Antissemitismo na Europa durante a Idade Média: livro de Ivan G. Marcus: 'How the West Became Antisemitic: Jews and the Formation of Europe, 800–1500' (Book review)

H-Diplo: New posted content

Soyer on Marcus, 'How the West Became Antisemitic: Jews and the Formation of Europe, 800–1500' [Review]

H-Net Reviews

Marcus, Ivan G..  How the West Became Antisemitic: Jews and the Formation of Europe, 800–1500. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024. 384 pp. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 9780691258201.

Reviewed by Francois Soyer (University of New England)
Published on H-Diplo (December, 2024)
Commissioned by Seth Offenbach (Bronx Community College, The City University of New York)

Printable Version: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=60963

Few questions in the history of Jewish-Christian relations are as controversial as those that relate to the nature and origins of Antisemitism. How is “Antisemitism” defined? Is Antisemitism a purely modern phenomenon, linked to the rise of modern pseudo-scientific racial theories? To what extent is Antisemitism, a term coined in the 1870s, primarily a modern/secular phenomenon distinct from a theological Christian anti-Judaism? Can we talk about a “Christian Antisemitism”? Is it, therefore, a grievous anachronism to speak of Antisemitism before the nineteenth century, especially in the medieval period? For decades, historians, including Gavin Langmuir (Toward a Definition of Antisemitism [1990]) and Robert Chazan (From Anti-Judaism to Anti-Semitism: Ancient and Medieval Christian Constructions of Jewish History [2016]), to name only the most famous, have debated these questions and little consensus exists.

The history of Antisemitism in the Christian West often treats it as a phenomenon in which Jews were passive bystanders. This is probably not surprising given that Antisemitism was built on fantasies and distorted notions about Jews and Judaism that developed among Christians. Saint Augustine’s conception of Jews as a “witness people” to be tolerated was contested when some Christian theologians and polemicists “discovered” the Talmud in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.[1] For these Christians, the Talmud proved that there was no link between the Jews of biblical times and those who lived in medieval Europe. Bowdlerized passages of the Talmud were presented as evidence that medieval Jews were irrational and that they deliberately engaged in acts of blasphemy, sacrilege, and even quasi-ritualized murders of ordinary Christians, in particular children (the infamous “ritual murder” and blood libels). To argue that Jews were not passive but involved in the growth of Antisemitism is a very delicate topic for historians since it risks giving credence to some Antisemitic myths and victim blaming.

In just under two hundred pages (excluding the bibliography), Ivan G. Marcus offers his readers not just a survey of the existing scholarship but also a new perspective and a nuanced argument. To begin with, Marcus does not seek a direct link between medieval and modern Antisemitism by merely looking for evidence of continuity in beliefs, prejudices, and myths. Rather, his objective is to identify and explore the “structure” underpinning a medieval Antisemitism that differed markedly from a mere theological opposition to Judaism. The structure underpinning the deteriorating perception of Jews among medieval Christians, Marcus contends, came in three parts. First, there was a “binary of inverted hierarchy” in Christian society (p. 18). Marcus traces its origins to the rivalry between Jews and Christians in which both groups believed themselves to be God’s chosen people and the other as their inferiors. Medieval Christians perceived acts of assertiveness or resistance by members of the Jewish minority as distortions in a righteous hierarchical order. Second, Marcus points to the emergence of the image of the Jew as an enemy within. From the First Crusade in the late eleventh century onward, the image of the Jew as subverting the established hierarchy took the form of accusations against Jewish usury, sacrilege, blasphemy, treasonous plots, and even the murder of Christian children. The image of Jews as an existential threat not just to the Christian faith but also to ordinary Christians created a context justifying their increased segregation or even wholesale expulsion (as occurred in many medieval Christian kingdoms and states from the late twelfth to the late fifteenth century). The third and final part in this Antisemitic structure is that many Christians came to perceive Jewish identity as “unchangeable or even permanent” and that the genuine conversion of Jews to Christianity was almost impossible (p. 18). This essentialization of Jewish identity and faith turned the religion into a functional equivalent of race and justified violence and exclusion against Jewish people.

To support this argument, the book’s nine chapters follow a thematic, and to a certain extent chronological, pattern. Starting with a discussion of the gradual migration of Jews into early medieval western and central Europe, Marcus proceeds to explore how tensions developed even though Jews integrated socially, economically, and culturally. At the same time, however, competing claims about being God’s chosen people created friction as “Jews were simultaneously attracted to Christians and repelled by Christianity” (p. 13). Marcus argues that Jews “created an imagined Christianity” as a form of paganism to be derided (p. 14). Inevitably, this Jewish assertiveness was not just expressed in a private context but also manifested itself in public acts of blasphemy and of sacrilegious contempt for Christian sacred images by individual Jews. Christians reacted defensively to such unsettling assertiveness and to this apparent inversion of a religious and social hierarchy in which Christianity was manifestly dominant over Judaism. Religious change and reforms in western Christianity encouraged Christians to fashion their own imagined Judaism and imagined Jews who were actively hostile to Christianity and Christians. Of course, many of the accusations targeting Jews, in particular the “ritual murder” and blood libels, had no foundation in reality but served to create an enduring image of the Jew as an enemy within. Finally, Marcus charts the rise of skepticism about the ability of Jews to become genuine converts to Christianity and illustrates how this phenomenon was closely linked to “cultural aesthetics” and the coalescing of Jewish appearance and faith (p. 16).

In the final section of this work, Marcus invites us to consider the wider implications of his three-part structure of Antisemitism. He argues, convincingly, that it is relevant to understand the continuing survival of Antisemitism in the modern era and even today. Antisemitism will develop whenever and wherever Jews are perceived as inverting an established order and seizing power, regarded as an “enemy within” seeking to destabilize society or harm non-Jews, and viewed as a unassimilable racial group even when intermarriage frequently takes place (such as in the modern United States). The book offers no magic solutions to oppose Antisemitism and ends on a rather pessimistic note. Marcus observes that Antisemitism has proven to be remarkably resilient and that the three-part structure of Antisemitism is easily discernable in the contemporary propaganda of white supremacists and nativist groups in the United States. When considering Marcus’s conclusion, it is hard not to remember the striking and haunting image of young white men parading at night with tiki torches and shouting “Jews will not replace us” at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017.[2]

Overall, the value of Marcus’s book lies not so much in its exploration of the factual history of Jewish-Christian relations in medieval Europe. Numerous modern historians have extensively studied the anti-Jewish accusations detailed in chapters 3, 4, 5, and 6. It is perhaps surprising that the medieval Iberian Peninsula does not feature as prominently given the significant size of its Jewish population and the fact that the notorious “purity of blood” statutes that originated there in the fifteenth century are probably the best example of a proto-racial hatred of Jews before the modern era. Rather, the real value of this work resides in Marcus’s succinct and clear articulation of the three-part structure of Antisemitism as a paradigm through which to understand Antisemitism in both the medieval and modern West. This alone makes the work a valuable addition to the existing corpus of work on this topic, and there is no doubt that this concept will feature prominently in discussions among scholars and students for many years to come.

