Studying the explosion of vernacular literature is fundamentally important to historians of the Middle Ages because it informs them about contemporary political, social, and cultural developments. Vernacular literature developed as a form of expression belonging to the emerging merchant class and the literate, meaning that literature was no longer the preserve of the Latin-reading rich and monastically trained monks, leading to an increasingly diverse and secular audience. Through the ‘popular lens’ of the vernacular, historians can examine contemporary explorations and critiques of society, allowing them to see perspectives beyond those that were rich enough to learn Latin. It must be noted, however, that this was not a literary ‘revolution’, as books remained expensive regardless of the language, meaning that the explosion of vernacular increased authorship and readership, but not financial accessibility. Vernacular literature gave more women a voice, allowing historians to integrate them into the narrative. It was also immensely political, often becoming a vehicle for criticism and even rebellion, whereas Latin remained the language of authority. Vernacular writing allowed religious and philosophical discussion beyond the nobility and clergy, enabling new ideas to spread and challenge orthodox beliefs. It is, therefore, essential for medieval historians to study the explosion of vernacular literature, as it offers an insight into the minds of contemporaries and tells us so much about the Middle Ages. The explosion of vernacular writing suggests that an increasing number of people were literate, implying that books and their ideas were no longer the preserve of elites or monastics. In the 14th century, it is estimated that up to fifty per cent of the male population could read, suggesting sizable literary circulation.[1] However, this is not fully reflective of the literate population, as people engaged with books in different ways; for example, now that texts were in the vernacular, those who had books read aloud to them could understand a growing repertoire. Vernacular education manuals survive, such as one preserved from the 15th century, suggesting growing literacy and, therefore, increasing social mobility in the Middle Ages.[2] Further, Books of Hours began to be published in vernaculars, and it has been argued that their popularity points to the expanding literacy of the laity and the growth of a vibrant reading culture.[3] It is true that these works were extremely expensive, often heavily decorated and considered status items, meaning that they remained unaffordable for many. However, they still show the literary expansion, not revolution, that took place during the Middle Ages, meaning that they are essential sources for understanding the period. The vernacular allows for more informal writing, including critiques of society, which are valuable to historians. Some have suggested that in The Canterbury Tales, the parson, knight, and ploughman represent the Three Estates of society, giving historians insight into the social hierarchy as perceived by contemporaries.[4] Further, the Miller’s satirical tale counters the aristocratic romance of the knight’s, creating a conflict between their classes that reveals broader resentment at social stratification.[5] During his prologue, the eponymous Miller refuses to let the monk tell his story first and is in “no mood for manners or to doff”.[6] This can be read as a critique and satire of the social hierarchy, and shows historians how contemporaries interpreted the order they were stratified within. Thus, vernacular literature is used to represent and satirise highly stratified medieval society, and is useful to historians who want to understand contemporary society and an increased range of people’s mindsets. The vernacular also gave a new voice to women, telling us about contemporary patriarchal social relations and how some women countered them. Chaucer’s The Wife of Bath satirises the Wife’s five marriages, and she is identified only by her relations to men, perpetuating misogynistic stereotypes and allowing historians to examine contemporary attitudes towards women.[7] On the other hand, the writings of Christine de Pizan give historians a rare insight into the life and mind of a woman in the Middle Ages without the lens of a male writer. Some have argued that her change to French is influenced by a desire to create courtly literature specific to France, allowing historians to examine contemporary attitudes at the French Court.[8] However, some could argue that writing for the Court restricted her audience to the elites (who were Latin-educated anyway), and was an aesthetic choice, rather than a desire to expand her readership. Despite this, the vernacular increased her audience, allowing non-Latin-educated people beyond the Court to read her works, and countered prevailing misogynistic stereotypes to all audiences. In The Book of the City of Ladies, she tackles misogyny by offering an alternative view of history in which women’s contributions are fully recognised and writes that “God has never criticised the female sex more than the male sex”, equating men and women within a universally understood Christian context that sparked debate, showing that vernacular literature gave medieval women a voice and allowed them to counter prevailing sexism.[9] However, some historians argue that Pizan’s writings are somewhat conservative, as they almost exclusively discuss aristocratic women.[10] Despite this, her other works discuss a greater social range; The Treasure of the City of Ladies has advice for everyone, from “princesses” to “prostitutes”, so that “everyone may benefit” from its advice; Pizan, the first professional female writer, writes for all women, even if they cannot read her texts.[11]Therefore, the vernacular literature that exploded in the Middle Ages gives women a voice and allows historians to see what life was truly like for them, re-integrating them into the historical narrative. The explosion of vernacular literature allows historians to explore medieval politics through the lens of someone ‘ordinary’ who participated in them. It tells us that medieval people were politically engaged; indeed, the ‘explosion’ even implies an increase in political engagement. Latin is often seen as the language of authority, and vernacular as the language of the people; thus, vernacular writing is a record without the authorities’ agenda embedded into it. Indeed, using the fact that indictments were submitted in Latin but evidence was in English, Helen Wicker argues that the shift from Latin to English creates a political “tension” in the sources that shows the contrast between popular politics and authority.[12] Further, she posits that vernacular development was policed to avoid treasonous language, showing historians the power of language in the Middle Ages.[13] The choice of vernacular may be because, as Dante himself writes, it is perceived to be “the more noble” because “the whole world employs it”.[14] Therefore, we could argue that Dante and his contemporaries saw the vernacular as the “more noble” language because it allowed universal, not limited, political expression.[15] Indeed, The Divine Comedy is inherently political, making it a crucial source for understanding Florentine politics. Some historians argue that it is a “constant comment on the sinful greed of the mercantile class”, showing how Dante uses the vernacular to criticise the growing merchant class.[16] Indeed, in Paradiso, Dante writes that a group of wealthy people are “destroyed by their own pride!”, a thinly veiled political critique, perhaps aimed at the Medici and similar families.[17] This gives historians a window into 14th-century Florentine politics, allowing them to examine socio-political perspectives in a way that they could not have in an official Latin text. The vernacular also allowed an expression of national identity, which was an increasingly contested political debate in medieval Europe. Benedict Andersen argues that the decline of Latin and the growth of the vernacular gave rise to ‘nationalist’ sentiments across the world, emphasising the power of print media in shaping someone’s social psyche.[18] Andersen’s work focuses on a slightly later time period, but his analysis can still inform our understanding of the Middle Ages; indeed, other historians have argued that a “nationalist discourse” ran through some medieval literature.[19] Whilst it may be anachronistic to apply ‘nationalist’ to the Middle Ages, ‘national consciousness’ is perhaps more fitting, and is evident in Scottish literature. In The Bruce, John Barbour writes that the Scots were “in bondage” to the English, and that Robert the Bruce’s “bravery” gave other people courage to fight them.[20] Thus, he uses vernacular literature to stir up national pride, patriotism, and hatred of the English. This is useful to historians as it provides a valuable source for Robert’s reign, and shows how people felt about the time about Edward II’s attempted invasion. The explosion of religious and philosophical vernacular texts also allowed people to understand and debate ideas themselves, challenging the hegemony of the Latin Church and showing historians that religious innovation could be fuelled by the vernacular. The rediscovery of Aristotle’s writings (through translations from Arabic) detracted from Biblical studies, showing how the vernacular could introduce new ideas to new audiences and challenge conventional beliefs.[21] Further, when John Wycliffe translated the Bible into English, it became the most widely disseminated medieval English text, allowing more people to read Scripture and form their own direct relationships with God.[22] This was fiercely opposed by the Catholic Church, who perceived it as a threat to the orthodox teaching of priests as intercessors between the worshipper and God. It is true that the translation was scholarly, and arguably not intended for the masses, but the furore it created in the Catholic Church, and the Lollard movement it inspired, speak to its effectiveness at sparking religious debate.[23] This shows historians how vernacular religious works could take on lives beyond their original purposes to create arguments and change society, showing the importance of studying the explosion of vernacular literature. Some scholars argue that Dante explores new theological ideas, with the “graded descent” of Inferno differing from traditional conceptualisations of Hell as “unbridled disorder”.[24] His stratification of Hell is more nuanced than contemporary notions of evil, implying that there are different levels of sin and sinners, and that not every bad person is inherently totally evil.[25] This use of the vernacular allows authors to express religious ideas to wider audiences, and allows historians to track the development of theological innovation. Boccaccio also uses the vernacular to discuss religion, instead criticising the “guzzling hypocrisy” of the Church.[26] The protagonist of this tale, a wealthy man, tells an Inquisitor that “for every one” bowl of broth the poor drinks, “you shall receive a hundredfold”, implying that the Friar would drown in the broth due to his (and by extension, the Church’s) greed.[27] This critique of the Church was extraordinarily bold, and the vernacular allowed more people to read it, sparking debate over the Church’s corruption. Thus, the vernacular becomes a vehicle for religious satire and criticism, and a historian studying the Middle Ages can now see evidence of popular religious commentary and criticism. Ultimately, the study of the explosion of vernacular literature in the Middle Ages is of a vital importance to any historian studying the intellectual, cultural, political and social history of the time. This is because it tells us so much about medieval society, how people moved around within its structure, how people criticise it, and reveals an increasingly literate, engaged, and secular readership. It also gives a voice to women, as more can now express themselves more freely, letting historians appreciate their contributions to literature and society. The development of the vernacular was inherently political, as it contributed to growing national identities and exposed the tension between the Latin of authority, and the languages of the masses, revealing contemporary popular political opinions. Religious and philosophical debate was expanded with the vernacular, as more people could now engage with fundamental questions; this expanded the reach of these subjects from the Latin-learned clergy and opened them up to anyone with access to a book. This is not to say that the vernacular caused a literary ‘revolution’, as books remained extremely expensive and elite objects. Rather, it started the development of mass literacy and literary engagement, and opened up previously elite subjects to new audiences. Therefore, historians should absolutely study the explosion of vernacular writing in the Middle Ages because it tells us so much about the political, social, and cultural changes in the medieval world. Callum Tilley has just completed his 1st year of a BA in History at Durham University (University College) Notes: [1] Laurel Amtower and Jacqueline Vanhoutte (eds.), A Companion to Chaucer and his Contemporaries (Toronto, 2009), p. 304 [2] Ibid., pp. 329-331 [3] Kathleen Kennedy, ‘Reintroducing the English Books of Hours, or “English Primers”’, Speculum, Vol. 89, No. 3 (July 2014), p. 695; Ibid., p. 719 [4] Amtower and Vanhoutte, Companion to Chaucer, p. 70 [5] James Simpson (ed.), The Norton Anthology of English Literature, tenth edition: The Middle Ages (New York, 2018), p. 282 [6] Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales (London, Ed. 2003), p. 70 [7] Amtower and Vanhoutte, Companion to Chaucer, p. 81 [8] Jane Hall McCash, ‘The Role of Women in the Rise of the Vernacular’, Comparative Literature, Vol. 60, No. 1 (Winter, 2008), p. 47 [9] Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. Rosalind Brown-Grant (London, Ed. 1999), p. 87 [10] Rosalind Brown-Grant, Christine de Pizan and the Moral Defence of Women: Reading Beyond Gender (Cambridge, 1999), p. 129 [11] Christine de Pizan, The Treasure of the City of Ladies, trans. Sarah Lawson (London, Ed. 2003), p. 5; Ibid., p. 158; Ibid., p. 154 [12] Helen Wicker, ‘The Politics of Vernacular Speech: Cases of Treasonable Language, c. 1440-1453’, in Helen Wicker and Elizabeth Salter (eds.), Vernacularity in England and Wales, c. 1300-1550 (Utrecht, 2011), pp. 173-174 [13] Ibid., p. 173 [14] Dante Alighieri, De vulgari eloquentia, ed. and trans. Steven Botterill (Cambridge, Ed. 2009), p. 3 [15] Steven Botterill has argued this; see ‘Introduction’ in De vulgari eloquentia, p. xxiii [16] Stanley Chandler and Julius Molinaro, The Culture of Italy; Medieval to Modern (Toronto, 1979), p. 54 [17] Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. Robin Kirkpatrick (London, Ed.2012), p. 397 [18] See Benedict Andersen, Imagined Communities (London, Ed. 2006) [19] Roderick Lyall, ‘The Literature of Lowland Scotland, 1350-1700’, in Paul Scott (ed.), Scotland: A Concise Cultural History (Edinburgh, 1993), p. 77 [20] John Barbour, The Bruce, trans. George Eyre-Todd (Glasgow, Ed. 1907), p. 7; Ibid., p. 124 [21] George Gordon Coulton, Medieval Panorama: The English Scene from Conquest to Reformation (Cambridge, 1939), p. 412 [22] Elizabeth Solopova (ed.), The Wycliffite Bible: Origin, History and Interpretation, (Leiden ,2016), p.1 [23] Ibid., p. 2 [24]Robin Kirkpatrick, ‘Introduction’, in Dante, The Divine Comedy, p. xviii [25] See Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. Robin Kirkpatrick (London, Ed. 2012), p. 1 - Inferno [26] Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, trans. Wayne Rebhorn (New York, 2013), p. 56 [27] Ibid., p. 56

Note: all underlines or italics within quotes are the authors’ own unless otherwise stated Nazi Germany is often thought of as the epitome of a totalitarian regime, with omnipresent terror, enforced from above, implementing the government’s will. This image has influenced how historians analyse the period, and has created a historical and historiographical debate between those who see Nazi terror as totalitarian, revisionists who challenge this argument, and post-revisionists seeking to synthesise the two views to find a more balanced appraisal of terror in Nazi Germany. This essay explores the debate by analysing the different arguments and comparing them to primary sources to test their credibility. Ultimately, the post-revisionist ‘middle way’ between totalitarianism and a self-policing society will emerge as a more nuanced and convincing argument. This is not to dismiss the role of terror in Nazi Germany, but an acknowledgement that both top-down terror and bottom-up complicity were needed to facilitate the extreme levels of repression seen during the Nazi dictatorship from 1939 to 1945; specifically, the idea of terror as more significant in the partnership than complicity, but both working together to create extreme levels of repression, is perhaps the closest historians have got to explaining the nature of terror in the Third Reich. Indeed, some may argue that the eagerness with which some people supported the regime implies a new understanding of totalitarianism, whereby popular collaboration enabled the creation of extreme terror that characterises a totalitarian regime. In order to understand this debate, context about the Nazis’ terror structure is needed. Hitler rose to power in January 1933 after a successful election campaign, and immediately set about securing his position through terror. Opposition parties were outlawed, trade unions were suppressed, and the Sturmabteilung, the Nazi paramilitary force that threatened Hitler’s policy of ‘legality’, was eliminated as a challenge to his authority. This secured the ascendency of the SS-police terror infrastructure and was an ominous precedent for what was to come. During the following years, dissent was suppressed, with ‘preventative custody’ being used to arrest political, social, and religious ‘enemies’ and send them to newly opened concentration camps. The Gestapo, established in 1933 and consolidated under Himmler in 1934, and associated organs (such as the SS and concentration camps), became the principal methods of enforcing Nazi policy on the domestic population through terror. By 1939, the Nazi state had established a ruthless network that effectively suppressed dissent. Scholarship on Nazi terror appeared soon after the war. Originally published in 1951, Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism describes the police structure as the “sole organ of power” that enforced uniformity through terror, to the extent where it “succeeded in cutting the moral person off from the individualist landscape and in making decisions of conscience absolutely questionable and equivocal.”[1] This shifting of the concept of ‘good’ from objective to subjective allowed the Nazis to implement any policy they wished to, and suppress anyone who stood against them. She further argues that totalitarian regimes “demand unlimited power”, which could only be secured if “literally all men, without a single exception, are reliably dominated in every aspect of their life.”[2] This would imply that terror in the Third Reich was omnipresent in everyday life to the point where people’s decisions were influenced by the threat of the Gestapo and terror superstructure. This is supported by the account of a political prisoner who, after the liberation of Buchenwald, collected testimonies from other survivors. According to him, there was “no German who was not aware that concentration camps existed” and “no-one who did not fear them.”[3] This first-hand account of a political dissident who was targeted by the Nazi regime, and indeed his gathering of additional perspectives, reliably supports the idea that the terror that the state inflicted on ‘enemies’ was pervasive. True, this source discusses the camps, and not the police structure, but the inter-connected nature of the terror system means that all terror agencies together played a part in creating the atmosphere of terror prevalent in the Third Reich. This is reflected in the diaries of Victor Klemperer, who recorded that “Frau Pick attempted suicide a second time, and this time successfully” due to a “fear of ill-treatment by the Gestapo during the transport, perhaps also fear of unknown Theresienstadt.”