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This is the first book to focus on the history of abortion in an African context. It traces the criminalization of abortion in South Africa during the apartheid era (1948–1990), the emergence of a flourishing clandestine abortion industry, and the controversial passage in 1975 of the country’s first statutory law on abortion. The study examines the politics of gender, sexuality, racism, and nationalism in the making and maintenance of apartheid culture, in particular regarding the authoritarian National Party government’s attempt to regulate white women’s reproductive sexuality in the interests of maintaining white supremacy. A major focus of the book is the battle about abortion that erupted in the late 1960s when doctors and feminists called for liberalization of colonial-era abortion laws. A central argument is that all women, regardless of race, were oppressed under apartheid. Although the National Party was preoccupied with denying young white women their reproductive rights, black women bore the brunt of the lack of access to safe abortion, suffering the effects of clandestine abortion on a shocking scale in urban centers around the country. At the heart of the story are the black and white girls and women who, regardless of hostility from a range of official and traditional authorities, persisted in determining their own destinies. Although a great many were harmed and even died as a result of being denied safe abortion, many more succeeded in thwarting opponents of women’s right to control their capacity to bear children. This book hopes to convey both the tragic and triumphant sides of their story.

Africa throughout its postcolonial history has been plagued by human rights abuses ranging from intolerance of political dissent to heinous crimes such as genocide. Some observers consequently have gone so far as to suggest that human rights are a concept alien to African cultures. The International Criminal Court (ICC)’s focus on Africa in recent years has reinforced the region’s reputation as a hotspot for human rights violations. But despite Africa’s notoriety concerning human rights, Africa and the Shaping of International Human Rights argues that the continent has been pivotal for helping shape contemporary human rights norms and practices. Challenging prevailing Eurocentric interpretations of human rights’ origins and evolution, it demonstrates that from the colonial era to the present Africa’s peoples have drawn attention to and prompted novel ways of thinking about human rights through their encounters with the world at large. Beginning with the depredations of King Leopold II in the Congo Free State in the 1880s and ending with the ICC’s current activities in Africa, it reveals how African events, personalities, groups, and nations have influenced the trajectory of human rights history in intriguing and critical ways, in the end enlarging and universalizing a major discourse of our time.

Opposition to apartheid was one of the great moments in postwar history. Its success remains a symbol of a progressive global community. An African Volk looks at this phenomenon from the other side. It explores how the apartheid state in South Africa sought to maintain power as the world of white empire gave way to a new postcolonial environment that repudiated racial hierarchy. Drawing upon archival research across Southern Africa and beyond, as well as over fifty hours of interviews with leading figures from the apartheid order, An African Volk shows how instead of simply resisting decolonization and African nationalism in the name of white supremacy, the white power structure looked to hijack and invert the norms of the new global era to relegitimize its rule, break out of isolation, and secure international acceptance. Situated at the nexus of African, decolonization, and Cold War history, An African Volk tells the story of how the architects of apartheid used statecraft to redefine whiteness and promote a fresh ideological basis for their rule. In doing so, it offers new global and local perspectives on the apartheid state and illuminates the complexities and contradictions of the postcolonial project. Equally, it shows how the regime’s outreach to Africa both reflected and fueled heated debates within Afrikaner society over the relationship between race, nation, and state, exposing a deeply divided polity in the midst of massive economic, cultural, and social change.

We are living in a stressful world. Approximately half of all British employees suffer from workplace stress and over 13 million working days are lost through stress each year, costing the economy over £4 billion per annum. Stress has had a similar impact throughout the modern world: in both developed and developing countries, stress is now the most commonly cited cause of sickness absence from work and stress-related conditions, such as depression, heart disease and cancer, constitute a substantial source of personal ill-health and economic burden. Focusing on the evolution of biological and psychological understandings of stress during the twentieth century, The Age of Stress explores the relationship between scientific formulations and personal experiences of stress, on the one hand, and socio-political and cultural contexts, on the other. The book argues that scientific theories of stress and disease were strongly influenced not only by laboratory studies of homeostasis, but also by wider social, cultural and intellectual currents: the impact of economic depression during the inter-war years; modernist commitments to social reform; concerns about the consequences of military conflict during and after the Second World War; fluctuating global anxieties about political instability and the threat of terrorism during the Cold War; scientific studies of cybernetics; socio-biological accounts of behaviour; and counter-cultural arguments urging consumers to resist the incipient pressures of modern capitalism. The science of stress that emerged in this climate of anxiety was driven and shaped by, and in turn served to structure and direct, the search for individual and collective happiness in a troubled world.