Notes

[1]. See Jeremy Cohen, Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

[2]. Adam Gabbat, “‘Jews Will Not Replace Us’: Vice Film Lays Bare Horror of Neo-Nazis in America,” Guardian, August 16, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/16/charlottesville-neo-nazis-vice-news-hbo; and “You Will Not Replace Us,” Anti-Defamation League, accessed September 12, 2024, https://www.adl.org/resources/hate-symbol/you-will-not-replace-us.

François Soyer is an associate professor of history at the University of New England (Australia). His research focuses on the history of Antisemitism in late medieval and early modern Europe.

Citation: Francois Soyer. Review of Marcus, Ivan G.. How the West Became Antisemitic: Jews and the Formation of Europe, 800–1500. H-Diplo, H-Net Reviews. December, 2024.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=60963

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

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H-Diplo Publication Schedule, 09 to 20 December

Diane N. Labrosse

The H-Diplo publication schedule for the period 09 to 20 December is as follows:

Week of 09 December:

1. H-Diplo Roundtable Review of Julia Irwin, Catastrophic Diplomacy: US Foreign Disaster Assistance in the American Century. University of North Carolina Press, 2024.

Introduction by Megan Black, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Reviewers:

Shoon Murray, American University

Kevin O’Sullivan, University of Galway

Davide Rodogno, Geneva Graduate Institute

Ian Seavey, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley

Lauren Turek, Trinity University

Response by Julia Irwin, Louisiana State University

2. H-Diplo Review of Mauricio Castro, Only a Few Blocks to Cuba: Cold War Refugee Policy, the Cuban Diaspora, and the Transformations of Miami. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024. 

Reviewed by Michael J. Bustamante, University of Miami

3. H-Diplo Review Essay of Matthew Evangelista, Allied Air Attacks and Civilian Harm in Italy, 1940–1945: Bombing among Friends Routledge, 2023. 

Nicola Labanca, University of Siena, Italy, Department of History and Cultural Heritage. 

4. H-Diplo|RJISSF Essay Series on Learning the Scholar’s Craft: Reflections of Historians and International Relations Scholars.

“How I Became an Intellectual Historian.” 

Annelien de Dijn, Utrecht University 

5. H-Diplo Roundtable Review of Ismay Milford, African Activists in a Decolonising World: The Making of an Anticolonial Culture, 1952-1966. Cambridge University Press, 2023. 

Introduction by Timothy Scarnecchia, Kent State University

Reviewed by 

Jeffrey Ahlman, Smith College

Maxmillian Chuhila, University of Dar es Salaam

Yasmina Martin, Yale University

Response by Ismay Milford, Freie Universität Berlin

Week of 16 December:

1. H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable Review of Liza Mundy, The Sisterhood: The Secret History of Women at the CIA, Crown, 2024 

Introduction Sarah-Jane Corke, University of New Brunswick

Reviewers:

Kathryn Olmstead, University of California, Davis

Kate Vigurs, University of Warwick

Jess Shahan, University of Leicester

Response by Liza Mundy, author.

2. H-Diplo Article Review of Vladimir Dobrenko, “The Soviet ‘Struggle for Peace,’ the United Nations, and the Korean War,” Journal of Cold War Studies 26:1 (Winter 2024): 29-49. 

Mervyn J. Bain, University of Aberdeen 

3. H-Diplo Review of Richard Norton Taylor, The State of Secrecy: Spies and the Media in Britain. London: Bloomsbury, 2023. 

Rory Cormac, University of Nottingham

4. H-Diplo Review of Nu Anh Tran and Tuong Vu, eds., Building a Republican Nation in Vietnam, 1920-1963. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2023.

Trieu Huy Ha, University of Management and Technology, Vietnam

5. H-Diplo/RJISSF Review of Agathe Demarais, Backfire: How Sanctions Reshape the World Against U.S. Interests, Free Press, 2018.

Introduction, Bruce W. Jentleson, Duke University

Reviewed by: 

Emma Ashford, Stimson Center

Daniel W. Drezner, Tufts University

Daniel McDowell, Maxwell School of Citizenship & Public Affairs, Syracuse University

Response by Agathe Demarais, European Council on Foreign Relations

***

Regards,

Diane Labrosse, H-Diplo managing editor

Book review; Leveringhaus on Cabestan, 'Facing China: The Prospect for War and Peace'

 H-Diplo: New posted content

Leveringhaus on Cabestan, 'Facing China: The Prospect for War and Peace' [Review]

H-Net Reviews

Cabestan, Jean-Pierre.  Facing China: The Prospect for War and Peace. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2023. 248 pp. $34.00 (paper), ISBN 9781538169896.

Reviewed by Nicola Leveringhaus (King's College London)
Published on H-Diplo (November, 2024)
Commissioned by Seth Offenbach (Bronx Community College, The City University of New York)

Printable Version: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=60707

Facing China offers an accessible all-in-one analysis of the risk of war with China, whether over Taiwan, the South China Sea, the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands, or the Indian border. A great merit of this book is its clarity of expression: the reader need not be an International Relations or area specialist to understand the cautionary arguments about the prospects for war today. The idea for the book stems from an article by the author in 2018 that evolved into a monograph published in French in 2021.[1] This English-language translation of the book, published in 2023, remains as timely as ever, with questions around the inevitability of conflict and all-out-war in Asia still looming large.

The author engages wholeheartedly with the dominant US debates on China’s rise and the potential for conflict, including the now-everywhere analogy of a Thucydides trap.[2] The introduction states plainly that Graham Allison’s 2017 book Destined for War “inspired this one” (p. 7). As such, this book sits squarely and comfortably in US debates about Chinese grand strategy and the challenges China’s rise seemingly poses to US primacy in Asia and beyond—from Destined for War to Rush Doshi’s 2021 The Long Game. 

In assessing possible risks of war, four areas of inquiry are outlined: (1) the potential for nuclearization, namely whether major war can avoid escalation to the nuclear level; (2) alternative domains for conflict: cyber and technological arms racing; (3) the likelihood that China seeks military conflict with Taiwan, over the South China Sea and with Japan as opposed to continued grey zone tactics; and finally, (4) Beijing’s ability and desire to use force beyond the region to protect its interests and impose its will on the world. Of these four, the book excels in addressing the third concern: possible conflict over Taiwan, the South China Sea, and Japan.

By far the strongest analysis of the book comes in chapter 3, on Taiwan. Indeed, this was one of the richest and most balanced accounts of possible conflict over Taiwan that the reviewer has read, offering meaningful political, social, and military accounts of conflict from the perspective of the PRC, Taiwan, and the United States. The discussion of Taiwanese debates and readiness at a social and military level is especially thoughtful and relevant. Indeed, in 2025, Taiwan will be streaming a new TV series, Zero Day, to further sound public alarm about the prospect of conflict. The sobering conclusion to this chapter is twofold: first, if the PRC does seek to take the island by force, then the war in Ukraine illustrates for Beijing the “need for speed” (p. 109) to secure military victory; and second, only democratization of the PRC can truly end the prospect of conflict over Taiwan. Both claims, though thought-provoking, could have been more fleshed out. For instance, how might “need for speed” be affected by possible crises occurring in parallel in the region such as between the DPRK and ROK? The second claim, though compelling in its boldness, is left unproblematized, not least because the wider democratic peace thesis in International Relations does not offer much reassurance here.[3]

The book’s main analytical strength—on the prospects of war over Taiwan—is reflected in the length of the third chapter, at over forty pages. By contrast, the chapter on the South China Sea (chapter 4), is half the size, at just over twenty pages. This chapter is excellent as an introduction to the topic, offering a succinct historical account of claimant narratives as well as the legal implications of the 2016 international arbitration case presented by the Philippines against China. The subsequent chapter, on the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands (chapter 5), is only fourteen pages; and the border conflict with India is even shorter, at nine pages. A reorganization of the chapters might have rebalanced the proportions, for example, given the importance Japan now attaches to the security of Taiwan, the discussion of China-Japan conflict might have flowed better if it had come straight after the chapter on Taiwan, rather than following the South China Sea chapter. The India chapter is too short to engage fully in widespread public debates in India on China. The last chapter, on missions abroad, is, as the book makes clear, really about the aspirational projection of future military power, not present or near-term capabilities. One wonders if these last two chapters—on India and missions abroad—were needed. Removing them would have allowed for longer empirical treatments of the South China Seas and Diaoyu/Senkaku islands, matching the depth of analysis in the Taiwan chapter.