[4] This may be a singular example, but it explicitly shows that the Gestapo and camps had such a reputation of fear that it drove people to suicide, and is illustrative of the terror that even the threat of the Gestapo created. No form of resistance or dissent was tolerated; the Gestapo’s treatment of the Weiße Rose shows how ruthlessly resistance was crushed. The members published anti-Nazi pamphlets condemning the regime during the war, for which the leaders were condemned by the People’s Court and executed. Another example is that of Elise and Otto Hampel, who conducted a quiet propaganda campaign against the regime by leaving hundreds of postcards around Berlin, calling for civil disobedience and sabotage. They were caught by the Gestapo, publicly tried in the People’s Court, and executed in 1943, showing how all subversion was publicly eliminated. [5] Whilst these may be singular examples, they show how the state created an atmosphere of repression and terror that seeped into all areas of society, inducing historians to argue that the terror imposed on Nazi society was indeed totalitarian. Arendt may be a philosopher, meaning her expertise as a historian may be somewhat limited, but historians have supported her totalitarian interpretation. In an early expression of his view, Richard Evans notes “the absolute centrality of violence, coercion and terror” to National Socialism “from the very outset” of the regime.[6] Indeed, he argues that terror was not merely applied to “despised and tiny minorities of social outcasts”, but rather to the “great majority” of their “fellow-citizens.”[7] Thus, according to Evans, universally applied terror was essential to the preservation of the dictatorship and the creation of a totalitarian society. Evans later elaborates on his views in the Third Reich trilogy, writing that “everything that happened in the Third Reich” took place in a “pervasive atmosphere of fear and terror, which never slackened and indeed became far more intense towards the end.”[8] This repression can be seen when Clemens von Galen, Bishop of Münster, gave a series of sermons criticising the euthanasia programme Operation T-4. Priests who distributed copies of it were arrested, and Galen himself was intimidated by the Gestapo; his sister was arrested, but she escaped. This story is repeated across the country; Bernt Engelmann recalls in his memoirs that his local minister, Pastor Klötzel, was taken into protective custody for “misuse of the pulpit”, including his membership of the Confessing Church and the Pastors’ Emergency League, two anti-Nazi clerical organisations.[9] Other examples of political repression include the arrest of Communists in occupied territories; in October 1941 alone, 1518 people were arrested for “opposition” and 7729 for “ceasing to work”, labels that belie the political nature of their arrest.[10] This terror was not just political: homosexuals were arrested for their ‘deviancy’ because, in the eyes of the state, their sexuality threatened the reproductive efficiency of the so-called master race. Evans recounts the story of “H.D.”, who is arrested and tortured, sent to person for three and a half years, and then re-arrested and sent to Buchenwald.[11] Whilst this is a singular example, across the Reich, between 5,000 and 15,000 gay men were sent to concentration camps, half of whom perished there.[12] Society was monitored by the Gestapo, and all ‘deviancy’, even in the private sphere of the bedroom, was not tolerated. This supports the argument that the Nazis’ terror was implemented from above, even creating a totalitarian society in which all transgression, political or social, was not tolerated. In the occupied territories, terror was equally if not more all-consuming; Mary Fulbrook writes that, in Poland, “SS units systematically rounded up and killed those whom they considered potential enemies or undesirables.”[13] These included “members of the Polish nobility, left-wingers and many Polish Jews” who were “simply murdered after the invasion of Poland.”[14] This systematic eradication of perceived enemies of the regime speaks of terror enforced from above, as an occupied population was cleansed of its dissidents and ‘undesirables’ by an invading regime. This terror is markedly different from that seen within Germany proper, as the vast majority of people neither anticipated the regime change nor wanted it, and the majority of people in the newly occupied territories fell into the category of racial minority or enemy, unlike in Germany. However, many people in occupied territories did collaborate with the Nazis; some historians argue that, for the ethnic Germans in Poland, “occupation appeared to be anything but foreign rule” as they benefitted from the incoming racialised discrimination.[15] Furthermore, many groups, such as Ukrainian nationalists and right-wing Poles, worked with the regime because they shared a “common ideological language” of antisemitism and anti-Sovietism.[16]Even so, the ethnic cleansing of Poles, Slavs, and other minorities precludes overwhelming collaboration from these social groups, implying that these and many other people experienced terror at the hands of the occupying regime. Thus, in occupied territories such as Poland, some people collaborated with the regime – especially if their interests aligned – but many others felt top-down repression at the hands of the occupiers. This ‘top-down’ approach was developed by Raul Hilberg, whose argument posits that the Holocaust was implemented from above by the Nazi state and bureaucracy, using the terror superstructure. He argues that “the German bureaucracy” decided to “destroy, utterly and completely, the Jews of Europe”, pointing to a top-down process of repression enforced by increasingly radical state machinery and bureaucrats.[17] An example of this would be Adolf Eichmann, a bureaucrat who was responsible for the deportation and eventual deaths of hundreds of thousands of Jews, first from Austria, and then the occupied territories. Hilberg’s interpretation is supported by the Wansee Protocol, which shows that the state planned the “final solution” of the “Jewish question” from at least the early 1940s.[18] We must remember that, as a source coming from the Nazi state, and Heydrich being ordered to formulate this plan by Göring, it is in the authors’ interests to present the Final Solution as a fail-safe pre-determined plan for extermination. Nevertheless, the concrete and highly detailed nature of the plans suggests that these were pre-existing and merely unveiled and solidified at the Wansee conference, belying earlier plans for extermination that would support Hilberg’s state-driven argument. Furthermore, a prisoner in the Warsaw Ghetto recorded that the Germans had “conceived and planned the extermination with exactitude, precision, and devilish shrewdness.”[19] Whilst his interpretation is framed by his life experiences as a victim of the Nazis, which would present them as powerful and terrorising from on high, it offers valuable insight into how the state’s terror was perceived to function. Therefore, Nazi terror could be considered totalitarian as it was enforced onto society by an increasingly radical bureaucracy that escalated antisemitic violence into genocide. Hilberg is supported by Ian Kershaw, who posits that the result of people “working towards the Führer” was “the unstoppable radicalisation of the 'system' and the gradual emergence of policy objectives closely related to the ideological imperatives represented by Hitler.”[20] This saw zealous Nazis implementing increasingly radical policies they thought aligned with Hitler’s plans, which supports Hilberg’s thesis of an increasingly radical bureaucracy and adds a layer of analysis to the ‘top-down’ argument, whereby bureaucrats implemented terror from above to please their leader. In another work, Kershaw affirms that “the Nazi regime was a terroristic dictatorship – in a literal sense, a terrifying regime – which knew no bounds in the repression of its perceived enemies.”[21] This is supported by a bystander, who witnessed inmates at Stutthof “being hounded to work” by SS women “carrying whips” whilst she watches on, and opines that “feeling sorry for them was all we could do, nothing more.”[22] This source details Nazi terror on two levels: firstly, it shows that the inmates themselves were subject to extreme levels of terror at the hands of the SS. Secondly, it shows that bystanders felt they couldn’t step in to help victims because of the terror the SS inspired. True, she writes that “after all we too were having to work”, which would imply that she felt some level of moral equivalency with the prisoners; in her mind, they had to fulfil their tasks, as she did, which would imply that she would not have intervened even if she could have. However, the presence of the SS, and the fact that she writes she “could” do “nothing more” for the prisoners, would imply that she felt she could not help them due to her own fear of the SS and the terrifying consequences for her. This suggests that eyewitness accounts support Kershaw’s view that terror in Nazi Germany was unequivocal and absolute. However, Kershaw maintains that denunciations remained a way of working towards the Führer; denunciations of jealous neighbours and doctors rushing to nominate people for the euthanasia programme are examples of people eagerly collaborating with the regime in order to fulfil what they believed Hitler expected of them.[23] Thus, Kershaw introduces a more nuanced ‘dual’ approach, in which both top-down bureaucratic radicalism and popular eagerness to collaborate with and ‘please’ Hitler created a society in which terror was imposed from above, but supported through complicity from below. This argument is taken further by Robert Gellately, whose revisionist interpretation attempts to show that Hitler established a dictatorship through gathering support from the majority of the German people and not through imposing terror from above. He terms this a “plebiscitary dictatorship” that aimed to build a social consensus which was both fluid and active, and argues that the Nazis did this by reducing unemployment, overriding the Treaty of Versailles and appealing to Germany’s Imperial ‘glory days’.[24] Thus coercion was highly selective, and terror was not universally enforced; instead, society became ‘self-policing’, with denunciations becoming essential to the Gestapo’s success. Gellately goes on to write that denunciations “were crucial to the functioning of the Gestapo. We know that 26 per cent of all cases began with an identifiable denunciation, and this must be taken as a minimum figure.” [25] Thus terror was not totalitarian by Arendt’s standards, and was in fact maintained from below by ordinary people’s complicity. This is supported by Engelmann, who recalls a New Year’s party where, in reply to a Nazi toast, “God save our Führer!”, a man replies quietly, “and us from him!”[26] This man is later arrested by the Gestapo and killed in a camp near Esterwegen, denounced by a medical graduate, Dr Heinz, who was a member of the German Student League, a devoted group who became spies and informers. This may be one example, and of a particularly zealous Nazi informer (and thus might not be fully representative of the general population) but it is a first-hand account showing how people denounced others and, through the fear of this, other people kept silent, creating a self-policing society. Indeed, Engelmann continues that the Gestapo was an “omniscient secret police” that only “grew” over time, and details another example where Frau Meinzerhagen was threatened with denunciation by her neighbour because she woke him up from his afternoon nap.[27] This is reflected throughout Germany on a national scale; of Jewish survivors surveyed by Johnson and Reuband, nineteen percent recalled being spied upon by neighbours, fifteen percent by fellow pupils, five percent by co-workers, and eight percent by the police.[28] Thus, forty-seven percent of survivors recall being spied upon, but this says nothing about those who didn’t survive, where the number was undoubtedly higher, as a larger proportion would have been denounced for them to be sent to concentration camps. Further, thirty-nine percent of these spies were ‘ordinary people’, not the police, supporting Gellately’s argument for a self-policing society in which normal people helped to maintain the regime through surveillance and denunciation. Therefore, arguably Nazi Germany became a self-policing society in which denunciations created an atmosphere of terror from the bottom up, facilitated by the actions of ordinary people. Other historians, however, have criticised Gellately’s stance; Claire Hall, a post-revisionist, has argued that Gellately “moved the argument on from the 1950s' totalitarian view of nazi [sic] Germany” but created a “revisionist overstatement” by exaggerating the significance of denunciations.[29] She concedes that “a police state does require some degree of co-operation from society”, but that ultimately “Nazi Germany was not a self-policed state” as the Gestapo acted as “both a reactive and proactive agent of repression”.[30] Thus, in her criticism of Gellately’s argument, Hall positions herself between those that think that Nazi terror was fully totalitarian, and revisionists who argue that Nazi society was self-policing. This ‘middle way’ is perhaps more nuanced than either extreme, allowing for an understanding of both terror and denunciations as a means of maintaining political power. Indeed, the figures mentioned above suggest that, if forty-seven percent of survivors were spied upon, a similar amount, to their knowledge, were not. This would suggest that just over half of the survivors interviewed experienced terror directly from the state, and just under half experienced the effects of a ‘self-policing’ society. Although this is not perfect, it seems to support Hall’s argument for a middle path in which terror was more significant, but denunciations also played a role in ensuring the suppression of ‘enemies of the Reich’. This middle way is developed by Eric Johnson, who argues that both terror and complicity were required to effectively suppress dissent and create the atmosphere of terror present in the Third Reich. He writes that the Gestapo “was not all-knowing, all-powerful, and omnipresent”, meaning that “Nazi terror relied heavily on the complicity of the ordinary German population.”[31] However, he counterweights this with the reminder that some “underestimate and obscure the enormous culpability and capability of the leading organs of Nazi terror, such as the Gestapo” and “overestimate the culpability of ordinary German citizens”.[32] This means that, for Johnson, “some Germans were far more guilty than others”, clearly delineating between ordinary people and the agents of terror organisations.[33] This analysis can be applied to both lower-level agents and their superiors, meaning that the higher up the ladder you climbed, the more complicit you were in the regime’s repression. An example of this would be Reinhard Heydrich, who was Chief of the Reich Security Main Office between August 1940 and June 1942. This gave him responsibility for the repression that was seen throughout the Third Reich, making him much more culpable than an ordinary person who, scared of reprisals, denounced a neighbour for listening to foreign radio stations. This also speaks of a spectrum of complicity, perhaps challenging the question of whether or not ordinary people were complicit by arguing that everyone was, to differing extents. This differentiation is seen in the example of Albert Emmerich, who witnessed the execution of Jews but, when asked if he would spread the word, said no, because “then it would have been our turn.”[34] Emmerich is complicit, yes, because he witnessed the execution of Jews and kept his silence. However, even though his silence facilitated further executions, the people actually committing these acts were far more to blame than him. Further, the terror of seeing the execution and being threatened with the same also acted as state-driven terror, forcing Emmerich to keep his silence. This example is illustrative of the spectrum of complicity that Johnson puts forward, challenging the innocence/complicity dichotomy. This means that terror was both top-down and bottom-up in the Third Reich, relying upon the actions of the state and the silence of citizens to reach the extreme levels seen during the Second World War. Thus, Johnson challenges both totalitarian historians and revisionists to forge a nuanced post-revisionist view of Nazi terror that accommodates for the complexity of human reactions to terror. In their book The Gestapo, Carsten Dams and Michael Stolle also argue that both terror and denunciations together were necessary for the regime to suppress dissent. Although “the broad scale of denunciations certainly played its part in the innumerable misfortunes of the Nazi state’s victims, the active participation of organised [sic] state and party units and apparatus was more decisive.”[35] Therefore, along with Hall and Johnson, they argue that the regime relied upon both denunciations and terror, but that the latter was more important in suppressing dissent. They also critique the totalitarian argument, as the Gestapo’s “intentional self-image” reinforced its reputation as omniscient, and failure to see this means that a historian has bought into the Gestapo’s own propaganda.[36] Furthermore, the accounts of the persecuted depict a “strong, powerful Gestapo” by their nature, when in fact, it too was fallible and relatively small compared to other regimes’ secret agencies, such as the KGB and Stasi.[37] Indeed, the Gestapo was numerically small, with only forty-thousand agents for the entirety of Germany and huge cities like Hamburg having between forty and fifty.[38] This would suggest that much of the Gestapo’s reputation as the enforcer of totalitarian terror came from its projected image, and contemporaries who themselves were being persecuted had their judgements clouded by their personal, visceral fear of the Gestapo. Indeed, a contemporary later recalled that “denunciations weren’t even talked about. It was so taboo, you didn’t do that. From little on, you did not fink on your friends.”