In colonial-era Egypt, a new social category of “modern men” emerged, the efendiyya (sg. efendi). Working as bureaucrats, teachers, journalists, free professionals and public intellectuals, the efendis represented new middle class elites. They were the experts who drafted and carried out the state’s modernisation policies, and the makers as well as majority consumers of modern forms of politics and national culture. As simultaneously “authentic” and “modern,” they assumed key political role in the anti-colonial movement and in the building of a modern state both before and after the revolution of 1952. This book tells the story of where did these self-consciously modern men come from, and how did they come to be through multiple social, cultural, and institutional contexts. These contexts included social strategies pursued by “traditional” middling households responding to new opportunities for social mobility; modern schools as (non-exclusive) vehicles for new forms of knowledge opening possibilities to redefine social authority; but they also included new forms of youth culture, student rituals and peer networks, as well as urban popular culture writ large. Through these contexts, a historically novel experience of being an efendi emerged. New social practices (politics, or writing) and new cultural forms and genres (literature, autobiography) were its key sites of self-expression. Through these venues, an efendi culture imbued with a sense of mission, duty, and entitlement was articulated, and defined against and in relation to two main contrastive others: “traditional” society and western modernity-cum-colonial authority. Both represented the efendis’ social, cultural and political nemeses, who, in some contexts, could also become his allies.

This book presents a “shared” history of Asian involvement in the Great War from non-national and transnational perspectives. Asian involvements make the Great War not only a true “world” war but also a “great” war. The war generated forces that would transform Asia both internally and externally. Asian participation transformed the meaning and implications of the broader conflict. The First World War was in fact a defining moment that shaped worldviews and developments across Asia. This book is also meant to be a step in recovering memories of the war and re-evaluating the war in its Asian contexts. The Asians’ part in the war and the part the war played in the collective development of Asia represent the first steps of the long journey to full national independence and international recognition. This book aims to bring the Great War more fully into Asian history and Asians into the international history of the war with hope that this book helps the people of Asia develop a better understanding of their shared history through the Great War in order to lay the groundwork for a healthy and peaceful journey into a future that will only be shared, not lived separately.

Assimilation was an ideology central to European expansion and colonization, an ideology which legitimized colonization for centuries. This book shows that the aspiration for assimilation was not only driven by materialistic reasons but also motivated by ideas. The engine of assimilation has to be found in the combination of two powerful ideas, namely the European philosophical conception of human perfectibility and the idea of the modern state. Europeans wanted to create, in their empires, political and cultural forms which they valued and wanted to realize in their own societies but which did not yet exist. This book examines three imperial experiments—seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New France, nineteenth-century British Australia, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century French Algeria—and reveals the complex interrelationship between policies of assimilation, which were driven by a desire for perfection and universality, and the greatest challenge to those policies, namely, discourses of race, which were based upon perceptions of difference. Neither colonized nor European peoples themselves were able to conform to the ideals given as the object of assimilation. Yet, the deep links between assimilation and empire remained because at no point since the sixteenth century has the utopian project of perfection—articulated through the progressive theory of history—been placed seriously in question. The failure of assimilation pursued through empire, for both colonized and colonizer, reveals the futility of the historical pursuit of perfection.

In an epoch when environmental issues make the headlines, this is a work that goes beyond the everyday. Ecologies as diverse as the Himalayas and the Indian Ocean coast, the Negev desert and the former military bases of Vietnam, or the Namib desert and the east African savannah all have in common a long-time human presence and the many ways people have modified nature. With research in six Asian and African countries, the authors come together to ask how and why human impacts on nature have grown in scale and pace from a long pre-history. The chapters in this volume illumine specific patterns and responses across time, going beyond an overt centring of the European experience. The tapestry of life and the human reshaping of environments evoke both concern and hope, making it vital to understand when, why, and how we came to this particular turn in the road. Eschewing easy labels and questioning eurocentrism in today’s climate vocabulary, this is a volume that will stimulate rethinking among scholars and citizens alike.