Beyond Taiwan, the book sparks important thinking in the nuclear domain. The first of these is how changes to US strategic capabilities and doctrine since the early 2000s have affected China’s own calculations of military readiness and victory in war. For decades, Chinese scholarship has cautioned that US capabilities in the strategic domain seek not mutual vulnerability but underpin a desire for damage limitation and superiority against China.[4] Chapter 2 triggers these questions but misses an opportunity to examine Chinese concerns directly or deeply, whether in terms of US extended missile defense arrangements in East Asia since the 1990s or a series of US nuclear posture reviews since George W. Bush’s presidency (2001, 2016, and 2020) that speaks to a desire for damage limitation. Claims that the People’s Liberation Army has not ruled out using a neutron bomb in the Western Pacific (p. 19) are also off the mark given that officially China has no neutron bomb capabilities.[5] A second nuclear question relates to the catalyst for nuclear war between China and the United States over Taiwan. The scholarly debate on possible nuclear weapons use between the United States and China within the nuclear field is much less sanguine than the book presents. While most nuclear scholars would agree that the prospect of deliberate nuclear use is relatively low over Taiwan, many would assert that the risk of accidental use is worryingly high (and since the war in Ukraine, the risk of nuclear signaling/threats has arguably grown, too).[6] This concern over accidental use is in large part because there exist very few guardrails, whether in the form of official track 1 nuclear dialogues or other agreed confidence-building measures between the United States and China. Shockingly, despite repeated attempts (the most visible one by former US president Barack Obama in 2008) nuclear forces on both sides have yet to meet and dialogue with one another. Moreover, the official crisis hotline that exists has been tested at various points (in 1998 following the accidental NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy and in 2001 during the EP-3 incident, for example) and has not proved effective, with China seemingly reluctant to engage quickly through that platform.[7] Wider literature on entanglement speaks compellingly as to how technology (especially dual-use, hot-swappable warheads such as the DF-26) can confuse rivals and raise the stakes for escalation in a crisis.[8] In this vein, the third chapter, on Taiwan, would have particularly benefited from reference to entanglement and misunderstandings, engaging perhaps with Catilin Talmadge’s seminal work in 2017 on whether the United States might accidently push China into a nuclear corner over Taiwan.[9]

Nuclear questions aside, two other factors are left for greater development in the book. The first of these is the role of economic statecraft in any coming conflict with China. Here, the role of not just the United States, but also Southeast Asian, South Asian, and European states would have added an interesting angle to analysis. Indeed, any military conflict with China over Taiwan is now predicted to cause significantly more economic harm in Europe than the ongoing war in Ukraine. For its part, the Russian factor when facing China does not receive much treatment beyond what the war in Ukraine means for the region at the time of the first edition of the book (2021). Yet since then, Russia has deepened its security relationship with China, as well as other states in the region like North Korea—how does this affect the prospect of war across Taiwan, the South China Seas, and the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands? It should be said that assessments of Russia’s support for China in any future conflict with the United States remain poorly appreciated in the wider scholarship. Since at least 2019, Russia has been open about its collaboration with China on space, satellite, and laser technologies, which might offer China the ability to develop a launch-on-warning (LOW) capability it does not yet have that could be useful in any future conflicts with the United States. Other areas of China-Russia collaboration include joint military exercises, which have not ceased during the ongoing war in Ukraine. These exercises have so far not included a nuclear element but might perhaps in the future. A third area for expansion relates to basing, with the potential for Russia to open up and share its bases for the PLA in any future conflict against the United States.

As with nuclearization, the role of economic statecraft and the China-Russia factor in any possible future conflict with China is ongoing and difficult to assess. This book offers a great introduction (and, on Taiwan, an especially robust deep dive) on what remains one of the most, if not the most, important geopolitical question of our times. Above all, this book is both scholarly and policy-relevant—what more could a reader ask for?

Notes

[1]. “Le piege de Thucydide vu de Pekin. Affirmer son leadership, eviter la guerre [Beijing’s view of the Thucydides Trap: Asserting leadership, avoiding war],” Le Debat, 202 (November-December 2018): 4-15, and Demain la Chine: guerre ou paix?[China Tomorrow: War or Peace?] (Paris: Gallimard, 2021).

[2]. Gideon Rachman, “Year in a Word: Thucydides's trap,” Financial Times, December 18, 2018; and for a rejection of the term in our understanding of US-China relations, see Hal Brands and Michael Beckley, Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China (New York: W. W. Norton, 2022).

[3]. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, James D. Morrow, Randolph M. Siverson, and Alastair Smith, “An Institutional Explanation of the Democratic Peace,” American Political Science Review 93, no. 4 (1999): 791–807, doi:10.2307/2586113. ISSN 0003-0554. JSTOR 2586113. S2CID 54953575.

[4]. A recent technical assessment can be found in Bin Li and Riqiang Wu, “U.S. Strategy of Damage Limitation vis‑à‑vis China: Long‑Term Programs and Effects,” China International Strategy Review 6 (2024): 9-21, https://doi.org/10.1007/s42533-024-00153-w.

[5]. It developed that ability but abandoned the program during the Cold War. Jonathan Ray, “China’s ‘Capitalist Bomb’: Inside the Chinese Neutron Bomb Program,” CIRA, January 1, 2015, https://cira.exovera.com/research-analysis/china/red-chinas-capitalist-bomb-inside-the-chinese-neutron-bomb-program/

[6]. Sheryn Lee, “Towards Instability: The Shifting Nuclear-Conventional Dynamics in the Taiwan Strait,” Journal for Peace and Nuclear Disarmament 5, issue sup. 1 (2022): 154–66, https://doi.org/10.1080/25751654.2022.2055912.

[7]. Christian Ruhl, “Beijing Is Unavailable to Take Your Call: Why the US-China Crisis Hotline Doesn’t Work,” Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, June 24, 2024; and Brad Glosserman, “If a Phone Rings in a Forest and No One Answers, Is It a Hotline?,” Japan Times, July 2, 2024.

[8]. Tong Zhao and Li Bin, “The Underappreciated Risks of Entanglement: A Chinese Perspective,” in Entanglement: Russian and Chinese Perspectives on Non-Nuclear Weapons and Nuclear Risks, ed. James M. Acton (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2017), 47–75, http://carnegieendowment.org/files/Entanglement_interior_FNL.pdf.