[39] Being interviewed after the fall of the Third Reich, he is perhaps aiming to present himself as an honourable person who did not facilitate the regime’s crimes by denouncing others. Nevertheless, his account suggests that the regime’s terrifying reputation meant that people were too scared to talk about certain subjects. This is a singular example, but if extrapolated suggests that many people didn’t talk about certain topics because they feared the consequences. This implies that the Gestapo was supported by denunciations and complicity, but its primary function was the terrorising of the population into submission and silence. The question of Nazi terror is complex, and perhaps no historian can provide a definitive answer as to how far it was truly totalitarian. This essay has examined key theories concerning Nazi terror, from state-driven to popular approaches, and has compared them to source material, evidence, and statistics, in order to weigh up their credibility. All present valid and highly researched viewpoints, but the most convincing are ultimately those that take a more balanced, post-revisionist ‘middle path’, like Hall, Johnson, and Dams and Stolle. Their arguments appreciate the fact that both terror and complicity were needed for the Nazi dictatorship to function as it did, but they tend to weigh the activities of the terror apparatus as more important to the successful suppression of dissent. This is not to say that Nazi terror wasn’t all-consuming for many people – such as minorities and perceived enemies of the state – but that it often wasn’t aimed at ‘ordinary’ people, perhaps because the vast majority of them complied willingly with the regime. Thus, in my view, the arguments of the post-revisionists are more convincing because they appreciate that both terror and denunciations upheld the regime, but state-driven terror was more significant in this partnership. Returning to Arendt’s definition of ‘totalitarian’, it describes a regime where the concepts of good and evil are manipulated by the state to the point where something objectively evil is considered good; for example, the murder of a Jew, heinous to everyone else, is praiseworthy to a Nazi. This was done through terror, yes, but also through indoctrination and by drawing upon long-standing nationalist and antisemitic sentiments latent in German society. These latter methods would induce people to denounce others who were seen to disobey, as the denouncers would view them as a challenge to the new world that the regime was trying to create. This is similar to the post-revisionist argument, where firstly terror, but also complicity, are both necessary to the regime. Therefore, perhaps the question is not of terror and complicity, but rather of a new understanding of totalitarianism, whereby both terror and ordinary complicity, even eagerness to participate in suppressing dissenting voices as treacherous, facilitated the creation of an atmosphere of terror so pervasive that it changed the very character of good and evil. Callum Tilley has just completed his 1st year of a BA in History at Durham University (University College) Notes: [1] Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (London, Ed. 2017), p. 549; Ibid., pp. 592-593 [2] Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 598 [3] Eugen Kogon, Der SS-Staat trans. Lesley Sharpe and Jeremy Noakes (Munich, 1946), pp. 331–3, from the Birkbeck archive, source no. 94, available from: http://www.camps.bbk.ac.uk/documents.html (last accessed 16th March 2023) [4] Victor Klemperer, The Klemperer Diaries 1933-1945 trans. Martin Chalmers (London, Ed. 2000), entry from 20th August 1942, p. 567 [5] See the appendix ‘The true story behind Alone in Berlin’ in Hans Fallada, Alone in Berlin (London, Ed. 2009), p. 589 [6] Richard J. Evans, ‘Raleigh Lecture on History: Coercion and Consent in Nazi Germany’, Proceedings of the British Academy 151 (May 2006), p. 81 [7] Ibid., p. 81 [8] Richard Evans, The Third Reich in Power (London, 2005), p. 118 [9] Bernt Engelmann, In Hitler’s Germany; Everyday Life in the Third Reich trans. Krishna Winston (London, Ed. 1988), pp. 52-54 [10] Richard Evans, The Third Reich at War (London, 2008), p. 365 [11] Ibid., p. 537 [12] Evans, The Third Reich at War, p. 537 [13] Mary Fulbrook, A History of Germany 1918-2008; The Divided Nation (Chichester, 2009), p. 80 [14] Ibid., p. 80 [15] Klaus-Peter Friedrich, ‘Collaboration in a "Land without a Quisling": Patterns of Cooperation with the Nazi German Occupation Regime in Poland during World War II’, Slavic Review, Vol. 64, No. 4 (Winter, 2005), p. 725 [16] Ibid., p. 717 [17] Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (New Haven, Ed. 2003), p. 6 [18] Anson Rabinbach and Sander Gilman (eds.), The Third Reich Sourcebook (California, 2013), p. 752 [19] Rabinbach and Gilman, The Third Reich Sourcebook, p. 778 [20] Ian Kershaw, ‘'Working Towards the Führer.' Reflections on the Nature of the Hitler Dictatorship’, Contemporary European History, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Jul., 1993), p. 117 [21] Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship (Bloomsbury, ed. 2015), p. 241 [22] Walter Kempowski, Haben Sie davon gewusst? trans. Lesley Sharpe and Jeremy Noakes (Munich, 1999), pp. 107-8, Birkbeck archive, source no. 100, available from: http://www.camps.bbk.ac.uk/documents.html (last accessed 28th March 2023) [23] Kershaw, ‘Working Towards the Führer’, p. 117 [24] Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany (Oxford, 2002), p. 2 [25] Robert Gellately, ‘The Gestapo and Social Cooperation: The Example of Political Denunciation’ in Neil Gregor (ed.), Nazism (Oxford, 2000), p. 254 [26] Engelmann, In Hitler’s Germany, p. 50 [27] Engelmann, In Hitler’s Germany, p. 52 [28] Eric Johnson and Karl-Heinz Reuband, What We Knew; Terror, Mass Murder and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany (London, 2005), p. 296 [29] Claire Hall, ‘An Army of Spies? The Gestapo Spy Network 1933-45’, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 44, No. 2 (Apr., 2009), p. 248 [30] Ibid., pp. 264-265 [31] Eric Johnson, Nazi Terror; The Gestapo, Jews, and Ordinary Germans (New York, 2000), pp. 483-484 [32] Johnson, Nazi Terror, pp. 483-484 [33] Ibid., pp. 483-484 [34] Johnson and Reuband, What We Knew, p. 248 [35] Carsten Dams and Michael Stolle, The Gestapo; Power and Terror in the Third Reich (Oxford, Ed. 2022), p. xiii [36] Ibid., p. 180 [37] Ibid., p. 180 [38] Geoff Layton, Democracy and Dictatorships in Germany, 1919-63 (London, Ed. 2015), p. 165 [39] Johnson and Reuband, What We Knew, p. 145

Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries British merchants, diplomats and soldiers attempted to break into China by a number of routes, only to be consistently rebuffed by the Qing imperial authorities. [1] Their activities were part of a broader enterprise, of English and Scottish travellers attempting to establish a presence in eastern markets, usually but not exclusively under the aegis of the East India Company, that had been going since 1600. [2] But China, which had once been fairly open to the world - spreading its influence as far as Africa - had turned inward. [3] By the late 1750s, the Qianlong emperor had proscribed Christianity, dismissed the imperial court’s Jesuit advisors, and introduced ‘the Canton system’, limiting interactions with westerners to a short, heavily regulated trading season in the eponymous southern port (now Guangzhou). It was made illegal for foreigners to be taught Chinese, and for the Chinese to leave the country - though this last order was routinely ignored by the people of the southern coast. [4] While contact continued across terrestrial frontiers, the Qing empire had mostly turned against the maritime world, and the merchants and pirates it delivered to them. [5] Frustrated by these limitations, the British sought to establish diplomatic relations and gain favourable concessions: an embassy in Peking, access to other ports, and the freedom to trade without restriction. [6] Eventually, a delegation under Lord Macartney presented themselves to Qianlong in the summer of 1793 - without an invitation - only to be snubbed after months of awkward negotiation. [7] The fallout is sometimes thought to have led to the Opium Wars. [8]Macartney’s mission is often seen as a starting point in the Sino-British relationship; but is perhaps better thought of as an inflection point in an era of transformation, as British visitors came to demystify, criticise and eventually exploit China. Between about 1690 and 1820, we can begin to trace the emergence of an imperial ideology, as perceptions shifted from curiosity to condescension. Histories of the British relationship with the Sinosphere often treat the Macartney Embassy as if it were the first serious encounter. [9] It could be argued that much of the attention derives from its frequent use in older literature as a supposedly instructive vignette, of a hidebound Celestial Empire ill-advisedly dismissing the very people who just fifty years later would bring it to its knees. [10] The literature has since moved on from such unsavoury triumphalism, and the finer details of the embassy have come in for recent critical attention, with scholars making use of Chinese sources to draw a fuller picture. [11] The Anglocentrism of earlier accounts has also been challenged, as historians now routinely consider alternative perspectives, both Chinese and those of other foreigners. As Joanna Waley-Cohen has argued, the decision to turn away British overtures was perfectly logical from the Qing point of view - they had seen what the western imperial powers had done elsewhere in Asia, and were understandably anxious to avoid the same fate. [12] Meanwhile, the British were not the only foreigners knocking at the Emperor’s door: American ships had reached the Chinese coast within a year of independence, and Americans would be one of the largest, longest-lasting and most quarrelsome foreign communities in China until the revolution of 1949. [13] Just for our proposed period of study, there is a rich literature on the foreigners trading on the coast. Tonio Andrade has produced a careful study of the Dutch embassy to Qianlong that followed Macartney’s; while Alexander Afinogenov has reminded us of the importance of contacts across China’s northern frontier with Russia. [14] Lisa Hellman has brilliantly reconstructed the experiences of the merchants of the lesser-known Swedish East India Company in Canton and Macau. [15] Nor were Europeans, Americans and Russians the only ones causing headaches at the Qing court: Peter Perdue has written about the long campaigns against the northwestern steppe tribes that were finishing just as Macartney arrived, that in retrospect are now understood as being far more important to the Qing. [16] Most importantly, contemporary Chinese scholars - increasingly writing in English to reach global audiences - have sought to reclaim Chinese history by shifting the focus away from foreigners. The missions to China, given such importance in our historiographies, were in reality a minor annoyance to imperial authorities, who were more concerned with the threats presented by the White Lotus Rebellion in the mountainous southwest, and by pirates in the South China Sea. [17] (The latter including pirate queen Zheng Yi Sao, who had risen from humble beginnings in a floating brothel to command a fleet of 500 junks and 60,000 crew). [18] Environmental concerns, particularly extreme weather and failed harvests, were equally important issues on the imperial to-do list. [19] Nevertheless, the wider British encounter with China is worth further examination. While Macartney was the first formal diplomatic contact, British travellers had been skirting the fringes of the Chinese world for decades. Other missions would follow, with the explicit aim of finding a way around the Canton system. The plan was to establish a presence in a third country - Tibet, Vietnam and Siam (now Thailand) were all considered - and harness the existing trade networks of the Chinese world by relying on intermediaries, from the ordinary merchant sailors of the Nanyang diaspora to the Panchen Lama, the political leader of Tibet. [20] The importance of these other encounters is being recognised, and has been the subject of a recent monograph by Xin Liu. [21] However, despite Liu’s efforts, there has yet to be a study that fully integrates the different approaches British travellers took to get a foothold in the Chinese market: the Tibetan expeditions, if studied at all, are usually seen in isolation from the voyages to the southern coasts, while precious little attention is now paid to the early British attempts to establish trade relationships with Vietnam. These must be seen as part of a broader whole, an approach on many fronts over many decades, but with the same aims in mind - access to the riches of China, by hook or by crook. More research is needed. Knowing more about British approaches to China before the Opium War adds context, challenges the over-emphasis on Macartney found in much of the literature, and improves our understanding of the reasons for his mission, the Chinese reaction to it, the causes of its failures and its ultimate consequences. This is particularly relevant today, as Britain adapts to a rising China: while most British audiences would struggle to recall the basics of the Opium Wars, they remain a live issue in China. [22] It is vital that British audiences learn to understand their own (small) role in Chinese history, and develop the historical empathy that will help constructive future engagement. The earliest British encounters with the Chinese world took place on its fringes, and initially at the hands of privateers. The Portuguese reported English raiders off Macau in 1627, and anonymous Englishmen were undoubtedly among the crews of Dutch and Spanish ships plying eastern waters before this, but one of the first to have recorded his impressions was William Dampier - incomparably described in the National Portrait Gallery as a ‘pirate and hydrographer’ - in a popular account of one of his circumnavigations of the world. [23] Dampier had been drawn to Chinese waters by an open-ended commission from the English Admiralty to attack Spanish shipping, and had chosen to try and attack the treasure galleons en route to Manila. In 1688, while sheltering from a storm near Canton, he went ashore to mingle. His observations were necessarily limited by linguistic shortcomings, so Dampier focused primarily on appearances and clothing, both of which he was noticeably polite about, in contrast to many later commentators. Dampier speculated on the origin of porcelain, one of the most mysterious - and therefore valuable - Chinese exports of the time, but gamely admitted that he ‘forgot to enquire about it’ whilst there. [24] He closed his account with a wry commentary on what he perceived as the Chinese love of gambling: ‘[they] are very great gamesters, and they will never be tired with it, playing night and day, till they have lost all their estates; then it is usual with them to hang themselves’. [25] This somewhat jarring remark seems to be in great contrast to the rest of his commentary. In Dampier’s account, the Chinese are afforded no special attention, nor any particular criticism - they are just one of the many peoples he meets along his journey, afforded the same treatment, which is always curious and relatively tolerant, especially considering that in life, Dampier was hardly the most enlightened of men, but by all accounts a bloody-minded sea-dog, who would later sold his heavily-tattooed Filipino slave, Giolo, to a human zoo to cover his debts. [26] It is hard to square Dampier’s behaviour with the self-image presented by his book, but his sharper comments somewhat give the game away. The next significant British traveller to China came by a rather different route. John Bell, a Scottish surgeon, had offered his services to the Russian court after graduating from Edinburgh, and was dispatched on an overland mission to Peking from 1719 to 1722. [27] However, he would not write up his travels for decades, after public opinion had begun to be shaped by more hostile accounts. [28] (Bell remained a Sinophile, and after retiring to Scotland, attracted the attention of his neighbours by dressing in a fine Chinese robe). His first sight of China proper was the Great Wall, at the sight of which, after the monotony of the steppes, ‘one of our people cried out, “Land!”, as if we had been all this while at sea’. [29] Rather than deal with freewheeling coastal merchants, as most British ‘China hands’ would, as a diplomat in the imperial capital Bell was given privileged access to the court, and even the Emperor himself. This in turn shaped his narrative: the imperial court, while undoubtedly haughty, was less given to the kind of tactics that would frustrate those who encountered the coastal communities. Bell consequently left China with a particularly positive impression. Whereas earlier Catholic accounts of China had tended to focus on obscure spiritual questions, Bell was bluntly practical, and interested in even the smallest details, to the point of spending several paragraphs describing the design of the kettles of a cook he briefly lodged with. His mission was to record as much as possible about China, in an even-handed way, in the spirit of the Scottish Enlightenment - a theme of other travellers like George Bogle, to whom we will return. Nor was Bell overawed by the magnificence of the imperial court, as some of his Jesuit predecessors had been: he described the Kangxi emperor as simply a good-natured, grandfatherly figure, rather than praising him as the Son of Heaven. Bell politely sat through ‘several comic farces, which to me seemed very diverting, though in a language I could not understand’, which culminated in a skit he certainly could, and appears to have enjoyed - a Chinese caricature of European travellers, dressed with extravagant foppery and gawking at passerby. [30] Bell was one of the first of what Jonathan Spence has called ‘the realist voyages’ to China - but he stands out for his good humour and spirit of curiosity, especially when compared with the next significant traveller. [31] George Anson, a naval officer who, like Dampier, had been given orders to raid Spanish shipping, nearly didn’t make it to China. His voyage around the world, between 1740 and 1744, was a disaster: only a tenth of his original crew survived, and seven of his eight ships were lost. Perhaps this, and the pressures of command, go some way to explaining the vitriol of his account of Canton. [32] His visit started inauspiciously: Anson asked passing fishermen for directions to Macao, but instead, ‘they held up fish to us; and we afterwards learned that the Chinese name for fish is somewhat similar’. [33](It is not). Anson was particularly incensed by what he perceived as the failure of the fishermen to acknowledge him. ‘A ship like ours had doubtless never been in those seas before … yet they did not appear to be at all interested’. [34] His pride wounded, his narrative becomes increasingly hostile. Anson took Chinese incuriosity as the gravest insult: ‘it is an incontestable symptom of a mean and contemptible disposition, and is alone sufficient confutation of the extravagant panegyrics which many hypothetical writers have bestowed on the ingenuity and capacity of this nation’. [35] It is easy to conclude that Anson and his blustering marks the point at which the overweening arrogance of the imperial age began to be applied to China. Eventually reaching Canton, Anson immediately began to squabble with the local mandarinate, who demanded he leave the way he had come, and continued to heap insults on the Chinese: ‘in artifice, falsehood, and an attachment to all kinds of lucre … the Chinese are difficult to be paralleled by any other people … [they have] a fraudulent and selfish turn of temper’. [36] He took umbrage at the behaviour of unscrupulous merchants: ‘the method of buying all things in China being by weight, the tricks made use of … were almost incredible’. Ducks and chickens bought to feed his crew were found to have been fed gravel to increase their weight; already-butchered pigs had been injected with water. When Anson bought live pigs instead, he was sold a sickly herd that died quickly. Throwing them overboard, he watched fishermen hauling the carcasses up for resale. Anson sailed away in disgust, writing ‘these instances may serve as a specimen of the manners of this celebrated nation, which is often recommended to the rest of the world as a pattern of all kinds of laudable qualities’. [37] He had arrived in China in a hostile mood, and nothing that happened to him there lessened it. In his anger and disillusionment, he had chosen to single out the more tolerant Enlightenment and Jesuit accounts of China for mockery - which, he was right to point out, were often the work of those who had never set foot in China, or lived a cloistered existence at the heart of the imperial court. His own account is clearly designed as a harsh corrective. There is, however, one intriguing incident that Anson mentions: his meetings with James Flint, a Chinese-speaking Englishman who had been left behind in Canton as a child, and learned several dialects. Anson relied heavily on Flint during his negotiations with the local government, ‘as … none of the Chinese usually employed as linguists could be relied upon.’ He admired the forward thinking of the captain who had put Flint ashore decades before, and wondered why more like him were not trained, so that the East India Company would not have ‘to carry on the vast transactions of the port of Canton either by the ridiculous jargon of broken English .. or the suspected interpretation of the linguists’. [38]However, this was not to be: Flint later made the grave error of submitting a petition to the Emperor in fluent Chinese. Qianlong was furious that his laws had been disobeyed, and ordered that whoever had taught Flint be found and beheaded. Flint was imprisoned for three years, and thereafter banished from China, never to return. [39] (He would, however, later introduce the soybean to North America, helping to establish an experimental farm in Georgia that manufactured tofu, a project that attracted the attention of Benjamin Franklin). In response to these events, between 1774 and 1784 a more novel approach was tried - to secure a route to China through the remote Himalayan kingdoms of Bhutan and Tibet. In 1774, Warren Hastings, governor-general of Bengal, dispatched his young Scottish secretary, George Bogle, on a mission to the Panchen Lama, with instructions to learn as much as possible about Tibet - especially anything about their rumoured habit of polyandry. [40] Bogle, who had already prepared a report on Indian trade, was considered a natural choice. [41] ‘Mr. Bogle’s … abilities and temper rendered him every way qualified for so hazardous and uncommon a mission’, an admiring contemporary wrote. [42] Though he would die before he could produce his own book, Bogle left a wealth of letters and dispatches describing an idyllic stay in Bhutan and Tibet, where he married and fathered children with a local woman, described in family legend as a princess. [43] He also befriended the Panchen Lama, with whom he spoke in Hindustani, and shared an interest in country pursuits. While much of the recent scholarly attention paid to Bogle’s time in Tibet focuses on the challenges to his Enlightenment rationalism presented by a different order of life, the straightforwardly mercantile aims of Warren Hastings in sending him there must not be forgotten. [44] Bogle would eventually use his friendship with the Panchen Lama to have him intercede with Qianlong on behalf of Company interests (unsuccessfully). [45] Whatever he might privately conclude, and however positive his impressions of the Tibetan people, Bogle was ultimately there to investigate the possibilities of establishing a route to China. Bogle died young, in 1781. Around the same time, so did the Panchen Lama - or rather, so did his sixth reincarnation. In accordance with Tibetan belief, the Panchen Lama was then reborn, leading to an unusual situation for the next British visitor, Samuel Turner, who arrived in 1783: diplomatic protocol demanded he pay his respects to a baby. Turner, after delivering an address to the Panchen Lama to the effect that the East India Company was glad to hear of his reincarnation and looked forward to trade negotiations when he had learned to talk, noted the child’s reactions: ‘[he] looked steadfastedly towards me with the appearance of much attention … as though he understood and approved every word, but could not utter a reply’. [46] Turner, an Enlightenment man through and through, was - like Bogle - forced to confront the possibility of a world beyond his familiar rationality, having become convinced that the Panchen Lama really had been reincarnated once he compared his experiences with the child to Bogle’s notes on meetings with his last incarnation. Yet despite this, like Bogle, Turner never lost sight of why he was in Tibet: ‘the possibility of establishing, by degrees, an immediate intercourse with the empire of China, through the intervention of a person so revered as the Lama, and by a route not obviously liable to the same suspicions as … by sea’. [47] Ultimately, political concerns, and the logistical difficulties of moving goods across the Himalayas, nixed the Tibetan approach to China. A final alternative approach was considered: to reach China via Southeast Asia. In 1778, between Bogle and Turner’s visits to Tibet, Warren Hastings sent a mission to Vietnam under Charles Chapman. Chapman also decried the Canton system: ‘the Chinese are desirous of totally excluding all Europeans from their country … were such an event to happen the want of a settlement to the eastward would be severely felt’. Worried that such a move would leave Britain overly reliant on the Dutch and Spanish, who had alternative bases to fall back on, Chapman recommended that the Company partner with the Chinese merchants who ‘have fixed their abode [in Vietnam] and … have their correspondents in every sea port’. [48] The merchant diaspora could then run ships to and from China on Britain’s behalf. This alliance would secure cheaper products, insulate British interests from a mercurial Chinese government, and even reopen trade with Japan, which had been closed to all but the Dutch and the Chinese. So popular was the idea of a Vietnamese port that the Macartney embassy stopped there on the way to China, with one member, John Barrow, agreeing wholeheartedly that the best option was ‘to accomplish an equalisation of the trade’ by establishing a partnership with the Chinese diaspora. Vietnam not only ‘furnishes many valuable articles suitable for the China trade’, he wrote, but ‘would open a new and very considerable vent for many of our manufactures’. [49] The dream died hard: George Finlayson, visiting Vietnam in 1821, professed similar sentiments, heaping praise on the ‘industry’ of the Chinese diaspora and identifying them as natural partners able to get around the Canton system by taking trade offshore. [50] As late as 1826, a guidebook to Southeast Asia dreamed of the possibilities of an empire of trade anchored in Vietnam: ‘in a few years, we may have a British factory at Turon [Danang], steam-boats plying the Saigon River, or ascending the unknown course of the Mekong, and a joint stock company may be formed to work the gold-mines of Tongkin!’ [51] It was not to be. Instead, Vietnam fell victim to French imperialism, Tibet retreated from engagement, and British policy shifted. By the 1830s, hostility to China had mounted to fever pitch, and amid concerns over the balance of trade and anger at the Canton system. After a diplomatic incident in which the governor of Canton seized and burned western stocks of opium in protest at its deleterious effects on the Chinese people, the British decided to shoot their way in. In the wake of the Opium Wars, a series of ‘unequal treaties’ were imposed on China - dozens of ports, most prominently Hong Kong, were opened along the coast, while western merchants were given extraterritorial legal rights. [52] The tolerant, curious travellers of the Enlightenment, like Bogle, Turner and Bell, and even pragmatic merchants like Chapman and Barrow, who though driven by profit had little ill-will towards China, gave way: the travellers of the later nineteenth century would sound more like Anson - blustering, domineering and contemptuous. Their blunders would poison the British relationship with China for a century - even, arguably, until today. Sean Paterson is currently undertaking an MLitt in Transnational, Global and Spatial History at the University of St. Andrews. Notes: [1] Robert Markley, ‘Riches, power, trade and religion: the Far East and the English imagination, 1600-1720’, in Daniel Carey (ed), Asian Travel in the Renaissance (Oxford, 2004), pp. 169-191. [2] David Howarth, Adventurers: The Improbable Rise of the East India Company (New Haven, 2023). Scots played an outsize role: see Michael Fry, The Scottish Empire (Edinburgh, 2001), and Jessica Hanser, Mr. Smith Goes to China: Three Scots and the Making of the Britain’s Global Empire (New Haven, 2019). Not all merchants were Company men: see W.G. Miller, British Traders in the East Indies, 1770-1820 (Woodbridge, 2020). [3] China’s long relationship with Africa is unduly neglected. Philip Snow, The Star Raft: China’s Encounter with Africa (London, 1988). [4] Guo Shibao, ‘Reimagining Chinese diasporas in a transnational world : towards a new research agenda’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, vol. 48, no. 4 (October 2021), pp. 847-872. [5] Chung-yam Po, Conceptualizing the Blue Frontier: The Great Qing and the Maritime World in the Long Eighteenth Century. PhD dissertation, University of Heidelberg, 2013. [6] Robert Bickers, The Scramble for China: Foreign Devils in the Qing Empire (London, 2012), pp. 18-51. [7] Two contrasting visions of the embassy are given by Alain Peyrefitte, L’empire Immobile: Ou, Le Choc de Mondes (Paris, 1989); and James Hevia, Cherishing Men from Afar: Qing Guest Ritual and the Macartney Embassy (Durham NC, 1995). Peyrefitte attributes the failure of the embassy largely to economic concerns, while Hevia argues that the clash was at the ritual-conceptual level. [8] Julia Lovell, The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China (London[8] 012), pp. 1-17; and Stephen Platt, Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China’s Last Golden Age (London, 2019). [9] Christopher Hibbert, The Dragon Wakes: China and the West, 1793-1911 (London, 1988), for instance, dispenses with earlier missions, and the entire Canton system, in just four pages. Even postmodern critical literature has maintained a fixation with the Macartney embassy, particularly Lydia Liu, The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making (Cambridge MA, 2004). [10] The Opium Wars are commonly held in China to have marked the beginning of the ‘Century of Humiliation’. Zhang Wang, ‘National humiliation, history education, and the politics of historical memory: patriotic education campaigns in China’, International Studies Quarterly, vol. 52, no. 4 (December 2008), pp. 783-806. [11] Henrietta Harrison, The Perils of Interpreting: Two Translators Between Qing China and the British Empire (Princeton, 2021); and Hao Gao, Creating the Opium War: British Imperial Attitudes Towards China, 1792-1840 (Manchester, 2020). [12] Joanna Waley-Cohen, The Sextants of Beijing: Global Currents in Chinese History (New York, 1998), pp. 92-93. [13] James Fichter, So Great a Profit: How the East Indies Trade Transformed Anglo-American Capitalism (Cambridge MA, 2010), pg. 1. See also Jacques Downs, The Golden Ghetto: The American Commercial Community at Canton and the Shaping of American China Policy, 1784-1844 (Hong Kong, 2014), and Jonathan Spence, To Change China: Western Advisors in China (New York, 1969). [14] Tonio Andrade, The Last Embassy: The Dutch Mission of 1795 and the Forgotten History of Western Encounters with China(Princeton, 2021); Alexander Afinogenov, Spies and Scholars: Chinese Secrets and Imperial Russia’s Quest for World Power(Cambridge MA, 2020). The Sino-Russian relationship has recently received more attention: see also Chris Miller, We Shall Be Masters: Russian Pivots to East Asia (Cambridge MA, 2021), and Philip Snow, China & Russia: Four Centuries of Conflict and Concord (New Haven, 2023). [15] Lisa Hellman, Navigating the Foreign Quarters: Everyday Life of the Swedish East India Company Employees in Canton and Macao, 1730-1830. PhD dissertation, University of Stockholm, 2015. [16] Peter Perdue, China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (Cambridge MA, 2010). [17] Wensheng Wang, White Lotus Rebels and South China Pirates: Crisis and Reform in the Qing Empire (Cambridge MA, 2014). [18] Peter Lehr, Pirates: A New History (New Haven, 2019), pg. 68. [19] Robert Marks, Tigers, Rice, Silk and Silk: Environment and Economy and Late Imperial South China (Cambridge, 1998); [20] John Keay, The Honourable Company: A History of the English East India Company (London, 1991), pp. 421-435. For specific details, see: Alastair Lamb, The Mandarin Road to Old Hué: Narratives of Anglo-Vietnamese Diplomacy from the 17th Century to the Eve of the French Conquest (London, 1970), pp. 10-21; Alastair Lamb, British India and Tibet, 1766-1910(London, 1986), pp. 1-67; and Kate Teltscher, The High Road to China: George Bogle, the Panchen Lama and the First British Expedition to Tibet (London, 2006). The nature of the network is shown in Eric Tagliacozzo and Wen-Chin Chang (eds), Chinese Circulations: Capital, Commodities and Networks in Southeast Asia (Durham NC, 2010). [21] Xin Liu, Anglo-Chinese Encounters Before the Opium War (Abingdon, 2023). Liu is not a historian, and this is evident in the text. [22] Niv Horesh, ‘One country, two histories: how PRC and western narratives of Chinese modernity diverge’, Journal of Global Faultlines, vol. 7, no. 1 (June 2020), pp. 114-126. [23] William Dampier, A New Voyage Round the World (London, 1697). For anonymous English sailors, see C.R. Boxer, Jan Compagnie in War and Peace, 1602-1799: A Short History of the Dutch East India Company (Hong Kong, 1979). [24] For the value of porcelain, see Timothy Brook, Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of a Global World(London, 2009), pp. 54-83. [25] Dampier, New Voyage; q.i. Gerald Norris (ed), William Dampier: Buccaneer Explorer (London, 1994), pp. 110-113. [26] Timothy Brook, Mr. Selden’s Map of China: The Spice Trade, a Lost Chart and the South China Sea (London, 2013), pp. 177-181. [27] Bell’s journey is analysed in Jonathan Spence, The Chan’s Great Continent: China in Western Minds (New York, 1999), pp. 45-52. [28] John Bell, Travels from St Petersburg in Russia to Various Parts of Asia (Glasgow, 1763). [29] Bell, Travels, pg. 117. [30] Bell, Travels, pg. 144. [31] Spence, Chan’s Great Continent, pp. 41-61. [32] A Voyage Round the World, in the Years MDCCXL, I, II, III, IV, by George Anson, Esq (London, 1748). [33] Anson, Voyage, pg. 463. [34] Ibid. Perhaps they remembered Dampier’s visit, unlike Anson. [35] Ibid. [36] Ibid, pg. 510. [37] Ibid, pp. 524-525. [38] Ibid, pg. 532. [39] Liu, Anglo-Chinese Encounters, pg. 132. [40] ‘Memorandum on Tibet by Warren Hastings, accompanying the instructions to Mr. Bogle’, 13th May 1774. q.i. Alastair Lamb (ed), Bhutan and Tibet: The Travels of George Bogle and Alexander Hamilton, 1774-1777, vol. 1: Letters, Journals and Memoranda (Hertingfordbury, 2002), pp. 52-55. [41] George Bogle, ‘Report on the East India Company’ (1770). Mitchell Library, Glasgow: file TD1681 (Bogle Family Papers), bundle 5. [42] John Stewart, An Account of the Kingdom of Thibet (London, 1777), pg. 8. [43] Gordon Stewart, Journeys to Empire: Enlightenment, Imperialism and the British Encounter with Tibet (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 58-108. [44] ‘Minute by Warren Hastings’, 9th May 1774, q.i. Lamb (ed), Bhutan and Tibet, pg. 41. [45] Teltscher, High Road to China, pp. 1-3. [46] Samuel Turner, An Account of an Embassy to the Court of the Teshoo Lama in Tibet (London, 1800), pg. 336. [47] Ibid, pg. xiii. [48] Charles Chapman, ‘A sketch of the geography of Cochin China’ (1778), in Lamb (ed), Mandarin Road, pg. 135. The Chinese diaspora were long the partners of choice for the British in Southeast Asia; see Stan Neal, Singapore, Chinese Migration, and the Making of the British Empire, 1819-67 (Woodbridge, 2019). [49] John Barrow, A Voyage to Cochinchina in the Years 1792 and 1793 (London, 1806), pp. 338-342. [50] George Finlayson, The Mission to Siam, and Hué, the capital of Cochin China, in the Years 1821-2 (London, 1826), pg. 63. [51] Josiah Conder, The Modern Traveller: Birmah, Siam and Anam (London, 1826), pg. 367. [52] Robert Nield, China’s Foreign Places: The Foreign Presence in China in the Treaty Port Era, 1840-1943 (Hong Kong, 2015).

Introduction Leading scholars of inequality today, such as Branko Milanovic[1] or Frank Stilwell[2] amongst others, tend to structure their publications in three segments: inequality between nations, inequality within nations, and inequality between global citizens. Similarly, historians writing on inequality often fall either within the debates on global divergences, such as Austin, Acemoglu and Robinson, Pomeranz, or Parthasarathi, or within debates on local inequalities within societies, including Dahrendorf, Tilly, and Flannery. However, not so many authors draw contrasts between the histories of global hierarchies and the experiences of local inequalities. I thus argue that historians should juxtapose local with global inequalities in a mutually relating, rather than isolating way, to uncover the mechanisms of inequality formation. In particular, I will analyse how the changing global systems of hierarchies result in shifts in experiences of inequality within national societies both directly physically, and indirectly ideologically. Firstly, to illustrate the former, I will use an example of nineteenth-century British colonialism’s impact on racial inequality in Malaysia and Singapore. Secondly, the latter will be explained by an analysis of how local experiences of inequality in the post-communist Eastern European countries were shaped by the global hierarchies of knowledge pushing for neoliberal reforms in the 1990s. Nineteenth-century colonialism Wallerstein called two time periods as ‘Age of Transition’, referring to major shifts in global economic and political hierarchies. These are from 1450 to the present, and from 1945 to the present[3]. In this article, I will narrow down these two timeframes to the 1800s and 1990s to demonstrate the historical contrast between international and national inequalities. This part will analyse the former, specifically, how the global shift in the British Empire’s domination determined the local experience of racial hierarchies in Singapore and Malaysia. It will start with a brief discussion of the Great Divergence and British domination, followed by a conceptual understanding of contrasting imperial growth with national colonial inequalities and end with a specific example of racial polarisation in the British Straits Settlements. The Rise of Europe and the British Empire The last 500 years saw something that Acemoglu and Robinson call the ‘Reversal of Fortune’, which points out that regions in Asia, and Africa, that were relatively prosperous in the 1500s, became poor[4]. Pomeranz notes that it was in the 1800s when industrialisation got underway that the greatest change in world regions began to show[5]. Western Europe diverged greatly, more than doubling its output per capita in the century, while East Asia stagnated[6]. It was notably the British Empire that climbed to its zenith of global dominance at the time not only economically, but politically too, newly acquiring several countries in Africa, as well as Burma, New Zealand, Singapore, and Hong Kong. The nineteenth century also saw the British crown assigning governmental authority to the East India Company[7], which now had legitimate tools to directly extract wealth from residents[8] of a country 7000 km away to its domestic royal sovereign. Many inequality historians argue that this century holds the roots of global inequality[9], with Branko Milanovic’s famous data explorations confirming the 1800s as a starting point for a change in the composition of global income inequality. While in the early 1800s within-state class disparities were responsible for the bigger part of global inequality, today, 80% of it is comprised of between-countries income variation[10]. How and why exactly this happened is one of the biggest ongoing academic debates, with classical explanations ranging from Weber’s appraisal of Protestant ethics as the driving mechanism for European economic growth[11] to the Malthusian argument of better European population management[12]. These have now been mostly rejected and historians, such as Parthasarathi, or Pomeranz, take a more pragmatic approach, stressing the importance of the lack of wood, competition from the Indian textile industry[13], and exploitation of the New World lands[14] as leading to the European coal-fired industrial revolution. The two authors are critical of institutionalist or Marxist approaches that shine a light on capitalism and surplus value extraction as the drivers of European divergence. This critique is complemented by Austin’s argument that capitalism can also be found in the pre-colonisation indigenous communities[15]. However, in analysing how this restructuring in global hierarchies required a change in local colonial inequalities, focusing on capitalist markets and surplus value extraction will prove quite useful. Colonial inequalities The rising economic and political power of Europe inevitably meant the weakening of non-European regions. Historians and Political Science authors including Austin[16], Wallerstein[17], Luxemburg[18], Hobsbawm[19], Buzan and Lawson[20] all tend to somewhat agree that the changing global hierarchies resulted in an intensified spread of the capitalism, both through colonisation, and global trade in general. The Marxist school of thought argue that the surplus value extraction and capital accumulation qualities of the capitalist economy required non-capitalist lands inclusion in the global economic system for three main reasons. Firstly, industrial production required raw materials from new lands[21]; secondly, the British empire needed new markets to sell their products to, as the local English citizens were too deprived by the new industrial capitalist regime to provide enough demand[22]; thirdly, the intrinsic nature of capitalism required the spread ‘beyond its native continent’[23], for the sake of the 'entanglement of all peoples in the <...