Workshops

Abstract:

This paper is the fourth chapter of his dissertation, "Faith for This World: Protestantism and the Reconstruction of Constitutional Democracy in Germany, 1933-1968." The chapter shows how a network of Protestant theologians, jurists, and politicians in 1950s West Germany petitioned the federal government and constitutional court for an expansion of the right of conscientious objection to military service, beyond members of historically pacifist churches. Central to Protestant claims, I argue, was an ongoing reappraisal of the legacy of the resistance to the Nazi state, in particular the failed coup d'état of July 20, 1944 in which a number of conservative Protestants had participated. Resistance against National Socialism challenged the conventional boundary German Protestants drew between political and spiritual affairs, engendering debate about the proper scope of the church's political action in postwar West Germany.

October 13: Josh Ehrlich (History), "The Anglicist-Orientalist Controversy Revisited: Education and the Ends of the Company State in British India"

Abstract:

The "Anglicist-Orientalist Controversy" (1833-5) has long been considered a seminal episode in the history of British empire in South Asia. Its supposed outcome, associated in posterity with T. B. Macaulay's minute on education, was the decisive replacement of an eastward-facing ("Orientalist") cultural outlook with a westward-facing ("Anglicist") one among officials of the East India Company. Tracing the growth of British-Indian education policy from 1819, however, this paper argues that the larger significance of the controversy, and of debates over education before and after, lay in the gradual replacement of a politics of elite conciliation by one of mass education. The primary significance of education policy lay in facilitating the Company state's transformation into a territorial sovereign, divorced from old mercantile associations and deriving legitimacy from its supposed hold on Indian society at large.

Abstract:

This chapter examines interwar European parliamentarians’ private missions abroad as informal diplomats and analyzes the party-political and other deals they made across the continent. The chapter focuses on the specific case of the British Labour Party politician and Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, as well as networks of interwar socialists and conservatives.

This chapter provides an overview of the Algerian War between November 1954 and March 1962 as well as a more detailed look at the four-month “transition period” between the signing of the Evian Accords in March 1962 and the referendum on Algerian independence in July 1962. This chapter will also discuss the months immediately following independence between July 1962 and the formation of the FLN-controlled National Assembly in September 1962. Throughout, this chapter examines the socio-political history of the Exécutif Provisoire (Provisional Executive), which the signatories of the Evian Accords established as a means to govern French Algeria (in concert with colonial authorities) until a referendum on self-determination could take place and, afterward, act as the caretaker government of a fully independent Algeria until elections could be held. Compared to processes of decolonization elsewhere, the Provisional Executive was a unique institution, as it represented an executive council of twelve men from both the colony’s European and Algerian Muslim communities and included members of the FLN (Front de Libération Nationale). Installed in the specially designed administrative complex of Rocher Noir located outside of the Algiers, these men worked around the clock for four months to hammer out the details of Algeria’s transition to independence and lay the ground work for the sovereign nation to come. Yet, little attention has been paid to the role that the Provisional Executive played in Algeria’s final chapter of decolonization. This is in part because the violence and uncertainty that marked the spring of 1962 has greatly overshadowed other events during the same period. Moreover, the Provisional Executive was quickly marginalized by the FLN immediately after independence. Nonetheless, by charting the day-to-day operations of the Provisional Executive, this chapter argues that far from being unprepared for the challenges of decolonization, French policymakers and their Algerian interlocutors were able to find common ground to ensure that a relatively peaceful transition to independence could take place.

This chapter follows the role of Protestant intellectuals in the transformation of West German public opinion on Europe's postwar territorial settlement and West German reconciliation with Eastern Europe from the mid-1950s through mid-1960s. In 1965, a commission of the German Protestant Church issued a memorandum calling on the West German government to recognize the Oder-Neisse line established by the Potsdam Agreement as the legitimate German-Polish border. The Protestant Church thereby became the first major German organization to publicly champion the renunciation of Germany's former Eastern territories and recognize the nonreversibility of the postwar expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe, at a time when all of the major West German political parties continued to assert the Federal Republic's sovereignty over Germany's 1937 borders. The Protestant memorandum is widely regarded as catalyzing a turning point in West German foreign policy, yet historians have yet to explore its roots in the Protestant intellectual milieu. This chapter analyzes the prehistory of the Protestant Church's so-called Ostdenkschrift, showing how the document reflected a transformation in Protestant theological thinking about questions of national identity, territory, and human rights with roots in the early postwar period. It also argues that the revival of Nazi criminal trials in West Germany during the early 1960s gave rise to a new Protestant appraisal of law as a medium of reconciliation, which contributed crucially to debates about German territorial rights.