[9]. Caitlin Talmadge, “Would China Go Nuclear? Assessing the Risk of Chinese Nuclear Escalation in a Conventional War with the United States,” International Security 40, no. 4 (2017): 50-92.

Dr. Nicola Leveringhaus is senior lecturer in war studies in the Department of War Studies, School of Security Studies, King’s College London, UK.

Citation: Nicola Leveringhaus. Review of Cabestan, Jean-Pierre. Facing China: The Prospect for War and Peace. H-Diplo, H-Net Reviews. November, 2024.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=60707

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

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DDB: Documentos Diplomáticos Brasileiros? - Uma possibilidade longinqua, ao que parece... Documentos Diplomáticos Suíços

DDB: Documentos Diplomáticos Brasileiros? - Uma possibilidade longinqua, ao que parece... Documentos Diplomáticos Suíços 

A diplomacia brasileira dispõe de um um Consultor Jurídico – o primeiro foi instituído pelo pai do Barão, o Visconde do Rio Branco –, mas nunca "sentiu necessidade" de dispor de um historiador oficial, ou seja, alguém encarregado de selecionar os documentos diplomáticos mais interessantes e de divulgá-los em prazos regulares.

Não temos, por exemplo, o equivalente do U.S. Foreign Relations series, volumes temáticos com documentos cronologicamente agrupados, mesmo confidenciais (depois de liberados), que servem ao público em geral, mas mais precisamente aos historiadores, como guias documentais em seu trabalho analítico e interpretativo. Sempre propus a criação de um cargo de Historiador Diplomático no Itamaraty, mas nunca fui ouvido.

Até o Reino do Marrocos possui um quadro estratégico das relações internacionais do país, preparado pelo seu instituto de pesquisas da área diplomática, que pode ser visto neste link: https://www.ires.ma/fr/publications/rapports-generaux/tableau-de-bord-strategique-evolution-du-positionnement-international-du-maroc-douzieme-edition

Abaixo, um exemplo interessante: a série da Suíça, liberada a cada 30 anos, ou seja, na desclassificação.

Paulo Roberto de Almeida

H-Diplo: New posted content

• H-Diplo Roundtable XXVI-11 on Zala et al., _Documents Diplomatiques Suisses, 1992_

H-Diplo: New posted content

H-Diplo Roundtable XXVI-11 on Zala et al., _Documents Diplomatiques Suisses, 1992_

christopher ball

H-Diplo Roundtable XXVI-11

Sacha Zala et al., Documents Diplomatiques Suisses, 1992. Bern: Dodis, 2023. ISBN 978-3-907261-10-1.

28 November 2024 | PDF: https://hdiplo.org/to/RT26-11 | X: @HDiplo | BlueSky: @h-diplo.bsky.social

Editor: Diane Labrosse | Commissioning Editor: Liliane Stadler | Production Editor: Christopher Ball

Contents

Introduction by Georg Kreis, University of Basel 2

Review by Stéphanie Ginalski, Université de Lausanne.. 6

Review by Marianne von Grünigen, formerly of the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs (EDA). 11

Response by Thomas Bürgisser and Sacha Zala, Diplomatic Documents of Switzerland.. 18

 

Introduction by Georg Kreis, University of Basel

The scholarly discussion revolving around the Dodis Research Centre’s volume on Swiss diplomatic documents from 1992 gives us the opportunity to reflect on the importance of this type of scientific endeavor in a recapitulatory way. The volumes of the Diplomatic Documents of Switzerland (DDS), which have been published since 1979, occupy a key position in the landscape of Switzerland’s diplomatic history and historiography.

Since 2021, the Dodis Research Centre annually selects and publishes approximately 1,800 of the most important documents on Swiss foreign policy at the exact expiry date of the 30-year protection and embargo period—just like a proverbial Swiss clock, so to speak. At the beginning of each year, Dodis uploads these documents via its website and publishes a small, carefully selected sub-set of approximately 62 documents both digitally and in print. The print volume of documents from 1992 was presented to the public at a well-attended book launch on 3 January 2023.[1]

In fact, the annual book launches of the DDS series have become somewhat of an institution in and of themselves and enjoy great popularity among scholars, students, journalists, as well as Swiss and foreign diplomats. They also receive considerable press coverage in Switzerland on the day they are held. Media professionals pour over the compiled documentation and convey a “selection of the selection” from the always rich and meaningful collections of documents, which continue to a wider public debate on the continued relevance of Swiss diplomatic history for the present day.[2] We know that documents that were previously classified as secret are of particular interest.

What is special about the way in which Dodis makes Swiss diplomatic documents accessible to the public is that they are primarily intended to allow interested citizens to encounter historical primary-source material with a sound balance of proximity and distance. The aim is to stimulate curiosity and inquiry. Thanks to the interactive format of both the print and digital versions of the DDS volumes, the index, and the table of contents, interested readers can find out more with little effort, about what was thought and done on their behalf in the arena of foreign affairs thirty years ago. The Dodis volumes also draw interest from the many bilateral and multilateral diplomatic missions based in Switzerland. Of course, current-day policymakers at the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs are interested too in what their predecessors have left behind in written reflections. 

Yet what significance do these editions have for historical research and for the ongoing academic debates surrounding Swiss foreign policy? They are important intermediate products in a continuous process of academic debate on the history of Swiss foreign relations. These can be used to gauge what has already been—as always—provisionally worked out in the existing literature. In the case of the present volume, Swiss reactions to the possibility of becoming part of the European Economic Area (EEA) have received considerable attention.[3] On the basis of the documentation now available, it is possible to guess what is still waiting to be recorded in an in-depth investigation. 

More broadly speaking, the selection of files contained in DDS 1992 provides a condensed overview of the most important foreign policy challenges—big and small—which occurred that year. With its layout, based primarily on archival holdings from the Swiss Federal Archives in Berne, it can provide a glimpse into issues and topics that have received little attention to date. The detailed note of a conversation that took place in Geneva in May 1992 between the president of the African National Congress (ANC), Nelson Mandela, and Swiss State Secretary Franz Blankart, is particularly significant and catalogued as Document Number 19 in DDS 1992 (115-118). In this document, Mandela comments that Switzerland had a “most negative image” in South Africa because of its non-participation in international sanctions and because of the behavior of several Swiss companies. Nevertheless, he added, “Let bygone be bygone, let us now normalize the perception,” referring primarily to financial support for the ANC (118).[4]

On the whole and in the spirit of “blue skies research,” DDS 1992 leaves open which research questions could or should be developed on the basis of the materials provided. Most Dodis volumes are products of what is called Grundlagenforschung in German—research that forms a solid basis for further investigations. They are intended as entry points into specific topics for those interested in historical research on Swiss foreign policy. The substantial introduction that precedes the documents provides both context and overview for the selection of documents that essentially mark the beginning of a new year in the declassification calendar at the Swiss Federal Archives (XXXI-LI). It is now also accompanied by a detailed review in the Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Geschichte, an academic journal dedicated to new research on Swiss history.[5]

I do want to stress, however, that while this roundtable primarily revolves around the edited volume of 1992, the publication of these documents in an edited volume—as much as they form the material core of the edition—is only half of the achievement. The other half—which cannot be valued highly enough, especially for further research—is the digital enrichment of the document corpus with metadata and its breakdown according to relevant core themes and key words, which makes targeted research much easier. The editors aptly state soberly in their contribution to our roundtable that, “this is the primary work we do on sources.” In her contribution, Stéphanie Ginalski correspondingly highlights the diversity of diplomatic activities and emphasizes, among other things, the negotiations on climate issues that were conducted in 1992—more than 30 years ago. She also reflects on the reorientation of the conventional understanding of Swiss neutrality that occurred that year, stressing Switzerland’s participation in international sanctions “without inciting a revolution.” 