> world market'[24] to maximise the surplus value extraction. In such a way, the rise of Europe, and Britain especially, above the rest of the countries, resulted in the separation of the world into the rich core, which centralised accumulated industrial capital, and poor colonial peripheral economies, from which capital was extracted. The power core countries had propelled the processes of global exclusion, segregation, and segmentation through imbalanced international trade and direct colonialism, which created what Cambridge sociologist Göran Therborn calls, a circle-like, core-periphery global system of inequality[25]. The British industrial revolution triggered the de-industrialisation of ‘the Rest’, as argued by Austin. This is because the British empire needed the markets to export their manufactured products, which have previously pushed Britain to a trade deficit due to for example aforementioned Indian textiles. In addition, richer Europe has now started requiring more agricultural goods[26]. With the new position at the top of the global hierarchy, Britain coerced the rest of the world into ‘export-intensive vehicles for the metropole’[27] through various colonial laws and policies, de-industrialising previously prosperous economies. Change in economic production inevitably meant a change in systems of inequality. The local colonial experiences of inequality were restructured in two ways, the first one being the creation of different labour relations to produce and export more primary goods. Wage-labour generally increased in most colonised countries in the nineteenth century, because of the demise of slavery in some[28], and the displacement of peasants from their private farms to plantations in others[29]. While drawing some out of poverty, this wage labour was extremely exploitative, including long hours and reduced food security[30]. However, as Austin notes, the creation of the wage labourers’ class was mostly unintentional, as what really interested the colonial elites was extracting more value from the land market, which required tax collection from the peasants living on these lands[31]. Therefore, the second way local relationships of inequality were changed was through new taxation systems imposed by the colonial powers. Extractive institutions in non-settler colonies were thus created to maximise the profits from land revenues by enhancing existing or creating new systems of inequality. Colonisers thus created bonds with local elites, imposing indirect rule through them[32]. In Bengal, for instance, on top of enforcing their own superiority, the British intervened in the local inequalities by reforming the hierarchical dominance of zamindars[33]. They put the supportive zamindars in the shoes of British-style landowners, which resulted in an even more extractive tax system that maximised colonial land revenue profits[34]. Acemoglu notes that in places like densely populated India, where some tax administration systems already existed, it was profitable for Europeans to control such systems and plunder wealth by levying high taxes[35]. Acemoglu’s institutionalist approach is generally very useful in contrasting the global and local inequalities arising from the colonial period, as he argues that Europeans developed private property institutions where they have settled, for instance, the US, or New Zealand, which sequentially led to the economic growth of these previously poor regions. On the other hand, in the colonies that they have not settled in, colonial powers manufactured extractive institutions characterised by exploitative labour, tax systems, and exclusive hierarchal orders, which have lasting negative effects until today[36]. These extractive institutions, designed to maximise rents to European colonialists, placed the majority of the colonial population at risk of expropriation by the government, which consisted of a small group of ruling elites[37]. Austin disagrees with Acemoglu in some ways, drawing attention that the extractive colonial and post-colonial institutions did not necessarily result from ill-intended colonisers, but from European private property concepts mismatching existing hierarchal practises[38]. Even so, their arguments overlap in agreeing that European colonialism disrupted existing social organisations, deepening extractive institutions, and thus hindering further inclusive development and growth[39]. Therborn’s systematisation of interactions between global and national inequality processes thus rightly notes that the global history of institutional legacy determines local distribution[40]. Racial inequalities in the Straits Settlement The changing global hierarchies of the nineteenth century allowed the newly rich European, and especially British, powers to expand their imperial dominance over the world. This disturbed pre-existing economic and social structures in the colonies, inevitably transforming local hierarchies. This section will specifically contrast how the local racial dynamics in the Straits Settlement, which consisted of port towns of Penang, Malacca, and Singapore, got affected by the British colonial rule, which, as I showed earlier, is the result of the changing global hierarchies the nineteenth century experienced. Before the British took over the Malay peninsula, it already had a somewhat multi-ethnic population, including Chinese and Indian migrants, due to its central trading position in Southeast Asian commerce. The indigenous rulers of the Johor state encouraged Chinese migration, entrepreneurship and settlement. The migrants integrated quite well and intermarried with the local Malays[41]. Some cultural division and occasional hostility existed between the races; however, as argued by William Lee[42], and Charles Hirschman, these were not systematic, as before the domination of the British, there was no racial ideology pertaining to social interactions[43]. However, the global dominance of the British, which eventually reached the Malay kingdoms in the nineteenth century, impacted the ethnic hierarchies in three pillars: imported ideological racism, exclusionary political treatment, and segregated economy, as discussed in the following paragraphs. The nineteenth century was a time of classification and hierarchical ordering in the European sciences, including Darwinian and Linnaean understandings of all species, non-human, and human. This resulted in defining and differentiating races, and in a sense, the birth of structural racism[44]. Hirschman argues that the British colonisers imposed the same type of thinking about races in colonised Strait Settlements too[45], which justified differences in entitlements to the white, Malay, Chinese, or Indian residents of the ports[46], and helped the British to ‘divide and rule’[47]. The British created stereotypes of Malaysians as ‘lazy’, and of the Chinese as ‘hardworking’[48]. These narratives have built a racial ideology in a country which did not have one before, producing consciousness of segregation, which is strongly felt by a lot of people in Singapore and Malaysia even today due to the adaption of racially exclusive institutions by the post-colonial regimes that followed after the independence[49]. Politically wise, however, the local pre-colonial rulers, who were Malay, received preferential treatment, as the British had to collaborate with local elites to negotiate for the establishment of their own rule. The new British authorities thus gave a promise to foster Malay culture as a superior one,[50] only letting full political or administrative participation of exclusively Malay officials, regarding resident Chinese as non-citizens[51], and allowing Malay aristocrat families to enter a cultural European snobbery alongside the new British rulers, however, virtually stripping them of any real power[52]. Economically, the races were strictly segregated into different segments by the British to maximise value extraction: cheap Indian and Chinese migrants’ labour was utilised for rubber plantations and tin mines, and local Malay peasantry was bound to feudalist-like agriculture[53]. The Chinese migration bringing cheap labour was heavily fostered by the colonisers to extract more value from tin and rubber exports, however, many Chinese migrants have also seized the opportunity to become entrepreneurs and established small businesses, or loan services, of which some grew into big enterprises. While not recognised as real citizens of Malaysian lands, they were relied on by the colonisers not only as workers, and economy fosterers, but also sellers of opium[54], which acted as a tool for the British to control the working class[55]. With the laws constraining the Chinese to urban areas only[56], racial segregation was established in every aspect of life. The new nineteenth-century global power that was Britain, imposed inequality-enhancing institutions on the colonised Malaysian and Singaporean territories to both rule over the country more efficiently, and extract more profits. Thus, the Straits Settlements example reveals a specific case of contrasting the historic events of global and local inequalities. The neoliberalism of the 1990s The physical territorial and material economic global hierarchies, exercised through colonisation were not the only way local inequalities changed. As mentioned before, a second timeframe Wallerstein calls an ‘Age of Transition’ is post World War II[57]. However, this is rather a time of de-colonisation and national independence movements, seemingly the opposite of the nineteenth-century transformations. However, in the following parts I argue, that historians should contrast the local and international inequalities of the last 70 years, by looking at the global hierarchy of knowledge, and ideology instead. Particularly useful is the case study of the economic transition of the post-communist Eastern European region after the fall of communism in the 1990s. Global Ideological Hierarchies Many historians argue for the central role of knowledge in shaping different forms of inequality. Examples include the aforementioned classification of races, biological differences argument for a system of gender binary[58], liberal theory shaping exclusionary hierarchies of reason[59], or the birth of statistics and the ‘bell curve’ to justify eugenics[60]. All of these ideas coming from the political hegemony of the West dictate how inequalities are perceived in the spheres of their influence around the globe. This is especially true for the post-war period, which saw the rise of a new kind of global hierarchy – the binary competition between the US and USSR for ideological and political domination. The US seized the opportunity to spread its capitalist understanding of economic development to the rest of the world through the Marshall plan, and Point Four programme, to ‘prove that capitalism was better equipped than socialism to ameliorate the lives of the poor and underprivileged’[61], as argued by Sara Lorenzi. In fact, due to its global academic hegemony, American and British thought became the roots of development as a discipline. Stephen Macekura further argues, that economic growth, as a linear process of development aiming at the goal of reaching the Western levels of ‘Mass Consumption’ as argued by Rostow[62], was invented by the Cold War economists dominating social sciences at the time[63]. Rostow’s ideas, for example, were directly used as a justification for the US military action in South Vietnam[64]. By producing knowledge on what kind of economy developing countries should strive for, Western economists inevitably manufactured ideas on how national inequalities should change as well. One such example is Simon Kuznet’s famous theory that income inequality should increase, and then decrease along the linear process of development. While it has been proven wrong by many contemporary prominent economists, Milanovic notes that it acted as a justification to push for certain economic development policies[65]. With both Kuznets and Rostow being fierce anti-communist campaigners, it is clear that this knowledge production was intertwined with maintaining and strengthening the US ideological hegemony in an intense battle of global hierarchy with the USSR in the Cold War. The rise of neoliberalism Because of the bipolar Soviet-American opposition, argues Piketty, heterodox thinking about economy and property was blocked[66]. Perhaps, this is why a radical idea of complete privatisation, market liberalisation and individualism, better known as neoliberalism[67], changed Keynesian economic policies of state intervention in the 1970s. In addition, David Harvey argues that the global neoliberalism project was led by the top classes in the developed world when their share of assets fell by 16% from 1965 to 1975 after real interest rates went negative due to a global period of stagflation and the oil crisis[68]. However, neoliberal policies, promoting tax cuts, erosion of social protection, free trade, and minimal state intervention could create conditions for the lost capital restoration[69]. Neoliberalism was first adopted by Reagan’s US, and Thatcher’s Britain, but soon spread across the developing world in three ways: through physical US-backed military regimes, such as in Chile, or Argentina[70], through implementations of the loan conditions from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Mexico[71], or Jamaica[72], and through voluntary national governments’ policies changes, such as in Deng Xiaoping’s China, or 1980s India[73]. In this way, and with the global hierarchy of knowledge, specifically in Economics academia (60% of all Economics Nobel Laureates are American[74]), the global Gramscian ‘common sense’, that free-market policies lead to economic growth, was manufactured[75]. Neoliberalism as a dominating doctrine, arising from the hegemony of the US, drastically changed all levels of inequality. Global inequality between individuals rose[76], with the top 1% of the ‘global plutocrats’ receiving one-fifth of the whole global output gains since the 1980s[77]. Neoliberal economic policies reached even communist China, and the USSR, both of which showcased high growth in income inequality too[78]. The developing countries’ local inequalities were also extremely reshaped by the IMF’s Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) of neoliberal austerity policies. This is true not only for income inequality but various other aspects of hierarchies too. For example, one of the austerity measures being social expenditure cuts meant that number of women were coerced to perform unpaid care work, reinforcing patriarchal structures[79]. Taking the risk of oversimplifying the complex global phenomenon that is neoliberalism, the summary of it as a mechanism that linked global and local inequalities is as follows. Changing global hierarchies, positioning USSR and America as two dominant ideological powers, resulted in America pushing for a radically anti-state intervention economic knowledge agenda that is neoliberalism. This push was additionally promoted by a shift on another level of global hierarchies – the weakening assets of the top elites. Neoliberalism quickly dominated the policies of the Western world, global development institutions, and the consciousness of national policymakers, in this way in itself further changing hierarchies by making the global rich richer. The neoliberal policies, which were designed to support global hierarchies, infused segments of local inequalities, creating class division and accumulating capital for the elites. Shock Doctrine in post-communist Europe The transition economies of post-USSR and Eastern European countries can act as the purest illustration for historians analysing the contrasts between global and local inequalities concerning neoliberalism of the last century. The fall of the USSR and communist regimes in Europe signalled the end of the Cold Way and the victory of the US ideological hegemony. This massively shifted the global hierarchies of knowledge and consciousness, as with the opposition to Western neoliberalism failing, one seemed to have no choice anymore but to agree with Thatcher, that there actually is ‘no alternative’[80]. The victory of the US was greatly celebrated by Francis Fukuyama’s famous essay on ‘the end of history’, promoting ‘Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government’[81]. Fukuyama employed Hegel’s notion of historical materiality[82], which bases itself on the metaphysical concept of consciousness transcending to material reality, resulting in the historical progression towards the absolute spirit. However, there are clear examples that the global consciousness of Western ideology of political economy did not naturally transcend to the local material lives of the new democracies of the independent post-communist states. Small weak countries, wanting to cut ties with the past regime and turn away from the massive security threat of Russia, had no choice but to accept every condition from the West to gain their support. The countries were economically deprived and in desperate need of funding sources[83], so undergoing a neoliberalism shock economic transition was crucial in two ways. Firstly, by adopting neoliberal reforms they asserted their ‘capitalist credentials’, gaining an advantage against the rest of the developing world such as Latin America, or Asia, in the competition for foreign investments[84]. Secondly, turning to IMF, and its’ austerity conditions, was the only choice as it provided much-needed loans. Dr Kropas, A Lithuanian economist working for the IMF and one of the figures behind Lithuania’s Independence Act, noted that alternative, less shock-inducing economic transition paths were never even mentioned in the parliamentary discussions[85]. However, as Prof Rutland notes, radical free-market reforms were not all coerced by international and capital pressures. In Latvia, neoliberal ideas were promoted by a group of local economists who had studied in the US, and one of first Estonia’s prime ministers Maart Laart claimed to be a fan of Friedman’s ideas[86]. Nevertheless, this does not mean that neoliberal policies were the actual best option for the Baltic countries, but were rather perceived by local policymakers as the only option through the aforementioned Gramscian ‘common sense’. The economic reforms of the ‘shock therapy’ – sudden privatisation through the use of vouchers, price liberalisation, social spending cuts, no regulations of new businesses or proper taxation regimes, and opening up to international trade, had detrimental effects on economic growth, as well as income, and social inequalities. The Gini coefficient, which measures the intensity of income inequality, jumped by 15 points on average in post-USSR countries[87]. As state-owned enterprises got privatised, unemployment rates soared[88], however, the ones at the top, or the ones who were quick and witty enough to engage in new forms of unregulated markets and entrepreneurship, gained capital quickly, exponentially creating a new economic and social stratification[89]. In fact, what emerged was what Titma and Murakas call ‘robber capitalism’[90]. Unregulated, and what it seemed, a perfect laissez-fairez world of business got intertwined with criminal activities, paving way for a sudden emergence of criminal organised crime groups. These groups gained power in coercing businessmen into cooperation and had deep connections within the government[91]. Throughout the early 90s, the number of homicides grew[92], as well as human trafficking, and communicable diseases, while male life expectancy dropped[93]. A slash in public social protection also meant that many women who were fully engaged in labour in the Soviet Union were pushed back to provide unpaid labour in their households, reinforcing patriarchy, and exacerbating gender inequality[94]. The post-communist world was in a perfectly weak position to easily accept neoliberal reforms offered by the global hierarchy that was the US[95]. Using the opportunity to expand its hegemony and global capitalism into newly available peripheral regions, the US influenced the local experiences of inequality by introducing austerity programmes directly through debt conditions, and indirectly by ‘common sense’, and hegemony of knowledge. Concluding thoughts The examples of British colonialism creating racial polarisation in Singapore and Malaysia and neoliberal shock doctrine revamping income and social inequalities in Eastern Europe after the ideological victory of the US hegemony reveals the close interrelation between global and local hierarchies. Therefore, historians should expand beyond thinking of global and local inequalities as isolated of it from each other, as often done in scholars’ work segregated to within and between-country analysis. Instead, one can examine the contrast between international hierarchies and local experiences of inequalities by understanding imperial and capitalist global development as an overall polarising project. Emilė Petravičiūtė is currently undertaking an MPhil in Development Studies at the University of Cambridge (Darwin College) Notes: [1] Branko Milanovic, The haves and have-nots (New York: Basic Books, 2011). [2] Frank Stilwell, The Political Economy of Inequality (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019). [3] Immanuel Wallerstein, ‘Globalization or the Age of Transition?’, International Sociology 15(2) (2000), p. 251-267, p.251. [4] Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, James A. Robinson, ‘Reversal of fortune: Geography and institutions in the making of the modern world income distribution’, The Quarterly Journal of Economics 177(4) (2002), p. 1231-1294, p. 1231. [5] Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence – China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 9. [6] Our World in Data, GDP per capita, 1820-2018 (2020) [https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-maddison-2020, accessed 21 Jan 2023]. [7] Britannica, British Empire 5 Jan 2022 [https://www.britannica.com/place/British-Empire/Dominance-and-dominions, accessed 21 Jan 2023]. [8] Bernard S. Cohn, ‘Law and the Colonial State in India’, in History and Power in the Study of Law: New