In the 1920s, the League of Nations promoted the standardization of passports. This paper will point out that the modern passport regime has not exempted children since its inception. At the same time, it has distinguished them from adults: Children were not necessarily assured the right to hold a passport of their own; Children could be included in the family passport of their parent, more exactly, that of their father. The system of family passports, however, remained uncriticized for most of the 1920s, when various actors discussed the desirable role and format of passports and other travel documents. At that time, humanitarians often supported the mandatory use of travel documents that would safeguard women and children against human trafficking. This paper will suggest that the system of family passports seemed useful to them as they addressed child protection in the context of family assistance.

The last years of the eighteenth century have been seen as both a golden age of British Indological research and a period of intense political pressure on the East India Company. These were the years of the polymath William Jones's research in Sanskrit and Indo-Persian, the MP Edmund Burke's prosecution of former governor-general Warren Hastings, and the present governor-general Charles Cornwallis's overhaul of the Company's Bengal administration. The relations of these landmark developments with each other and with the politics of knowledge comprises the subject of this chapter.

• September 23: Elizabeth Cross (History): "The Pen and the Sword: Visions of Revanche and the Problem of Company Governance in the French Indian Ocean"
• October 7: Tomasz Blusiewicz (History): “Überseehafen Rostock: East Germany’s Window to the World under Stasi Watch, 1961-1989”
• October 21: Rachel Friedman (Government): “The Collectivization of Risk and the Early Welfare State”
• November 4: Adriana Alfaro Altamirano (Government): “Adam Smith and Max Scheler on Sympathy”
• December 2: Jamie McSpadden (History): “A Radical Change? Female Parliamentarians’ Influence on European Politics, 1918-1940”
• December 9: Joshua Ehrlich (History): "Wellesley and the Politics of Fort William College"
• Feb. 17: Lydia Walker (History): "Politics of Plaint: Nagas, Namibians, and the United Nations System of the early 1960s"
• March 10: Kristen Loveland (History): “Replacing God: Reproductive Technologies in German Religious and Legal Thought in the 1980s”
• March 24: Liat Spiro (History): “Drafting Empire: American and German Capital Goods and the Mission Industrialisatrice in the Shandong-Kyushu Corridor, 1880-1914”
• April 7: Andrew Bellisari (History): “Yesterday’s Enemies: Decolonization and the Role of the Mixed Ceasefire Commissions in French Algeria”
• April 21: Brandon Bloch (History): “Institutionalizing Protestant Ethics: Families, Schools, and the West German Basic Law, 1949-1957

• October 23: Adriana Alfaro Altamirano (Government), “Great Expectations: Henri Bergson and the Morality of Uncertainty”

• November 6: Tae-Yeoun Keum (Government), “An Enlightenment Fable: Leibniz and the Boundaries of Reason”

• November 20: Elizabeth Cross (History), “The French Revolution of the Compagnie des Indes: 1789-1792”

• December 4: Lydia Walker (History), “In the Shadow of Katanga”

• February 26: John Harpham (Government), “From Freedom to Slavery”

• March 11: Colleen Anderson (History), “Cosmic Visitors: The Space Race in East and West Germany, 1957-1969”

• April 1: Guillaume Wadia (History), “The Deep State and the Imperial Spring, 1934-1937”

• April 15: Tomasz Blusiewicz (History), “Contraband, bribes, drugs and big bucks: Why was Solidarność born on the Polish Baltic Coast?”

• April 29: Jamie McSpadden (History), “Constructing and Contesting an Interwar Parliamentary International: The Inter-Parliamentary Union and Conférence parlementaire internationale du commerce”

• March 6: Kristen Loveland (History), "Reproducing Dignity: German and American Law and the Politics of Reproductive Technologies at the Millennium"
• March 27: Carolin F. Roeder (History), "Geographies of Alpine Knowledge: 1857-1932"
• April 6: Sarah Shortall (History), "The Weapons of the Spirit: Catholic Theology and the Resistance to Nazism"
• April 17: James R. Martin (History), "The Origins of International Economic Governance: Food, Finance, and Shipping during the First World War, 1916-1920"
• May 1: Mircea Raianu (History), "Between Paternalism and Technocracy: The Tata Iron and Steel Company and the Circulation of Expertise in the British Empire, 1900-1950"