Marianne von Grünigen, meanwhile, dwells on the strengthening of the CSCE and its successor organization over time, as well as on the “soft” institutionalization of its involvement in various conflicts leading up to and including 1992. She emphasizes that the year 1992 was significant in terms of enhanced cooperation among the existing international organizations in Europe. The year 1992 was a turning point after two decades of growing optimism for a more peaceful, secure and democratic Europe. Finally, Thomas Bürgisser and Sacha Zala, the two editors of the volume, respond to the two preceding contributions. They confirm Ginalski’s observation concerning the “glaring absence of women” in diplomacy at the time. Women remained heavily underrepresented in the diplomatic corps throughout the 1990s. Von Grünigen herself is a notable exception in the Swiss diplomatic corps and thankfully, the gender balance has since improved considerably. 

(...)

Ler a íntegra neste link: 

https://networks.h-net.org/group/discussions/20051318/h-diplo-roundtable-xxvi-11-zala-et-al-documents-diplomatiques-suisses

The Kings of Algiers: How Two Jewish Families Shaped the Mediterranean World During the Napoleonic Wars and Beyond, book by Julie Kalman, reviwed by Magda Teter (NYRBooks)

 The Kings of Algiers: How Two Jewish Families Shaped the Mediterranean World During the Napoleonic Wars and Beyond

by Julie Kalman

Princeton University Press, 259 pp., $32.00

 

Magda Teter

The story of two Jewish trading families during the last decades of the Regency of Algiers is skewed by being told through the perspectives of only European and American actors.

December 5, 2024 issue (New York Review of Books)

 

View of Algiers from the Sea; aquatint by J. Clark after Henry Parke, 1818

The Kings of Algiers: How Two Jewish Families Shaped the Mediterranean World During the Napoleonic Wars and Beyond

by Julie Kalman

Princeton University Press, 259 pp., $32.00

 

“The Mediterranean speaks with many voices,” wrote Fernand Braudel in his monumental and most influential work, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1949). “It is a sum of individual histories.” But given that these histories “assume in the course of research different values [and] different meanings,” the sum will also change, depending on which stories are included. Braudel drew attention to the connection between the land and the sea—“the sea of vineyards and olive trees just as much as the sea of the long-oared galleys and the roundships of merchants.” The sea’s history “can no more be separated from that of the lands surrounding it than the clay can be separated from the hands of the potter who shapes it.” This history is slow and repetitive, seasonal, “almost timeless,” shared by everyone living in the Mediterranean. Yet it is also a more traditional history of events—“l’histoire événementielle”—full of “surface disturbances, crests of foam that the tides of history carry on their strong backs.”

Julie Kalman’s book The Kings of Algiers: How Two Jewish Families Shaped the Mediterranean World During the Napoleonic Wars and Beyond tells the story of the Bacris and the Busnachs and their involvement in the trade and politics of the Regency of Algiers, an autonomous tributary state on the westernmost flank of the Ottoman Empire, during the final half-century of the regency’s existence, before it was invaded by France in 1830. Algiers was, as Kalman says, “a major trading and corsairing port in the Mediterranean.” Ships brought in luxury goods and captives and took away local produce, like its prized wheat, to be borne across the sea to Europe and even as far as the Americas. Thanks to the export of wheat the regency, as the historian James McDougall wrote, “enjoyed unprecedented general prosperity and stability,” especially during what Lemnouar Meroche termed the “century of wheat,” lasting from the late seventeenth to the end of the eighteenth century. Algeria, with its fertile river valleys of the Kabylia region, was a major supplier of grain to Europe, particularly France during the revolutionary era.

In the seventeenth century the autonomy of the regency, far from the center of imperial power in Istanbul, increased, and its governors, known as deys, were gradually able to conduct their own foreign and fiscal policy. But the Regency of Algiers never lost its nominal connection to the Ottoman Empire, and the dey’s election by local elites had to be confirmed by authorities in the capital. According to McDougall, for over three centuries, until the French invaded in 1830, coins minted in Algiers bore the name and title of the Ottoman sultan. Even as late as the twentieth century, McDougall claimed, “Friday sermons in mosques in rural districts of eastern Algeria were still being said in the name of the last reigning Ottoman sultan.”

The Kings of Algiers looks at the last decades of the regency and highlights the ties between the land and the sea and between the sea and the history of events, money, and power. It shows how the sea was attached to the produce and the people of the lands surrounding it: local farmers growing wheat, which was then sold overseas to profit the dey and the intermediaries facilitating the transactions and transport; European powers vying for control of trade routes; people being captured and sold as slaves or kept in order to extort ransom. In the midst of it all were two Jewish families, the Bacris and their related rivals the Busnachs, with connections on the European and African shores of the Mediterranean. Their business dealings and political influence were the subject of discussions among representatives of Christian powers that had stakes in the region, and they negotiated some of the most important international treaties of the time. Naphtali Busnach was apparently the dey’s “advisor and a middleman in diplomacy.” Jacob Bacri, his uncle, “was invited to dinner with Napoleon.” Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe necessarily discussed the Bacris in their strategic plans since they were “at the center” of US negotiations to secure peace with Algiers following the War of Independence, when American ships lost the protection that had been afforded to British ships.

To underscore this point Kalman starts with an anecdote that puts the Bacris in the middle of the “easy, linear” narrative explaining the French invasion of Algiers. In this telling, when the consul of France in Algiers visited the dey in 1827, he was confronted with the demand that France pay a debt that had been accruing since 1794 for wheat purchased on credit. When the consul did not respond, the dey became infuriated and struck him in the face with “a huge fan…[used] to keep flies away.” Insulted, the French insisted on an apology and sent other demands. When the dey pressed for payment, France sent its warships, and “the spat simply escalated from there.” And that decades-old wheat debt, which Kalman claims was owed to the Bacris, was how this Jewish family “came to occupy such a central place in international relations.” The incident, known in France as the coup d’éventail, the “blow with the fly whisk,” became, as noted by McDougall, “legendary in French imagery and schoolbook narratives.”

Book review: Rogers, Thomas D.. Agriculture's Energy: The Trouble with Ethanol in Brazil's Green Revolution - by Timothy Lorek

 A new Review has been posted in H-LatAm.

Lorek on Rogers, 'Agriculture's Energy: The Trouble with Ethanol in Brazil's Green Revolution'

Rogers, Thomas D..  Agriculture's Energy: The Trouble with Ethanol in Brazil's Green Revolution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022. Illustrations, maps. 306 pp. $99.00 (cloth), ISBN 9781469670447.$29.95 (paper), ISBN 9781469670454.$22.99 (e-book), ISBN 9781469670461. 