Directions in Legal Anthropology, ed. June Starr and Jane F. Collier (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), p. 131-152, p. 132-134. [9] Patrick J. McGowan and Bohdan Kordan, ‘Imperialism in the World-System Perspective: Britain 1870-1914’, International Studies Quarterly 25(1) (1981), p. 43-68, p. 43. [10] Branko Milanovic, ‘A short history of global inequality: The past two centuries’, Explorations in Economic History 48 (2011), p. 494-506, p. 499. [11] Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905). [12] Prasannan Parthasarathi, Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). [13] Ibid, p. 2. [14] Pomeranz, The Great Divergence – China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World, p. 264. [15] Gareth Austin, ‘Capitalism and the Colonies’, in The Cambridge History of Capitalism, Volume 2: The Spread of Capitalism: From 1848 to the Present, ed. Larry Neal and Jeffrey G. Williamson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 320. [16] Ibid., p. 307. [17] Immanuel Wallerstein, ‘The Rise and Future Demise of the Capitalist World System’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 16(4) (1974), p. 387-415, p. 408. [18] George Lee, ‘Rosa Luxemburg and the Impact of Imperialism, The Economic Journal 81(324) (1971), p. 847-862, p. 847. [19] Eric Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire. The making of modern English society, 1750 to the present day (New York: Pantheon Books, 1968), p. 110-112. [20] Barry Buzan and George Lawson, ‘The global transformation: the nineteenth century and the making of modern international relations’, International studies quarterly 57 (2013), p. 620-635, p. 621. [21] Wallerstein, ‘The Rise and Future Demise of the Capitalist World System’, p. 408. [22] Eric Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire. The making of modern English society, 1750 to the present day, p. 110-112. [23] Austin, ‘Capitalism and the Colonies’, p. 304. [24] Karl Marx, Capital Volume I (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1995), p. 379. [25] Göran Therborn, Inequalities of the world. New theoretical frameworks, multiple empirical approaches (London: Verso, 2006), p. 18-19. [26] Austin, ‘Capitalism and the Colonies’, p.302 [27] Buzan and Lawson, ‘The global transformation: the nineteenth century and the making of modern international relations’, p. 18. [28] Austin, ‘Capitalism and the Colonies’, p. 332 [29] James R. Rush, Southeast Asia: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), p. 69. [30] Austin, ‘Capitalism and the Colonies’, p. 311 [31] Ibid., p. 339 [32] Ibid., p. 307-8. [33] Irfan Habib, ‘Colonisation of the Indian Economy, 1757-1900’, Social Scientist (1975) 3(8) (1975), p. 23-53, p. 26. [34] Austin, ‘Capitalism and the Colonies’, p. 342. [35] Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, James A. Robinson, ‘Reversal of fortune: Geography and institutions in the making of the modern world income distribution’, p. 1265. [36] Ibid., p. 1264. [37] Ibid., p. 1261-1263. [38]Gareth Austin, ‘The ‘reversal of fortune’ thesis and the compression of history: perspectives from African and comparative economic history’, Journal of international development 20(8) (2008), p. 996-1027, p. 1010. [39] Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, James A. Robinson, ‘Reversal of fortune: Geography and institutions in the making of the modern world income distribution’, p. 1264. [40] Therborn, Inequalities of the world. New theoretical frameworks, multiple empirical approaches, p.43. [41] Charles Hirschman, ‘The Making of Race in Colonial Malaya: Political Economy and Racial Ideology’, Sociological Forum, 1(2) (1986), p. 330-361, p. 338-9. [42] William Lee, ‘Racial Inequality in Singapore’, Journal of International & Comparative Social Welfare, 11(1), (1995) p. 56-73, p. 69. [43] Ibid, p. 337. [44] John Carson, The Measure of Merit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), p.75-109. [45] Charles Hirschman, ‘The Making of Race in Colonial Malaya: Political Economy and Racial Ideology’, p. 340-341. [46] Charles Hirschman, ‘The Making of Race in Colonial Malaya: Political Economy and Racial Ideology’, p. 355 [47] Ibid, p. 332. [48] Ibid, p. 344-346 [49] The Economist, Racial Prejudice rears its head in Singapore, 24 January 2021 [https://www.economist.com/asia/2021/07/29/racial-prejudice-rears-its-head-in-singapore, accessed Jan 24, 2023]. [50] James R. Rush, Southeast Asia: A Very Short Introduction, p. 60-61. [51] Charles Hirschman ‘The Making of Race in Colonial Malaya: Political Economy and Racial Ideology’, p. 353. [52] Ibid., p. 355. [53] Geetha Reddy and Ilka H. Gleibs, ‘The Endurance and Contestations of Colonial Constructions of Race Among Malaysians and Singaporeans’, Front Psychol 10 (2009), p. 4. [54] James R. Rush, Southeast Asia: A Very Short Introduction, p. 70-72. [55] Ned Colin and Sonia Sarkar, ‘Singapore Celebrates Colonialism To Justify Modern Shortcomings’, Ozy, 25 Apr 2019 [https://www.ozy.com/news-and-politics/singapore-celebrates-colonialism-to-justify-modern-shortcomings/93340/, accessed 24 Jan, 2023]. [56] James R. Rush, Southeast Asia: A Very Short Introduction, p. 72. [57] Immanuel Wallerstein, ‘Globalization or the Age of Transition?’, p. 251. [58] Angelique Richardson, Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 33-37. [59] Uday S. Mehta ‘Liberalism and the Politics of Exclusion’ in Tension of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. by Frederic Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), p. 59- 86, p. 66. [60] Alain Desrosières, ‘Word and Numbers: for a sociology of the statistical argument’, in The Mutual Construction of Statistics and Society, ed. by Ann Rudinow Saetnan, Heidi Mork Lomell and Svein Hammer (New York: Routledge, 2011), p .41-63, p. 47-48. [61] Sara Lorenzi, Global Development. A Cold War History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), p. 28. [62] Walt W. Rostow, ‘The Stages of Economic Growth’, The Economic History Review 12(1) (1959), p. 1-16, p. 11. [63] Stephen Macekura, ‘Development and economic growth. An intellectual history’, in History of the Future of Economic Growth ed. by Iris Borowy, Matthias Schmelzer (London: Routledge, 2017), p. 110-128, p. 111. [64] Steven Vass, ‘How an economic theory helped mire the United States in Vietnam’, The Conversation, 22 Sep 2017 [https://theconversation.com/how-an-economic-theory-helped-mire-the-united-states-in-vietnam-84403, accessed 26 Jan 2023]. [65] Branko Milanovic, The Haves and Have-Nots, p. 7-9. [66] Thomas Piketty, Capital and Ideology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020), p. 246. [67] Nicola Smith, ‘Neoliberalism’, Britannica, 13 Dec 2022 [https://www.britannica.com/topic/neoliberalism, accessed 28th Jan, 2023]. [68] David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 12-19. [69] Ibid., p. 19. [70] Ibid., p. 39. [71] Sarah Babb, ‘The Social Consequences of Structural Adjustment: Recent evidence and recent debates’, Annual Review of Sociology 31 (2005), p. 199-222, p. 211. [72] Neil Smith, ‘The Satanic Geographies of Globalization: Uneven development in the 1990s’, Public Culture 10(1) (1997), p. 169-189, p. 182. [73] David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, p. 9. [74] Statista, Nobel Prize winners in economics by nationality until 2022 (2022) [https://www.statista.com/statistics/262901/nobel-prize-winners-in-economics-by-nationality/, accessed 29th Jan, 2023]. [75] David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, p. 39. [76] Thomas Piketty, Capital in the 21st century (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014), p. 237. [77] Branco Milanovic, Global Inequality: a new approach for the age of Globalization (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016), p. 24. [78] Goran Therborn, Inequalities of the World. New theoretical frameworks, multiple empirical approaches, p. 38. [79] Suzanne Bergeron, ‘Economics, Performativity, and Social Reproduction in Global Development’, Globalizations 8(2) (2011), p. 151-161, p.151-152. [80] David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, p. 40. [81] Francis Fukuyama, ‘The End of History?’, The National Interest, 16 (1989), p. 3-18, p. 4. [82] Ibid., p. 6. [83] James Roaf, Ruben Atoyan, Bikas Joshi, Krzysztof Krogulski, 25 Years of Transition Post-Communist Europe and the IMF (Washington, DC: IMF, 2014), p.7. [84] Hillary Appel, Michell A. Orenstein, From Triumph to Crisis: Neoliberal Economic Reform in Postcommunist Countries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), p. 6. [85] Stasys Kropas and Giedrius Šidlauskas, ‘Tarptautinis valiutos fondas ir Lietuva: bendradarbiavimo raidos bruožai bei perspektyvos’, Pinigų Studjios 3 (2002), p. 64-81, p. 65-69. [86] Peter Rutland, ‘Neoliberalism and the Russian transition’, Review of International Political Economy 20(2) (2013), p. 332-362, p. 337. [87]Serhan Cevik and Carlina Correa-Caro, Taking Down the Wall: Transition and Inequality, IMF Working Paper (2020), p. 4. [88] James Roaf, Ruben Atoyan, Bikas Joshi, Krzysztof Krogulski, 25 Years of Transition Post-Communist Europe and the IMF, p. 7 [89] Hillary Appel, Michell A. Orenstein, From Triumph to Crisis: Neoliberal Economic Reform in Postcommunist Countries, p. 41. [90] Mikk Titma and Rein Murakas, ‘Income Inequality in the Baltic States’, International .Journal of Sociology 34(2) (2004), p.39-71, p. 44. [91] Aurelijus Gutauskas, Arunas Juska, Peter Johnstone and Richard Pozzuto, ‘Changing Typology of Organised Crime in a Post-Socialist Lithuania (the Late 1980s - Early 2000s)’, Global Crime 6(2) (2004), p. 201-221. [92] Veidas, Kaip nusikaltėlių grupuočių sutriuškinimai veikia visuomenę? 20 Jun 2002 [https://www.delfi.lt/archive/kaip-nusikalteliu-grupuociu-sutriuskinimai-veikia-visuomene.d?id=1130233, accessed 30th Jan 2023]. [93] Hillary Appel, Michell A. Orenstein, From Triumph to Crisis: Neoliberal Economic Reform in Postcommunist Countries, p. 44. [94] Kristen R Ghodsee, ‘The Art of Medicine. Gendered impacts of privatization and austerity in Eastern Europe’, The Lancet 393 (2019), p. 519-520. [95] Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine (New York: Picador, 2008), p.96-97.

Early modern English perceptions of China, as expressed in surviving print materials, occupy a liminal intellectual zone, suspended partway between the wide-eyed credulity of medieval authors and the sneering condescension of the Enlightenment. [1] They are unique sources for those interested in historical spatial imaginaries, as those English sources written between 1480 and 1620 relied entirely on secondhand information, often centuries old, creating a fantasia of China in which verifiable fact and outright myth were combined. Most interesting for historians is how similar accounts of China are across any selection of the sources: certain stories and facts, from the wagons that ‘sailed’ the steppes like ships at sea, to the enormous number of geese consumed daily in Canton, were nearly always repeated. [2] The subject has languished under-examined for decades, with the last major studies of print materials that reflect English understandings of the world between the medieval era and the Enlightenment having been completed nearly sixty years ago. [3] The sources of this essay have been chosen because of how they converse with each other across decades, from 1570 to 1636, in their accounts of China. [4] At its heart is John Speed’s A Prospect of the Most Famous Parts of the World, published in 1627, which ‘remains little studied’. [5] In the absence of modern forms of citation, tracing where the authors drew their information is undoubtedly challenging, but it is possible to move towards an indication of how further research might solve this riddle. However, any study of the subject must first be put into its proper contexts. Encounters between Europe and China are rich territory for transnational historians: the two have been aware of each other since at least the parallel Roman / Han eras. Ptolemy wrote of Sinae, the land of silks, while his Chinese equivalents spoke of Da Qin, ‘a kind of counter-China at the other end of the world’. [6] The two formed distant poles of a trade network centred on the Indian Ocean monsoon circuit, though direct contact was unlikely. Following the collapse of the Roman Empire, Europe was isolated from the Asian world-system. By contrast, Arab traders were familiar sights in China during the European ‘dark ages’, as the account of Abū Zayd al-Sīrāfī (completed c. 851-943 CE) colourfully demonstrates. [7] China remained engaged with the outside world, both on the Eurasian steppe and in the maritime sphere, culminating in the spectacular voyages of the eunuch admiral Zheng He, which carried Chinese influence as far as Africa. [8] While the Ming emperors later attempted to ban sea travel and close China off, the orders were regularly ignored, and trade and contact continued at the private level. [9] Throughout the medieval era, European knowledge of the world atrophied, with regurgitated Classical scholarship, Biblical exegesis, garbled thirdhand narrative and outright myth shaping perceptions of Asia generally, and China in particular. [10] Despite a productive period of contact under the Pax Mongolica, typified by the accounts of ecclesiastical visitors to the courts of the Mongol Khans, and that of Marco Polo, knowledge remained fragmentary. [11] Prester John, the unimaginably wealthy Nestorian priest-king, was confidently expected to be found ruling over an earthly paradise somewhere between Ethiopia and Tartary. [12] Sir John Mandeville’s forgery, The Book of Marvels of Travels (c. 1350), with its dog-headed men and lost tribes of Amazons, remained popular - especially with English audiences, where it was one of the earliest books printed domestically, in 1490. Mandeville was considered reliable for centuries afterwards, with copies of his books carried on voyages by ‘England’s foremost navigators … [who were] as yet unable to discern with certainty the comparative value of the modern writers and the medieval legends’, well into the sixteenth century. [13] Europe gradually began to reintegrate with the world, during an era often mistakenly thought of as an age of discovery, between 1492 and 1700: what John Hobson has called ‘the myth of the Vasco da Gama epoch’. [14] In reality, Europeans remained bit players in an Asian story. [15] English merchants of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and the authors who existed in a symbiotic relationship with them, appear to have often shown a remarkable, though relative, degree of self-knowledge in their assessments of their place in the world, not least when it came to the lands they referred to as China, Cathay, Scythia, Tartary, or the Empire of the Grand Cham. Understanding its grander scale, they sought information in order to promote voyages there, hoping to become rich from its apparently limitless opportunities for trade. [16] During the period examined in this essay, England and China existed in a strange equilibrium, aware of one another but without firm direct contact. England had lagged behind the Iberian monarchies and the Dutch in establishing a presence in the east, with much effort dedicated to futile attempts to reach Cathay via the Arctic. What little presence the English had was limited to the Spice Islands, Siam and (briefly) Japan. [17] Like most European involvement in Asia at the time, it was largely indistinguishable from piracy, and the preserve of vagabonds. [18] While the Portuguese had secured Macao, and pan-Continental Jesuits were establishing themselves in Peking as advisors to the emperors (kickstarting academic Sinology in the process), the English had no equivalent formal presence in the Chinese world. [19] English privateers had harassed shipping off Macao in 1627, and a Chinese Jesuit, Shen Fuzong, had even visited London and Oxford in 1685; but sustained direct contact with China proper remained out of reach, in the absence of necessary imperial permissions. [20] Instead, English travellers skirted the Chinese world: the ‘pirate and hydrographer’ William Dampier circumnavigated the world three times, left firsthand accounts of Chinese merchant junks, and coined the word ‘chopsticks’, yet never set foot on the mainland. [21] Indeed, the first English-speaker to have definitely reached China was John Bell, a Scot in Russian service, in 1719.[22] Consequently, the English appetite for information on the East had to be satisfied with secondhand information, typically translated Spanish or Portuguese books, like those of Bernardino de Escalante and Francisco Támara, printed in London in 1579 and 1580, some years after their original publication. [23] European accounts were gathered by English chroniclers like Samuel Purchas, or Richard Eden and Richard Willes. [24] The literature on China, though limited compared to other topics, is still considerable - John Parker identified at least 49 works dealing with either China or Asia (little distinction was made) published in English between 1481 and 1620. [25] Clearly, selections must be made. Atlases, or rather their textual glosses, remain relatively neglected. Historians tend to focus on their visual elements, the maps, at the expense of the rest of the book. [26] However, the accompanying texts can be interrogated for details in order to help us reconstruct an approximation of Tudor-Stuart spatial imaginaries of China. Good atlases of the sixteenth century were a Continental preserve, usually imported to England, so before we examine Speed, we must turn to his immediate predecessor. The first truly modern world atlas was Abraham Ortelius’s Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (1570), printed in Amsterdam. It ran through dozens of editions until his death in 1598, and has recently been tapped as a source for spatial historians. [27] A London copy made in 1606 can be considered the best English version. [28] Somewhat atypically for the period and genre, Ortelius lists his own sources. Throughout his account of Asia - he only hazily distinguishes between ‘Tartaria, or the Empire of the Mightie Cham’ [29], Cataia (Cathay), and China - he draws heavily from ‘William Rubricius, a Friar … a copy of whose travels in these parts in the Year of Christ 1253, I have by me in written hand’ [30]For China, he relies almost entirely on ‘Bernardinus Scalintus, [who] hath in the Spanish tongue set out a peculiar description of this country’. [31] Ortelius is an exemplar of the early understanding of China in Europe, as a land of infinite wealth: it is ‘the same no doubt with SINAE … a country for rich commodities much talked amongst all ancient Cosmographers … it hath wonderful store of Gold, Silver and Rhubarb … [the waters] abound with all sorts of fish … [it has] infinite flocks of cattle … in Canton, which is one of the least cities of this province, there are spent every day upon their tables ten or twelve thousand ducks and geese’. [32] The cities are of a size unimaginable in Europe, ‘certaine Portugalls do report’. [33] The Chinese language is ‘not much unlike the Hieroglyphickes of the Egyptians’ [34], a comparison that would be echoed for at least the next century. [35] Justice is swift and violent, even by the standards of sixteenth century Europe. As more information became available between editions, Ortelius incorporated it: by the time of the London edition, he could draw from six additional accounts, primarily by Jesuits. [36] Ortelius’s atlas remained the standard work for decades, and the first fully ‘English’ atlas, as opposed to one translated from a European original - that of John Speed - would not appear until 1627. Speed made Asia the foremost continent in his account, for ‘the greatest part of Divine History was there written and acted’, while in China could be found ‘Quinsay, the greatest Citie in the world’. [37] He relegated Europe to ‘third place of my division … last of the old world’. [38] Speed was backhandedly impressed with China. It was clearly on a vaster scale than Europe, both ancient and advanced, and yet one can see harsher comments creeping in: particularly with regards to the appearance and religious practices he attributes to the people. Speed doesn’t quite seem to know what to make of China. He apes Ortelius, clearly drawing from Escalante as well: China’s riches are described with the same reference to abundant fish and cattle, and the familiar figure of 12,000 ducks eaten every day in Canton. He provides more detail than Ortelius, clearly the result of new sources of information becoming available. The Chinese are, Speed writes, ‘crafty and excellent engineers’, intolerant of ‘idle drones’. ‘Excellent practical wits … beyond any other nation’, they make ‘purslaine’ [porcelain], ‘their special skill, which we much admire but cannot imitate’. [39] However, they ‘have a confused knowledge of God, heaven, and the creation’, arising from their ‘priests’, who ‘live obscenely [as] swaggerers’. [40] Speed was, like many others of the period, sceptical of the supposed antiquity of Chinese civilization: ‘I give not full credit … to their own records, which reckon two hundred threescore and two kings … [over] about four thousand year.’ [41] (Despite Speed’s incredulity, this estimate is actually more or less accurate). He concluded ‘they must either vary from us in their measure of times, as we from the Germans in length of miles, else we must commit a foul error, to look beyond the Flood for their origin … surely I think they were not exempted from the general deluge’. [42] Despite his gripes about ‘their ignorant vainglory’, Speed readily attributes the invention of gunpowder and moveable type to the Chinese, decades if not centuries before this was accepted as common knowledge: ‘much quarrel hath been about the invention of guns and printing … the masterpiece of man’s wit: but without doubt, they were both used here, long before any of Europe pretended to knowledge of either.’ [43] This comment is unique to Speed’s atlas, and a great contrast to his contemporary Francis Bacon’s pronouncements on the ‘mechanical things’ - bombs, books and compasses - that made Europe modern. [44] Speed’s account of China - built from secondhand information, sceptical of its challenge to his own Reformation worldview, half admiring and half critical - is an excellent case study of a key point in the intellectual history of European spatial imaginaries of China. It deserves closer examination than could be achieved in this essay. One can already see the traces of the attitudes that would define the Enlightenment perspective - a distaste for the Other, disbelief in the antiquity of Chinese civilisation, and contempt for its religions and languages - while still hearing echoes of the medieval. Speed’s maps and text are more redolent of Mandeville than of John Bell; contemporary Jesuit accounts gave a better picture. It is perhaps best thought of as a culmination of the medieval tradition, produced by a world on the brink of greater contact, contact that would shatter the illusions of the medieval and usher in the disappointment, swiftly curdling into hostility, of the Enlightenment. Once the Iberian monopoly on Chinese information had been broken, English audiences came to realise that China ‘could no longer be regarded as a prodigy of serene paternal government and flourishing agriculture … [while] no mighty Khan lived in Tartary’.[45] In sources like Speed’s atlas, we can see the last high-tide mark of the medieval imagination, the point where the intellectual surf finally broke. In further examination, we might be able to discern the potential there may once have been for a different, unbeaten, path in the the history of English spatial imaginaries of China. Sean Paterson is currently studying towards an MLitt in Transnational, Global and Spatial History at the University of St. Andrews. Notes: [1] The best account of how European intellectuals soured on Asia remains Jürgen Osterhammel, Unfabling the East: The Enlightenment’s Encounter with Asia. Trans. Robert Savage. (Princeton, 2017; German second edition 2013). Also of note: PJ Marshall and Glyndwr Williams, The Great Map of Mankind: British Perceptions of the World in the Age of Enlightenment(London, 1982), pp. 1-184; and Jonathan Spence, The Chan’s Great Continent: China in Western Minds (New York, 1999), especially pp. 1-100. [2] Joseph Needham and Wang Ling (eds), Science and Civilisation in China, Vol. 4: Physics and Physical Technology, Pt 2: Mechanical Engineering (Cambridge, 1965), pp. 274-276. Chinese land-sailing appears in the atlases of Ortelius, Speed, and Mercator, examined below; and was mentioned in Paradise Lost. [3] John Parker, Books to Build an Empire: A Bibliographical History of English Interests Overseas to 1620 (Amsterdam, 1965); and Donald Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, Vol 1: The Century of Discovery (Chicago, 1965), esp. bk. 1, pp. 148-227, and bk. 2, pp. 730-821. The last full studies of the theoretical aspects are EGR Taylor, Tudor Geography (London, 1930) and Late Tudor and Early Stuart Geography (London, 1934). [4] I have modernised spelling throughout this essay. [5] Timothy Brook, Mr. Selden’s Map of China: The Spice Trade, a Lost Chart, and the South China Sea (London, 2013), p. 197. [6] Edwin Pulleybank, ‘The Roman Empire as known to Han China’, Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. 199, no. 1 (January 1999), p. 71. See also: André Bueno, ‘Roman Views of the Chinese in Antiquity’, Sino-Platonic Papers, no. 261 (May 2016). [7] Abū Zayd al-Sīrāfī, Accounts of China and India. Ed. trans. Tim Mackintosh-Smith (New York, 2017). [8] Zheng Yangwen, China on the Sea: How the Maritime World Shaped Modern China (Leiden, 2012), pp. 50-51. Zheng He and his chronicler Ma Huan were Muslims, allowing them ready connections across the Indian Ocean littoral. [9] Andrew Wilson, ‘The Maritime Transformations of Ming China’, in Andrew Erickson, Lyle Goldstein and Carnes Lord (eds), China Goes to Sea: Maritime Transformation in Comparative Historical Perspective (Annapolis, 2009), pp. 238-287. The assumption that China and Japan were totally isolated is demolished by the accounts gathered in Yoneo Ishii (ed. trans), The Junk Trade from Southeast Asia: Translations from the Tôsen Fusetsu-gaki, 1674-1723 (Singapore, 1998). [10] Lach, Asia in Making of Europe, vol. 1, bk. 2, p. 730. [11] See accounts collected in Christopher Dawson (ed), Mission to Asia (Toronto, 1980); and Antti Ruotsala, Europeans and Mongols in the Middle of the Thirteenth Century: Encountering the Other (Helsinki, 2001). [12] Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, vol 1, bk 1, p. 27. [13] Parker, Books to Build an Empire, p. 62 [14] John Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization (Cambridge, 2004), p. 135. [15] See Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley, 1998). [16] Stephen Alford, London’s Triumph: Merchant Adventurers and the Tudor City (London, 2017), pp. 65-79. [17] Anthony Farrington (ed), The English Factory in Japan (London, 1991, 2 vols); Anthony Farrington and Thīrawat Na Pomphet (eds), The English Factory in Siam (London, 2007, 2 vols) provide primary sources. [18] GV Scammel, ‘European Exiles, Renegades and Outlaws and the Maritime Economy of Asia, c. 1500-1750’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 26, no. 4 (1992), pp. 641-661. It’s likely anonymous Englishmen in foreign service encountered China in the sixteenth century, but left no reliable records. [19] DE Mungello, Curious Land: Jesuit Accommodation and the Origins of Sinology (Honolulu, 1989), pp. 354-358. M Howard Rienstra (ed. trans) Jesuit Letters from China, 1583-1584 (Minneapolis, 1986) for earliest Jesuit accounts of China published in Europe, as an annexe to annual reports on Japan and India. [20] Brook, Mr. Selden’s Map, pp. 48-54. [21] William Dampier, A New Voyage Around the World (London, 1697), in Gerald Norris (ed), William Dampier: Buccaneer Explorer (London, 1994), pp. 110-113, p. 171. Dampier also accidentally discovered Australia, but remained unaware of its significance, introduced the avocado to English audiences, and rescued the castaway Alexander Selkirk, the model for Robinson Crusoe. [22] John Bell, Travels from St Petersburg in Russia to Various Parts of Asia (Glasgow, 1763, 2 vols); Jonathan Spence, Chan’s Great Continent, pp. 45-52. [23] Bernardino de Escalante, Discourse of the Navigation Which the Portugales Doe Make to the Realmes and Provinces of the East Partes of the World. Trans. John Frampton (London, 1579); Francisco Támara, A Discoverie of the Countries of Tartaria, Scithia & Cataya, by the Northeast. Trans. John Frampton (London, 1580). Támara’s work was itself mostly a translation of Johann Boemus, Repertorium Librorum Trium [Repertory of the Three Books] (Augsburg, 1520), demonstrating quite how dated much English knowledge of the east was, and raising questions of what was lost across two translations. The first major published source was a six-page translated Spanish pamphlet, published as Thomas Nicholas, Strange and Marveilous News Lately Come From the Great Kingdome of China (London, 1577), of which ten originals survive today. [24] Samuel Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimage, or Relations of the World (London, 1613), pp. 342-353 for Tartary, pp. 366-378 for China; Richard Eden, A History of Travayle in the West and East Indies. Ed. Richard Willes (London, 1577). [25] Parker, Books to Build an Empire, pp. 243-265. [26] As in Jerry Brotton, A History of the World in Twelve Maps (London, 2013). [27] Eivind Heldaas Seland, ‘Spaces, Places and Things: The Spatial Dimension of Early Indian Ocean Exchange’, in Franck Bille, Sanjyot Mehendale and James Lankton (eds), The Maritime Silk Road: Global Connectivities, Regional Nodes, Localities(Amsterdam, 2022), pp. 27-30. [28] Abraham Ortelius, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum: The Theatre of the Whole World: Set forth by that Excellent Geographer, Abraham Ortelius (London, 1606; facsimile Amsterdam 1968). [29] Ortelius, Theatre, p. 105. [30] Ibid. Better known as Intinerarium fratris Willielmi de Rubruquis de ordine fratrum Minorum Galli, MCLIII ad partes Orientales [Account of the Journey of Brother William of Rubruck, of the Order of Friars Minor in Gaul, to Eastern Parts in the Year 1253]. See The Mission of Friar William of Rubruck. Ed. trans. Peter Jackson and David Morgan (London, 1990). [31] Ortelius, Theatre, pg. 106. Presumably Bernardino de Escalante; see note 20. [32] Ibid. Rhubarb was one of the most valuable substances on earth, and believed to grow only in ‘Tartary’. [33] Ibid. [34] Ibid. [35] See Robert Hooke, ‘Some Observations and Conjectures Concerning the Chinese Characters’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, vol. 16, no. 180 (April 1686), pg. 64. Hooke was sceptical of the supposed length of Chinese history, as it defied Biblical chronology. Abū Zayd al-Sīrāfī had raised the same issue, only to be told that the Chinese believed the Flood had not reached them, thus solving the problem their existence provoked in Biblical-Koranic accounts of world history. Accounts of China and India, 2.4.3. Mackintosh-Smith, p. 38. [36] Ortelius, Theatre, p. 107. [37] Speed, Description, pp. 3-4. Quinsay is modern Hangzhou. [38] Ibid, p. 7. [39] Ibid, p. 37. [40] Ibid, p. 38. [41] Ibid, p. 37. [42] Ibid. The parallels with al-Sīrāfī and Hooke are irresistible. [43] Ibid. [44] Francis Bacon, Novum Organum (London, 1620), book 1, aphorism 129. Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne (eds. trans.), The New Organon (Cambridge, 2000), p. 100. [45] Marshall and Williams, Great Map, p. 300.

Introduction In 168 BC, the Seleukid king, Antiokhos IV, stood victorious at the head of an army which had breached Ptolemaic defences, ready to march through the Delta, besiege Alexandreia, and put an end, once and for all, to the centuries-old rivalry between the two dynasties. The two kingdoms united, a new Greek empire would rise in the East, of unprecedented power and wealth. It would not be so. The unthinkable happened. A Roman official, Caius Popilius Laenas, handed the king a senatus-consultum, ordering him to withdraw from Egypt, and, ignoring the latter’s wishes to discuss this in a war council, using a stick, drew a circle in the sand around the king. The king was not allowed to leave it, without giving Rome an answer. King Antiokhos IV, obeyed and, humiliated, withdrew from Egypt.[1] On this day, the ‘Day of Eleusis’, the hitherto notion of the Hellenistic king died, and was replaced by something else, what Gotter accurately describes as the ‘castrated king’, a meek, subdued ruler, content with being allowed to govern a diminished kingdom, doomed to eventually be absorbed into Rome’s burgeoning eastern empire.[2] In the spring of 88 BC, eighty years later, the Roman and Latin-speaking residents of numerous cities across Anatolia and Asia Minor, largely under Roman dominion or influence for almost a century, were rounded up and massacred, seemingly in a single day, upon a given signal. In Pergamon, a city favoured by Rome due to its Attalid affiliations, the capital of their new province of Asia, the Roman population was slaughtered within the temple-sanctuary of Asklepios.[3] In Adramytion, they were pursued even as they fled into the waters of the Aegean and in Ephesos they were killed inside the magnificent temple of Artemis, as the rest of the citizenry smashed Roman statues.[4] Even in Kaunos, liberated by Rhodian influence almost a century before, by Rome, the same slaughter ensued, even as the victims clung onto a statue of Vesta.[5] Obedience to Mithradates’ orders was more important than obedience to the gods. At the bloody day’s end, between 80,000 to 150,000 people had been killed, all at the behest of one man.[6] This was how, despite earlier and seemingly friendly interactions, King Mithradates VI of Pontos made his opposition to Rome’s imperialist project in Asia, known, as the first of three Mithradatic Wars began. The Pontic king had achieved nigh unbreakable silence regarding a plot spanning hundreds of kilometres, involving thousands of individuals who obeyed unflinchingly. King Mithradates was recognised and followed by the peoples of a highly diverse region, each with their own, often conflicting interests, and was before long joined by even more cities, now from the Greek mainland. The King That Was Promised Mithradates’ birth and coronation would be accompanied by the rare sightings of two comets, which the king took full advantage of later on in his life.[7] For Greeks and Romans, comets were portents of doom, bloodshed and war, whereas for the Persians, Skythians and indigenous Anatolians, a great fire in the sky meant the eventual coming of a powerful leader.[8] Mithradates would build his image on both, as a terrifying harbinger of ruin for the Romans and as the king that was promised for the peoples of the Near East. As for the Greeks, since the two comets in question had appeared in the constellation of Pegasos, he adopted this symbolism as well, in an effort to bridge East and West.[9] The winged horse bore Zeus’ lightning but had its origins in Mesopotamian mythology. Even more fittingly, the sun-god Mithra would bless and legitimise a new king by riding across the sky on a chariot drawn by white horses, and was furthermore invoked by soldiers before a great battle as the god of war.[10] Mithradates presented himself as fully embodying his dynastic name as ‘Mithra’s given’, a king blessed by the god of war, come to deliver the peoples of the East from Roman oppression. Pegasos was also tied to the myth of the hero Perseus, whose son by Andromeda, Perses, was considered the mythological progenitor of the Persian people.[11]Perseus, a Greek hero marrying Andromeda, a woman of ambiguous provenance, and giving birth to the mythic father of Persia, was the perfect symbol for a ruler who wished to present himself as the link between East and West. All of this was reinforced by Mithradates’ participation in religious ceremonies of bicultural significance, such as the mountaintop fire ceremonies to syncretised Zeus Stratios/Ahura Mazda-Mithra.[12] Beyond the use of mythology, prophecy was another weapon in the king’s arsenal. When the philosopher Athenion addressed the Athenians in 88 BC, telling them of the king’s great victories in Asia against the Romans, he mentioned oracles from all over the Hellenistic East, foretelling Mithradates’ final victory.[13] From the dead Syrian soldier of Antiokhos III at Thermopylai, coming back to life and spelling doom for Rome, to the Oracle of Delphoi and the Third Book of the Sibylline Oracles, as well as the Zoroastrian-inspired prophecy of Hystaspes, all the signs pointed to a huge calamity for Rome, delivered by a saviour-king from the East.[14] These were likely expressions of the festering anti-Romanism present in Greece, Asia Minor and wider Anatolia, following the atrocities committed by the Romans there in the decades before Mithradates’ rise, and the Pontic king masterfully took advantage of it. He employed these prophecies to present himself either as the dreadful manifestation of eastern vengeance, for the Romans, or as a saviour-liberator, favoured by the gods, for the peoples who had suffered under Roman occupation in the previous decades. Both of these aspects had one thing in common: the element of supernatural inevitability Mithradates VI seemed to deliberately foster once conflict with Rome appeared unavoidable. The writing was on the wall: the Republic was weakened by a demanding war against Jugurtha in North Africa, uprisings of former Italian allies in its heartlands, widespread slave unrest which would culminate in the revolt of Spartakos, and the looming civil war between Marius and Sulla. Its actions in Greece and Asia would lead to a reckoning and Mithradates VI would be the one to carry it out. After all the signs, the prophecies, the warnings, one was compelled to either join him or be swept away. Hierarchies of obedience were deeply ingrained for the Greeks and the Romans and outright disobedience could take place only in certain contexts. For disobedience to assume such a blatant form and enter the realm of defiance, as in the bloody episode of the Asiatic Vespers, something or someone extraordinary would have to be involved, commanding vast forces of personal influence, intimidation and charisma. Indeed, charisma had been the cornerstone of early Hellenistic kingship. The very integrity and survival of the kingdom depended on a ruler’s capacity to convey through personal ability and charisma the impression that he was favoured by the gods or fortune itself.[15] This involved achievements and victorious public displays in the realms of religion, politics and war, and as long as the people under him prospered, seemingly as a result of his actions, the king was seen as legitimate and was obeyed totally. Polybios, in describing the establishment of the Attalid monarchy in Pergamon, clearly sets out these criteria: ‘the largesse and favoured conferred on his [Attalos I] friends’ as well as ‘his success in war’.[16]Therefore, Attalos ‘having conquered the Gauls […] he built upon this foundation, and then first showed he was really a king.’.[17] In our case, and as demonstrated above, Mithradates’ charisma was built on multiple levels, meant to appeal to every subject of his growing empire, before he ever crossed swords with Rome. The Conquest of the Northern Black Sea To the Greeks, Mithradates’ status as Saviour was fostered early on in his reign when he aided in the protection of the Greek cities of the Black Sea from the nomadic Skythian and Sarmatian tribes to the north.[18] In doing so, he fulfilled the role of the Hellenistic monarch prior to the ‘Day of Eleusis’, that is, of protecting Greek cities against the barbarians and thus gaining their fealty and obedience, similar to how the Antigonids, a few centuries before, had established themselves in Makedonia through military victory against the Gallic horde. In this way, Mithradates revived the notion of what Gehrke coined ‘liberation politics’, in the Greek East[19], which he would then employ once more in acquiring the loyalty of the Greek cities of Asia Minor and Greece, against the barbarian Romans. The Skythian and Sarmatian nomads interpreted the victory differently, recognising, as they did in their own societies, the undeniable display of strength by the Pontic king, and offering him their fealty as tributaries.[20] In all three Mithradatic wars, Skythian and Sarmatian detachments formed an essential part of the Pontic forces. As Gotter suggests, poleis could only obey a foreign monarch by awarding him divine honours, earned through supra-human victories, thus rendering him a benevolent god rather than a human tyrant.[21] Mithradates, who assumed both the title of ‘Soter’, Saviour, as well as that of ‘Neos Dionysos’, used his military victories against the barbarians, to earn the loyalty of the Greek cities within and without his domain.[22] Dionysos in particular, often seen as the god of upheavals and freedom, was a fitting symbol for how the Pontic king wished to present himself to Greeks and Romans alike, as a usurper of the Roman status quo and a restorer and guarantor of Hellenic liberty. Mithradates widely celebrated and circulated his Bosporan triumph, particularly as neither his purported Greek ancestor, Alexander, nor his Persian one, Kyros the Great, had managed to subdue the Skythians, and he used it as yet further evidence of his military prowess and victorious destiny. Furthermore, he also fulfilled his role as a proper Persian king, modelled after Kyros the Great, who also had a responsibility to ensure the safety and prosperity of his lands from outside threats.