This book reappraises Australia’s experience of empire since the end of the British Empire. The volume examines the meaning and importance of empire in Australia across a broad spectrum of historical issues — ranging from the disinheritance of the Aborigines to the foundations of a new democratic state. The overriding theme is the distinctive Australian perspective on empire. The country’s adherence to imperial ideals and aspirations involved not merely the building of a ‘new Britannia’ but also the forging of a distinctive new culture and society. It was Australian interests and aspirations which ultimately shaped ‘Australia’s Empire’. While modern Australians have often played down the significance of their British imperial past, the chapters in this book argue that the legacies of empire continue to influence the temper and texture of Australian society today.

At the end of World War II the Allies faced a threefold challenge: how to punish perpetrators of appalling crimes for which the categories of ‘genocide’ and ‘crimes against humanity’ had to be coined; how to explain that these had been committed by Germany, of all nations; and how to reform Germans. The answer to this triple conundrum was the application of historical reasoning to legal procedure. In the Nuremberg trials held between 1945 and 1949, a concerted effort was made to punish key perpetrators while at the same time analysing the Nazi state and recounting German history. Building on a long debate about Germany’s divergence from a presumed Western path of development, Allied prosecutors sketched out how Germany had betrayed the Western model. The prosecutors laid out how private enterprise, academic science, the military, and the civil service, which looked ostensibly similar to their opposite numbers in the Allied nations, had been corrupted in Germany even before Hitler’s rise to power. While the argument, depending on individual protagonists, subject matters, and contexts, met with uneven success in court, it offered a final twist against the backdrop of the Cold War: although Germany had lost its way, it could still be brought back into the Western fold. The first comprehensive study of the Nuremberg trials, The Betrayal explores this process and sheds light on how history underpins transitional trials as we encounter them in today’s courtrooms from Arusha to The Hague.

At the start of his administration, John F. Kennedy launched a personal policy initiative to court African nationalist leaders. This policy was designed to improve US-African relations and constituted a dramatic change in the direction of US foreign relations. The Kennedy administration believed that the Cold War could be won or lost depending upon whether Washington or Moscow won the hearts and minds of the Third World. Africa was particularly important because a wave of independence saw nineteen newly independent African states admitted into the United Nations during 1960–61. By 1962, 31 of the UN’s 110 member states were from the African continent, and both Washington and Moscow sought to add these countries to their respective voting bloc. For Kennedy, the Cold War only amplified the need for a strong US policy toward Africa—but did not create it. The Kennedy administration feared that American neglect of the newly decolonized countries of the world would result in the rise of anti-Americanism and for this reason needed to be addressed irrespective of the Cold War. For this reason, Kennedy devoted more time and effort toward relations with Africa than any other American president has. By making an in-depth examination of Kennedy’s attempt to court African nationalist leaders, this study adds an important chapter to the historiography of John F. Kennedy’s Cold War strategy. It also demonstrates that, through understanding and personal diplomacy, Kennedy realigned US policy toward Africa and largely won over the sympathies of its people.

Between the Ottomans and the Entente is the first social history of the First World War written from the perspective of the Arab diasporas in the United States, Brazil, and Argentina. The war between the Ottoman Empire and the Entente Powers placed the half million Syrian, Lebanese, and Palestinian migrants living abroad in a complicated geopolitical predicament. As Ottoman citizens living in a pro-Entente hemisphere, Arab migrants faced new demands for loyalty by their host societies; simultaneously, they confronted a multiplying legal regime of migration restriction, passport control, and nationality disputes designed to claim Syrian migrants while also controlling their movements. This work tracks the politics and activism of Syrian migrants from the 1908 Young Turk Revolution through the early French Mandate period in the 1920s. It argues that Syrian migrant activists opposed Ottoman rule from the diaspora, collaborating with the Entente powers because they believed this war work would bolster the cause of Syria’s liberation from Unionist rule. Instead, the Entente Powers used support from Syrian migrant communities to bolster colonial claims on a post-Ottoman Levant. This work captures a series of state projects to claim Syrian migrants for the purposes of nation-building in the Arab Middle East, and the efforts of Syrian migrants to resist the categorical schema of the homogenous nation-state and policies of partition and displacement.