Reviewed by Timothy Lorek (College of St. Scholastica)
Published on H-LatAm (November, 2024)
Commissioned by Casey M. Lurtz (Johns Hopkins University)

Printable Version: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=60115

One of the most intriguing aspects of the recent boom in historical studies of the mid-twentieth-century process remembered as the Green Revolution is the new light cast on the emergence of crops destined not for human food consumption but for industrial purposes, fuel, and animal feed. As Thomas D. Rogers adroitly demonstrates in Agriculture’s Energy, a case study of Brazilian sugarcane ethanol production, investments in agriculture too often lead to food insecurity. Whether Brazilian sugarcane, Iowa corn, Argentine soybeans, or Indonesian oil palm, the consolidation of agribusiness through machinery, fertilizer, and pesticide markets, not to mention state subsidies and development plans, has contributed to a wide range of social challenges, for example, increased land concentration, urbanization, malnutrition, and water pollution. While anthropologists, development economists, and historians focused on the United States and Europe have long recognized the Green Revolution’s complex and intensely debated results, the recent scholarly ascendance of historians focused on new archives and actors in what was once known as the Third World has produced an array of studies that carefully unpack the Green Revolution’s impact in more localized contexts. The growing spotlight on these place-specific impacts significantly includes the ways state planning, international science, and Cold War development benefited incipient industries like Brazil’s sugarcane ethanol sector.

Agriculture’s Energy is not the only recent monograph to tackle Brazil’s ethanol industry, including the state program advanced during the military dictatorship known as Proálcool (National Alcohol Program, 1975-90). Rogers’s study is in good company with another prominent English-language text, Jennifer Eaglin’s excellent Sweet Fuel: A Political and Environmental History of Brazilian Ethanol, also published in 2022. Where Eaglin focuses on specific conditions in Ribeirão Preto (São Paulo) and emphasizes the broader context of energy transitions, Rogers highlights international development and the above described irony linking intensified agricultural production and hunger. Rogers also provides a broad national focus to Brazil’s ethanol history, including a sustained and intriguing geographic comparison between the country’s Northeast and Center-South.

Agriculture’s Energy is divided into two parts. In part 1, “Sugarcane and Brazil’s Agricultural Modernization,” Rogers examines the policy and development contexts of ethanol production in historical sequence. Chapter 1 begins in 1918 when the country’s largest sugar mill owner publicly advocated for federal government support for agricultural research and production. Two competing assumptions lay behind this and other calls for government support. First, Brazilian agriculture was seen by many as backward and in need of modernization. Second, Brazilian agriculture, despite its backwardness, was critical to the country’s identity and future prosperity. Rogers goes on to tell the story of Brazilian agricultural modernization vis-à-vis sugarcane through the careers of northeastern sugarcane producer and politician Alexandre José Barbosa Lima Sobrinho and center-southern agronomist Ruy Miller Paiva. Juxtaposing the impact of Barbosa Lima and Paiva emphasizes the regional rivalry between the Northeast and São Paulo, as the latter shifted from a dependence on coffee to a research-oriented resurgence of sugarcane. It also highlights the centralization of Brazilian domestic politics during the Getúlio Vargas era, seen through the emphasis on national planning for agricultural production, as well as the emerging embrace of international development funding and expertise.

The next two chapters unpack the contexts of sugarcane ethanol production in the second half of the twentieth century. Chapter 2 places ethanol against the backdrop of the global Green Revolution in agricultural technologies. In this context, the Instituto do Açúcar e do Álcool (Sugar and Alcohol Institute, IAA) released a new long-range growth plan that increased production and spurred the establishment of dozens of new sugarcane mills. São Paulo producers likewise established new research centers and dramatically expanded their use of fertilizer. Meanwhile, the federal government harnessed international aid to pump into higher education programs such as development economics. By the 1970s, the Green Revolution’s broad impact led to increased industrialization and the ascendency of an agricultural product destined for industrial rather than food usage.

Chapter 3 then examines policy debates swirling around Proálcool. The unequal development of the country during the “Brazilian Miracle” was reflected in Proálcool, a program dominated by energy and industry representatives rather than agriculturalists and one that contributed to the specific growth of private companies and large producers, especially in São Paulo (more than 60 percent of national production in 1980), who partnered with the federal government. The program was canceled amid corruption scandals and a shift from state-led growth models to privatization and neoliberal deregulation. As Rogers concludes, Proálcool should not be evaluated as primarily an agricultural or energy policy, nor as a bailout to the sugarcane industry. Instead, it was a development program. “Proálcool’s establishment was one episode in the consolidation of a mode of development that crystallized out of the domestic and international programs that had supported and nurtured agricultural transformation over the preceding decades. Development in this guise had produced the linked processes we know as agribusiness” (p. 108).

Part 2, “Proálcool’s Consequences,” includes three chapters that examine labor, environmental issues, and the gross inequality that “directed agriculture’s prodigious energy into the transportation system rather than the food system” (p. 170). As in his first book, The Deepest Wounds: A Labor and Environmental History of Sugar in Northeast Brazil (2010), Rogers excels at weaving analyses of labor relations, class, and environmental conditions. In these sections, Rogers offers rich details about physical work, pollution, and policy debates, as well as thoughtful conclusions about symbolic representation and relationships. Chapter 4 focuses on the mobility of a new type of industrial worker: poor, vulnerable, urban, and increasingly female sugarcane workers often precariously employed via third-party labor contracts (the “flexibilization of the labor force” [p. 120]). Union mobilization on behalf of these bóia-fria workers (the derogatory term “cold lunch”) in the 1980s contested their marginality and cheapness.

Similarly, in chapter 5, Rogers examines another challenge to Proálcool: growing concern about the program’s environmental record. Enormous quantities of waste were produced, particularly a byproduct of the ethanol industry often termed vinhaça or vinhoto. As waste lagoons that held this sludge became increasingly common with growing sugarcane ethanol production under Proálcool, public debate over the environmental issue proliferated in the 1970s. As with union mobilization on behalf of workers, public pressure and scientific alarm forced the hand of the Brazilian government to enact broad environmental legislation in the early 1980s.

Finally, chapter 6 examines how Proálcool reflected an industrial development model that exacerbated inequality by providing incentives to shift significant land and labor toward the production of ethanol rather than food. Research produced growing evidence in the late 1970s and early 1980s that Brazil’s policies led to significant increases in industrial and export crop production at the expense of food production, which actually dropped more than 25 percent per capita between 1976 and 1980 (p. 189). All of this points to some overarching conclusions evaluated in the epilogue: for example, “what is agriculture for?” (p. 199). Rogers suggests that the development model embodied by Proálcool advanced the cause of private sector industrial growth by shifting rural populations toward precarious wage work made possible by cheap energy and cheap food, both of which were produced at considerable cost to the environment. Rogers’s analysis of the Brazilian sugarcane ethanol boom thus helps reveal the consolidation of a particular agribusiness model that depends on, even naturalizes, inequality. Seen this way, the history of Proálcool is instructive as we contend with a new era of agribusiness-led growth models and carbon markets.

Agriculture’s Energy is an important addition to a growing scholarly literature on late twentieth-century industrial agriculture. Rogers’s use of labor journals, newspaper editorials, and court documents in part 2 makes an invaluable contribution to Green Revolution scholarship and Brazilian studies. Beyond the Green Revolution and Brazil, scholars investigating energy histories, public-private partnerships, and the roots of twenty-first-century climate change debates and proposed policies will find the book helpful for its details as well the author’s ability to weave multiple themes.