Beyond the Arab Cold War brings the Yemen Civil War (1962–68) to the forefront of modern Middle East history, in a comprehensive account that features multilingual and multinational archives and oral histories. Throughout six years of major conflict Yemen sat at the crossroads of regional and international conflict as dozens of countries, international organizations, and individuals intervened in the local South Arabian civil war. Yemen was a showcase for a new era of UN and Red Cross peacekeeping, clandestine activity, Egypt’s counterinsurgency, and one of the first large-scale uses of poison gas since World War I. Events in Yemen were not dominated by a single power, nor were they sole products of US-Soviet or Saudi-Egyptian Arab Cold War rivalry. Rather, during the 1960s Yemen was transformed into an arena of global conflict whose ensuing chaos tore down the walls of centuries of religious rule and isolation and laid the groundwork for the next half century of Yemeni history. The end of the Yemen Civil War marked the end of both Egyptian President Nasser’s Arab nationalist colonial expansion and the British Empire in the Middle East, two of the most dominant regional forces. The legacy of the eventual northern tribal defeat and the compromised establishment of a weak and decentralized republic are at the core of modern-day conflicts in South Arabia.

This work explores the lives of people of sub-Saharan Africa and their descendants, how they were shaped by empire, and how they in turn influenced the empire in everything from material goods to cultural style. The black experience varied greatly across space and over time. Accordingly, thirteen substantive essays and a scene-setting introduction range from West Africa in the sixteenth century, through the history of the slave trade and slavery down to the 1830s, to nineteenth- and twentieth-century participation of blacks in the empire as workers, soldiers, members of colonial elites, intellectuals, athletes, and musicians. No people were more uprooted and dislocated; or travelled more within the empire; or created more of a trans-imperial culture. In the crucible of the British empire, blacks invented cultural mixes that were precursors to our modern selves — hybrid, fluid, ambiguous, and constantly in motion.

In 1842, the German poet, Henrich Heine, wrote that the bourgeoisie, ‘obsessed by a nightmare apprehension of disaster’ and ‘an instinctive dread of communism’, were driven against their better instincts into tolerating absolutist government. Theirs was a ‘politics … motivated by fear’. Over the next 150 years, the middle classes were repeatedly accused by radicals of betraying liberty for fear of ‘red revolution’. The failure of the revolutions of 1848, conservative nationalism from the 1860s, fascist victories in the first half of the twentieth‐century, and repression of national liberation movements during the Cold War — these fateful disasters were all explained by the bourgeoisie’s fear of the masses. For their part, conservatives insisted that demagogues and fanatics exploited the desperation of the poor to subvert liberal revolutions, leading to anarchy and tyranny. Only evolutionary reform was enduring. From the 1970s, however, liberal revolution revived on an unprecedented scale. With the collapse of Communism, bourgeois liberty once again became a crusading, force, but now on a global scale. In the twenty-first century, the armed forces of the United States, Britain and NATO became instruments of ‘regime change’, seeking to destroy dictatorship and build free‐market democracies. President George W. Bush called the invasion of Iraq in 2003 a ‘watershed event in the global democratic revolution’. This was an extraordinary turn‐around, with the middle classes now hailed as the truly universal class which, in emancipating itself, emancipates all society. The debacle in Iraq, and the Great Recession from 2008, revealed all too clearly that hubris still invited nemesis.This book examines this remarkable story, and the fierce debates it occasioned. It takes in a span from the seventeenth century to the twenty‐first, covering a wide range of countries and thinkers.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century the British Empire was confronted by two great Chinese questions. The first of these questions (often known as the ‘Far Eastern question’ to contemporaries) related specifically to the maintenance of British interests on the China coast and the broader implications for British foreign policy in East Asia. While safeguarding British interests in the Far East presented British policymakers with a range of significant challenges, as they wrestled with this first Chinese question, another kept knocking at the door. Since the eighteenth century, when plans for the establishment of a British colony at New South Wales had begun to materialize, Australia’s potential relations with China had attracted considerable interest. During the first sixty years of European settlement, China retained a prominent place in both metropolitan and colonial schemes for the development of British Australia. From the 1850s, however, when large numbers of Cantonese miners travelled to the Pacific gold rushes, these earlier visions began to appear hopelessly naive. By the late 1880s the coming of the Chinese to Australia, and the reaction to their arrival, had developed into one of the most difficult issues within British imperial affairs. This book sets out to tell that story. Reaching back to the arrival of the British in the 1780s, it explores the early history of Australian engagement with China and traces the development of colonial Australia into an important point of contact between the British and Chinese empires.