Citation: Timothy Lorek. Review of Rogers, Thomas D.. Agriculture's Energy: The Trouble with Ethanol in Brazil's Green Revolution. H-LatAm, H-Net Reviews. November, 2024.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=60115

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Atkinson on Rollo, 'Terminus: Westward Expansion, China, and the End of American Empire' [Review] (H-Net Reviews)

Estamos vivenciando o fim de uma era? O fim da expansão contínua do império americano e o início da re-ascensão do Império do Meio (em sua fase política comunista), depois de dois séculos e meio de ascensão do primeiro e do declínio do segundo? 

Pode ser, mas é um processo que pode se passar pacificamente, ou envolver algum conflito bilateral, uma vez que se trata de um processo diferente do que houve durante a era anterior, quando os dois impérios estavam relativamente ou absolutamente desconectados. Desta vez, há uma grande interdependência (já foi melhor) e intensos contatos entre os dois impérios, diretamente e nas zonas de fricção (Taiwan e Rússia, para mencionar apenas duas), o que pode comandar uma convivência em bons termos ou atiçar conflitos já existentes. Este livro trata do passado e não do presente ou do futuro, mas ele oferece boas indicações sobre como abordar essa MAIS IMPORTANTE relação da atual geopolítica mundial, mais até do que o desafio da Rússia, que pode ser contido no continente europeu.

As próximas décadas já são a de uma nova corrida armamentista, nuclear e espacial, e de uma disputa de arrogâncias que pode descambar para um conflito direto. O que significa que não haverá muito espaço para a cooperação conjunta em benefício dos países mais pobres, mas uma competição sem qualquer convergência de objetivos entre os dois grandes impérios da atualidade.

Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Brasília, 19/05/2024

Atkinson on Rollo, 'Terminus: Westward Expansion, China, and the End of American Empire' [Review]

H-Net Reviews

Rollo, Stuart.  Terminus: Westward Expansion, China, and the End of American Empire. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023. 296 pp. $55.95 (cloth), ISBN 9781421447384.

Reviewed by David C. Atkinson (Purdue University)
Published on H-Diplo (May, 2024)
Commissioned by Seth Offenbach (Bronx Community College, The City University of New York)

Printable Version: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=60309

Stuart Rollo’s Terminus: Westward Expansion, China, and the End of American Empire is a richly kaleidoscopic contribution to the ever-burgeoning literature on US-China relations. Rollo situates the Sino-US relationship in terms of the rise and fall of American empire, and this is the book’s most important interpretive contribution. Focusing on the context and character of Americans’ evolving disposition toward China over the last 250 years, he begins with an overview of US continental colonization and Americans’ subsequent expansion into the Pacific Ocean. He concludes with President Joseph Biden’s attempt to resuscitate the diminished structures of the US-dominated liberal internationalist order. In between, Rollo entwines his evaluation of American engagements with China with an expertly rendered narrative of imperialism and foreign relations, blending historical and international relations perspectives throughout. It is an erudite and informative synthesis that should appeal to all H-Diplo readers, as well as our students and members of the public who seek a clear understanding of why contemporary US-Chinese relations remain so fraught in our present moment, and how we got here.

Terminus is a versatile book that can be read in multiple registers. Rollo’s narrative is especially valuable for the way he weaves four distinct narrative threads together. On one level, it is a useful survey of Sino-US relations, albeit one that emphasizes the perspectives of American rather than Chinese interlocuters in that relationship. Readers looking for the Chinese perspective, or a greater focus on traditional diplomatic relations, will find it lacking compared to Warren I. Cohen’s still essential America’s Response to China (2019), for example. But that is not Rollo’s purpose. Rather, Terminus seeks to integrate that story into the history of American empire and expansion. On that level, it offers something particularly novel. Historians of American imperialism might balk at Rollo’s emphasis on the imperial rather than colonial manifestations of Americans’ desire for economic, if not territorial, suzerainty in Aisa, but again, that is not his objective: how Americans conceived of China (Qing, Nationalist, and Communist) in relation to the rise and fall of American empire (commercial, financial, territorial, military, and ideational) is the focus. In addition to interlacing these themes, on another level Rollo pays regular attention to the ideas of those theorists and strategists who whetted American appetites when it came to China, combining historical and international relations scholarship and perspectives throughout the narrative. We hear from a large cast of both critics and boosters of American power from across the centuries, including Karl Marx, John Atkinson Hobson, Nicholas Spykman, William Appleman Williams, and Andrew Bacevich to name a few. Finally, the book can be read as a very engaging survey of US foreign relations writ large, since Rollo never confines himself to the transpacific lens, and instead constantly keeps American visions of China in the same frame as Americans’ conceptions of a broader global imperium.

Terminus is therefore best understood as an alloy, in that it derives its strength from the mixture of these four interlacing narratives and frames. The result is a concise and accessible book that offers an adept historical overview of China’s changing significance to American policymakers, theorists, and strategists from independence to the present.

The book is divided into three sections, each encompassing a distinct phase of American ambitions for China. Part 1 traces the story from the aftermath of independence to the turn of the twentieth century and focuses on the commercial and financial aspirations of American merchants, statesmen, and strategists during that century. In the first two chapters, Rollo roots his narrative in a familiar story of westward expansion characterized by violent Native dispossession and the insatiable drive for land and commercial access to Asia. In that context, China especially enraptured those seeking to exploit Asia’s potentially lucrative markets, goods, and raw materials. Rollo is attentive to the domestic and international contexts that both facilitated and inhibited the realization of these prospects—whether real or imagined—and he emphasizes the internal and external ruptures that catalyzed the Qing dynasty’s nineteenth-century decline. This part of the book culminates in the convulsion of late nineteenth-century US imperialism, and Rollo rightly focuses on the major manifestations of that paroxysm in the Asia-Pacific region. The Open-Door Notes and the Boxer Rebellion receive particular attention, and Rollo is attentive to the racial and geostrategic anxieties that suffused the most capacious cravings of those who viewed China as an outlet not only for American goods, but also American capital and civilization.

Part 2 addresses the twentieth-century phase of US economic and strategic predominance, from the emergence of American power following the First World War to the ostensive triumph of the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991. Rollo unsurprisingly foregrounds the American and Japanese competition for East Asian predominance at the core of this section’s first chapter, orienting his analysis productively toward modern industrial warfare’s thirst for strategic raw materials. From this perspective, both contenders perceived China as a repository of essential minerals like manganese and tungsten that would consolidate their prospective regional—and in the case of the United States, global—primacy. Chapter 5 broadens its frame commensurate with the now truly global aspirations of American power. The allure of potential markets and investment opportunities in China and elsewhere now gave way to more sophisticated geostrategic conceptions of global capitalist integration and cooperation. Commercial dominance remained an important objective, but security and prosperity now required the creation and management of an intricate, internationally panoptic liberal-democratic architecture, one dominated of course by the United States. In Asia, that manifested in what Rollo provocatively calls an “American-led Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere,” anchored by Japan (pp. 120-121).

The sixth chapter addresses the emergence of the People’s Republic and the Cold War, which in Rollo’s interpretation sees China evoke a more dangerously existential threat to the broader hegemonic project fostered by the United States, not just in Asia but around the world. He sees the wars in Korea and Vietnam as exemplars of that project, but also harbingers of its demise. It is the one chapter in which Rollo’s argument might have benefited from more room to breathe, since we are hurled at breakneck speed through some of the most consequential moments in the history of Sino-US relations. This includes not only those devasting American wars in Southeast and East Asia, but also President Richard Nixon’s rapprochement, President Jimmy Carter’s fulfillment of recognition, and the profound economic transformations of the Ronald Reagan years, not to mention those of Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping.

The third part of Terminus transitions to the post-Cold War era through the present. Here, Rollo recounts the flush of victory that encouraged American policymakers to confidently thrust the open door upon the globe. The desire to secure markets, raw materials, and investment opportunities reigned supreme, as successive US presidents and their counselors inside and outside government tried to reshape the world in America’s apparently transcendent image. For Rollo, economic access and predominance remained paramount, but contemporary presidents differed in their enthusiasm for strategic competition with China. It waned during the Bill Clinton years, during which American officials believed the gospel of globalization would convert Chinese Communist leaders to the benefits of democratization and neoliberal economics. Strategic competition nevertheless waxed under the presidency of George W. Bush, exacerbated by the events of September 11 and the global war on terror. American imperial overreach during the Bush years diminished the United States’ capacity to reshape the world in its image, and China seized the opportunity to reorient and strengthen its own economy, eventually supplanting the US as the global economic hegemon by many metrics.

Chapters 8 and 9 deal with American attempts to alternatively understand, manage, resist, or reset that reality. The final chapter is, from my perspective, the most generative and thought-provoking. Rollo proves as fluent in the lexicon of modern security studies as he is with its historical antecedents. His assessment of our contemporary options to grapple with the threat and possibilities posed by Xi Jinping’s resurgent China is clear-eyed and judicious. Rollo’s estimation of the most productive path forward reflects that most venerable analogy, favored by generations of American national security personnel: the Goldilocks principle. While President Donald Trump favored a white-hot porridge laced with quid pro quos, zero-sum transactions, and military superiority, others have mooted the cold gruel of retrenchment. Rollo not surprisingly favors the more palatable oats of “offshore balancing and mutual deterrence and denial” (p. 206). That might not set the taste buds alight, but it is much less likely to cause irreparable indigestion.

The final chapter concludes with one of the book’s most intriguing points. Here, Rollo posits our contemporary conundrum: how to ensure peace between “a rising Chinese empire and a declining American one” (p. 208). This brief recognition that China is erecting an imperial structure of its own—one that reflects its own interests and yet echoes many elements of the now deteriorating edifice constructed by the United States—is a tantalizing gesture toward the next century of US-Chinese relations. It also demands that we retrain our focus less on American intentions and possible rear-guard actions, and more on the objectives of China’s ruling class as it looks toward the next century. Others are already doing that work, of course, and Rollo’s Terminus will be a very useful text for them as they come to grips with the American half of that equation.[1] The nightly gaggle of pundits who confidently espouse the unique dangers of China’s rise would do particularly well to take cognizance of Rollo’s historicization of the United States’ attitudes toward global power across the last two centuries. They may find more resonances than dissonances between the waning American imperium they lament, and the expanding Chinese imperium they decry.

Note

[1]. See. for example, Suisheng Zhao, The Dragon Roars Back: Transformational Leaders and Dynamics of Chinese Foreign Policy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2022); Susan L. Shirk, Overreach: How China Derailed Its Peaceful Rise (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022); and Bates Gill, Daring to Struggle: China’s Global Ambitions under Xi Jinping (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022).

David C. Atkinson is associate professor of history at Purdue University. He is the author of The Burden of White Supremacy: Containing Asian Labor Migration in the British Empire and the United States (2017), along with numerous articles and chapters on international migration, diplomacy, and empire.

Citation: David C. Atkinson. Review of Rollo, Stuart. Terminus: Westward Expansion, China, and the End of American Empire. H-Diplo, H-Net Reviews. May, 2024.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=60309

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

===========

From Amazon: 

Terminus: Westward Expansion, China, and the End of American Empire Kindle Edition

by Stuart Rollo (Author)  Format: Kindle Edition

3.0 3.0 out of 5 stars

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A sweeping narrative of America's imperial history and its long entanglement with China.

In Terminus, Stuart Rollo examines the origins and trajectory of American empire in the Asia-Pacific region, focusing on its westward expansion and historic entanglement with China. American foreign and strategic policy in this region, Rollo argues, has always been shaped by broader economic and political concerns centered on China. China's current rise, and the economic and strategic systems that China is developing, represents the most serious challenge to the structure of American empire to date.

Rollo paints a sweeping historical narrative of American imperial history and its relationship with China from 1776 to the present. Grounded in archival research, official and personal correspondence, policy documents, declassified intelligence material, and congressional records, Terminus traces the development of American empire building from the pre-independence period to the eve of World War I, arguing that this new empire was primarily driven by commercial interests in China. Rollo explores shifts in global power, resource politics, and international economic structures that led the United States to transition from one of several imperial powers to the world's sole superpower by the last decade of the twentieth century. Finally, he examines the decline of American empire since its brief period of unipolarity in the 1990s, explaining the new pressures and challenges posed by the rise of China.

Rollo proposes three scenarios for how the United States might manage its inevitable imperial decline: a vain attempt to shore up and extend the empire, an exploitative hegemony, or a post-imperial foreign policy. This last option would work to repair the damaged fabric of American social and political life, providing a long-term, stable foundation for national security, prosperity, and the well-being of its citizens. All empires eventually end, but with the benefit of hindsight, Rollo urges us to consider how to engineer a softer landing.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Important, insightful, and timely, this is an extraordinary synthesis of an incredibly comprehensive subject. I could never have imagined it possible to summarize the economic, political, and cultural history of US-Chinese relations over 225 years, yet Rollo has succeeded. The research is impressive, both for its thoroughness and selectivity.
―Walter Allan McDougall, University of Pennsylvania, author of The Tragedy of U.S. Foreign Policy: How Civil Religion Betrayed the National Interest

The first book to develop a historical analysis of the American empire through the lens of the US-China relationship, Terminus addresses the most challenging issue in the contemporary world: the great power rivalry between the United States and China. Rollo offers a comprehensive survey of the rivalry, entanglement, and decoupling of the United States and China in global trade, investment, and production as well as the growing role of China in undermining the US empire in such areas as capital formation, technology innovation, and global production and supply chains.
―Baogang He, Deakin University, author of Contested Ideas of Regionalism in Asia

Narrating the rise and decline of the American empire through the prism of US-China relations, Stuart Rollo has written a succinct, sophisticated, and hard-hitting critique. The appearance of Terminuscould not be more timely―nor or its contents more worrisome.
―Andrew Bacevich, Chairman and Cofounder, Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft

 

About the Author

Stuart Rollo (SYDNEY, AUS) is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for International Security Studies at the University of Sydney.

 

Product details

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023. 296 pp. $55.95 (cloth), ISBN 9781421447384

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0BWSKD9VM

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Johns Hopkins University Press (October 31, 2023)

Publication date ‏ : ‎ October 31, 2023

Language ‏ : ‎ English

File size ‏ : ‎ 4171 KB