[23] The Akhaimenid and Alexandrian Connection The comparisons did not end there, as Mithradates made full use of his Akhaimenid and Alexandrian provenance, appearing as a new Kyros to the Persians and as a new Alexander to the Greeks, come to liberate them all from the Roman yoke. On the Persian side, the connection was established due to the fact that King Dareios I had granted Mithradates’ ancestors their fiefdom in Pontos, centred around Amaseia, which became the satrapy that would one day evolve into the Pontic kingdom. It was convenient for the Mithradatids to assume that this satrapal appointment had been accompanied by the marriage between a Pontic prince and an Akhaimenid princess.[24] On the Greek side, the Mithradatids claimed a connection to Alexander through the Persian princess Barsine, whom Alexander captured after the Battle of Issos in 333 BC, subsequently married and supposedly had a child with, and who was settled in Pergamon, a city with, albeit tenuous, connections to the Mithradatid monarchy.[25] Furthermore, Mithradates VI’s mother, Laodike who hailed from Antiokheia in Syria, was herself a scion of the illustrious Seleukid dynasty, established by Alexander’s general, Seleukos I Nikator, who also claimed connection to the Argeads through assumed intermarriage between the upper echelons of the Makedonian monarchy and its potentates.[26] Mithradates’ portraits on Pontic coinage are often idealised and youthful-looking, with long flowing hair, in imitation of Alexander’s famous anastole. These coins were minted during Mithradates’ campaigns in Asia Minor and Greece, and were used to pay mercenaries and allies from the Greek city-states, who were thus encouraged to see him as a second Alexander.[27]Lastly, Mithradates VI was said to have possessed a cloak which once belonged to the Makedonian king himself, which he displayed as a direct, physical link to the great conqueror, and it was a Persian and wider Near Eastern belief that royal cloaks and robes could grant their new wearer the original owner’s personal qualities and legitimacy.[28] In the end, it did not matter whether the nebulous origins of Mithradates VI’s dynasty were anywhere close to the greatest of the Persian and Greek monarchies, but that by and large, the king’s Greek and Asian followers as well as his Roman enemies, believed in their validity and the implications associated with it. The Mithradatic legendary origins became a potent weapon for the Pontic king, as Alexander himself, by this point, had assumed cultic importance not just for the Greeks but for the indigenous Anatolians and Persians as well, and in associating himself with him, Mithradates could appeal to all the inhabitants of his diverse Anatolian kingdom. Focusing on Mithradatic coinage for a bit longer, Fleischer suggests that the early Hellenistic kings, the diadokhoi in particular, minted coins with dynamic portraits, reminiscent of Alexander, in an attempt to project strength and leadership qualities, something that the Greeks and non-Greeks alike in their realms could understand and respect.[29] The divine connections they fostered, according to Fleischer were not yet sufficient by themselves. In contrast, the epigonoi, appear reserved, quiet and distant. In minting coins in the likeness of Alexander, Mithradates, apart from emphasising his Alexandrian heritage, perhaps sought to imitate the early Hellenistic kings, rather than their subdued descendants like Antiokhos IV, thus reviving the model of the victorious Hellenistic king and drawing legitimacy from military strength rather than divine honours alone. The Victorious Hellenistic King Therefore, Mithradates was not, on the surface, doing anything new, but was rather drawing inspiration from older models of Greco-Persian kingship, familiar to the peoples of the Near East after centuries of such rule, in order to secure their approval and their obedience. Far from the timid late Attalids, constrained by their alliance with Rome, unable to engage in military victories, resorting rather to euergesiai, or the Bithynian monarchy of Mithradates’ day, propped up by Roman arms alone, he won the obedience of the peoples of the Near East by reviving a system they had perhaps considered defunct since the humiliation of Antiokhos IV. No longer did they need to suffer the Roman alternative, Mithradates represented a triumphant return to form, freeing slaves, many willingly joining his forces, cancelling debts, lifting taxes, and performing other acts of euergesia such as returning the treasury of Delos to Athens.[30] As ever, Mithradates was a master of the theatrical and the symbolic. Even for his Anatolian subjects, this would have seemed like a return to an older age of prosperity, as the Pontic king reinstated the satrapal system of administration, hearkening back to Akhaimenid glories.[31] Through meaningful self-presentation, propaganda, but most importantly, consecutive victories against the reguli of Kappadokia and Bithynia, the nomads of the Pontic-Caspian steppe, and the hated Roman enemy, Mithradates breathed new life into a system all the peoples of the Near East recognised as familiar: a triumphant king, blessed by the gods, by whose will the barbarians were repelled as the land prospered under a just, charismatic, and divinely mandated leadership. This would have fit in with the saviour persona he was cultivating for his Greek and Asiatic subjects. Decades after the cultural shock of the greatest of the Greek monarchies, the Antigonids and the Seleukids, having been defeated, reduced and conquered by the barbarian upstarts across the Adriatic, Mithradates had demonstrated to the peoples of the eastern Mediterranean that their conception of the world and their place in it, was not in the process of disintegration. There were still adventurer Alexander-like god-kings who achieved magnificent victories only one favoured by Zeus and Mithra could, who showered the cities with benefactions and guaranteed their autonomy, who earned their rule rather than inherit it. Mithradates VI as a Hellenistic restitutor orbis, an epanorthotes, created willing obedience in many grateful populations, struggling under the new Roman status quo. Anti-Roman Hatred Even so, perhaps the greatest unifying factor of all for his prospective subjects in Asia Minor and in Greece, was their hatred towards Rome. Here, Mithradates did not need to do much, save to give it form and direction. In Greece and in Asia Minor, Rome was widely hated, for its conduct during its wars of conquest, in the case of the former, and its ruthless and exploitative administration in the case of both. Publicani had flooded Asia Minor and imposed harsh taxes on its inhabitants, Greeks and non-Greeks, forcing many into debt-bondage and slavery. Quite telling is the incident of the Bithynian king, Nikomedes who at one point refused to send armed help to the Romans, citing the fact that a significant part of his kingdom’s population had been enslaved by Roman debt collectors.[32] Indeed, for those populations most influenced by Akhaimenid Persian culture and Iranian religion in the preceding centuries, slavery and debt-bondage in particular were seen as horrid and unjust practices, leaving one unable to fight against the Iranian notions of Darkness and Lies (Druj)[33], and they were now booming under Rome. Mithradates’ fight against the Romans, carefully presented within a Mithraic context, would be interpreted as a fight on the side of Light and Truth. Rome’s exploitative tactics and over-dependence on slavery, would result in Spartakos’ revolt in Italy, but in Asia, a quiet resentment bubbled beneath the surface. The violent manner alone in which Rome had acquired its Asian province, bequeathed to it by Attalos III, but contested by Aristonikos-Eumenes III, had created further hostility in the inhabitants of Asia Minor. Mithradates masterfully took advantage of this hatred, not only to build up his image, but to virtually bind the populations of Asia Minor to his cause. Greeks and non-Greeks could now unite against a common ‘Other’ who not only had no place in the Hellenistic East, but who had devastated and exploited them indiscriminately. When the cities of Asia Minor were purged of their Roman populations, there was no turning back for most of them. Their complicity and thus, their obedience were sealed in blood and now they were committed to the Mithradatic cause until the very end, out of fear for Roman reprisals should Mithradates lose. Interestingly, the only city in the Greek mainland to replicate this purge and join with Mithradates, Athens, fought the Romans to the very last, unwaveringly; a telling example of the effectiveness of Mithradates’ blood-soaked strategy[34]. In this manner, the Pontic king had acquired the obedience of the cities and inhabitants of Asia Minor by exploiting their hatred for Roman administration, and then, as mentioned above, taking steps to ensure his own administration was radically different. Terror Tactics Those who strayed, be they entire cities or the sons Mithradates notoriously suspected of treachery, were dealt with harshly and decisively. Even as he invaded Greece as liberator, those cities and regions which refused to be liberated, were ravaged and punished. When the tides of fortune turned, and the loyalty of some of his followers began wavering, Mithradates did not hesitate to march upon former allies in Asia, such as Ephesos, one of the cities which had taken part in the Asiatic Vespers.[35] In one fell swoop he attempted to poison the entire Galatian leadership, whose obedience could no longer be guaranteed.[36] Any son who acted against his wishes or appeared to harbour ambitions of his own, was also swiftly and mercilessly dispatched. Terror such as the one displayed in the butchery of the Roman population of Asia, was part of Mithradates’ arsenal and persona. As the manifestation of divine vengeance and restoration, the king could swiftly change from magnanimous benefactor to furious executioner, and it only added to his regal mystique and charisma. His followers were only too pleased to see his wrath directed towards their Roman enemies and their collaborators, in impressive and terrifying displays, such as the pouring of molten gold down a Roman official’s throat by the king at Pergamon[37], but they were also all too cognisant of the fact that they could find themselves at the receiving end of this wrath as well, as in the case of the enslavement of the entirety of Khios’ free population, suspected of treachery.[38] Both of these expressions of the king’s mercurial temperament ensured an obedience characterised in equal parts by awe and dread. Consequences of Defeat In the end, however, the reason behind the success of the system Mithradates sought to revive was also the one behind its downfall. As defeats accumulated, his allies, especially the Greek poleis, in Greece and Asia Minor, began turning to the Romans once more, as the victorious Hellenistic god-king they had gladly followed previously, was no longer victorious. More widely, it was the reason why Rome could lose battle after battle and still win wars, such as during the First Punic War, but entire Hellenistic kingdoms capitulated after one decisive engagement, and Mithradates’ own Anatolian empire was feeling the pressure, as he was expelled from Greece and constrained to a defensive war in Asia. Obedience faltered when the king’s own fortunes faltered, and soon enough Mithradates’ total war against Rome, in the name of justice and freedom, had to come to an end, and an albeit temporary compromise with the Romans. Conclusion Even so, where Mithradates stands out, is in his constant resurgence, with fresh armies of thousands willing to follow him back into the fray, despite the previous setbacks. It is in this that he perhaps transcended the struggles of the traditional Hellenistic monarch, and was able to continue fighting a war against the Romans even after numerous defeats. Was this because he provided or promised riches to his followers?[39] Other Hellenistic rulers had possessed riches before him, and more, such as his ally, Tigranes II of Armenia, who eventually capitulated to the Romans. In leaving his kingdom vulnerable to Roman attacks, having lost Asia Minor and gone on the defensive, Mithradates could have been perceived as failing in his traditional role of Hellenistic and Persian king. However, it took three separate wars for his Greek subjects to lose faith in him and support his son, Pharnakes II’s claim to the throne, while the king was busy preparing yet another army of Skythians and Sarmatians, to lead against Rome.[40] Ultimately, one did not follow a king for a singular reason. One doubts, for instance, that a Sarmatian nomad would have an axe to grind against Rome…this early at least. It was rather the combination of Mithradates’ personal charisma, magnetism, and impressive and terrifying displays of regal power, a language all of his diverse followers could understand, his expert use of propaganda, psychology, religion, and oracles to create an image of fateful invincibility, his revitalisation or perhaps even reinvention of Hellenistic kingship in a time of humbled kings, all under the veneer of staunch anti-Romanism, which inspired such obedience among his subjects and allies. Mithradates’ was the swan song of the victorious Hellenistic monarch, and the obedience he instilled in his followers was perhaps a recognition of that very fact. In an era of frail rulers, meekly bequeathing their kingdoms to Rome, such as Pergamon and Bithynia, or ruling diminished as client-kings, following Mithradates held a much greater significance for the populations of the Near East. With his death, the era of the victorious Hellenistic king truly ended, and the castrated kings now ruled. Xenofon Kalogeropoulos is currently pursuing a DPhil in Ancient History at the University of Oxford (St. Anne's College) Notes: [1] Polybios. The Histories, W.R. Paton (trans.), Loeb Classical Library 128. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), Book XXIX, 27. [2] U. Gotter, ‘The Castrated King or: the Everyday Monstrosity of Late Hellenistic Kingship’, in N. Luraghi (ed.), The Splendors and Miseries of Ruling Alone: Encounters with Monarchy from Archaic Greece to the Hellenistic Mediterranean, (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2013), p. 207. [3] Appianos, Roman History, Volume III, B. McGing (trans.), Loeb Classical Library 4, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019), Book XII, 22. [4] Ibid. [5] Ibid. [6] A. Mayor, The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome's Deadliest Enemy, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), p. 13. [7] Justinus, Epitome of the Philippic History of Pompeius Trogus, J.S. Watson (trans.), (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1853), Book XXXVII, 2. [8] Mayor, The Poison King, p. 30. [9] Ibid., p. 32. [10] B.C. McGing, The Foreign Policy of Mithridates VI Eupator, King of Pontus, Mnemosyne Supplements, vol. 89, Bibliotheca Classica Batava, (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1986), p. 44. [11] D.W. Roller, Empire of the Black Sea: The Rise and Fall of the Mithridatic World, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), p. 204. [12] Appianos, Roman History, Book XII, 66. [13] Phlegon of Tralles, Book of Marvels, W.F. Hansen(trans.), (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1996), 3.4-3.5. [14] Unknown, The Sibylline Oracles, M.S. Terry (trans.), (1899), Book III. [15] Gehrke, ‘The Victorious King: Reflections on the Hellenistic Monarchy’, in N. Luraghi (ed.), The Splendors and Miseries of Ruling Alone, p. 76. [16] Polybios, Histories, Book XVIII, 41. [17] Ibid. [18] B.C. McGing, The Foreign Policy of Mithridates VI Eupator, pp. 47-51. [19] Gehrke, ‘The Victorious King, pp. 80-81, 84. [20] B.C. McGing, The Foreign Policy of Mithridates VI Eupator, pp. 61-64. [21] U. Gotter, ‘The Castrated King or: the Everyday Monstrosity of Late Hellenistic Kingship’, in N. Luraghi, (ed.), The Splendors and Miseries of Ruling Alone, p. 204. [22] B.C. McGing, The Foreign Policy of Mithridates VI Eupator, pp. 100-102. [23] A. Mayor, The Poison King, p. 49. [24] Ibid., p. 37. [25] Mayor, The Poison King, p. 37. [26] Ibid. [27] J.M. Hojte, ‘Portraits and Statues of Mithridates VI’, in J.M. Hojte, (ed.), Mithridates VI and the Pontic Kingdom, Black Sea Studies 9, Danish National Research Foundation’s Centre for Black Sea Studies, (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2009), pp. 148-149. [28] Mayor, The Poison King, p. 38. [29] R. Fleischer, ‘Hellenistic Royal Iconography on Coins’, in T. Engberg, L. Hannestad, J. Zahle (eds.), Aspects of Hellenistic Kingship, (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 1996), pp. 29-31. [30] Appianos, Roman History, Book XII, 28. [31] Ibid., 21. [32] Mayor, The Poison King, p. 20. [33] Ibid., p. 47. [34] Appianos, Roman History, Book XII, 38. [35] Ibid., 48. [36] Ibid., 22. [37] Ibid., 21. [38] Ibid., 46-47. [39] Justinus, Epitome, Book XXXVIII, 3,7. [40] Appian, Roman History, Book XII, 108-109.

Upon the collapse of the Tsarist regime in Russia in 1917, the Bolsheviks were tasked with confronting the ‘national question’ - that is, how to incorporate the former Russian Empire’s “hundreds of ethnic groups” into a “multiethnic society”.[1] The South Caucasus—or Transcaucasia[2]—is “one of the most multiethnic regions in the world”.[3] Largely comprised of Armenians, Azerbaijanis, and Georgians, with significant minorities such as Abkhazians, Adzharians, Mingrelians, and Ossetians[4], one would expect that, to integrate this ethnoculturally heterogenous region of the former Russian Empire into a successful socialist state, Lenin and, ultimately, Stalin would enforce an equally variegated nationality policy. However, upon a thorough examination, whilst Stalin’s nationality policy in the South Caucasus was, indeed, varied, it also proved uniform in part. Stalinist nationality policy exploited an ethnofederal system that disproportionately advanced more autonomous nations, namely the dominant ethnic Union Republics of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia vis-a-vis less autonomous titular republics such as Abkhazia and Nagorno Karabakh. Thus, this paper argues that the extent to which Stalin’s nationality policy in the South Caucasus differed, depending on ethnic group, was broad, contingent upon a nationality’s position within the ethnically federalised structure of the Soviet Union. This provides both parallels in nationality policy, but most significantly, clear deviations where necessary to advance Stalin’s ends. In this view, whilst, of course, there are both parallels and deviations in policy towards the more autonomous states of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, the greatest differences are evident in the nationality policies towards the less autonomous nationality of Abkhazia and the people of Nagorno Karabakh. To this end, this paper will proceed by providing an assessment, and historical context, of Soviet nationality policy from 1917 to 1941[5] through two dimensions: the more autonomous nations of Transcaucasia—Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia—and the less autonomous nations of Abkhazia and Nagorno Karabakh. Despite Stalin’s central role in the conceptual formulation of nationality policy under Lenin[6], this paper understands Stalin’s nationality policy to be the policies implemented after Lenin’s death in 1924. Firstly, this paper will historically and theoretically contextualise Soviet nationality policy, from its inception under Lenin, its deployment, to its eventual cessation under Stalin. Secondly, an evaluation of Stalin’s nationality policy towards the South Caucasus titular nations of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia will demonstrate both its parallels and differences, whilst evidencing an adverse weighting against Azerbaijanis. Ultimately, a comparative assessment of Stalinist nationality policy towards Abkhazia and Nagorno Karabakh, will bespeak the ways in which nationality policy deviated significantly, dependent on ethnic group. To provide a comprehensive assessment of Stalin’s nationality policy towards nations in the South Caucasus, dependent on its respective autonomy, an overview of the historical and theoretical context in which Soviet nationality policy emerged and evolved is pertinent. One of the most pressing issues facing the fledgling Soviet Union, in 1917, was to tackle the ‘national question’. In essence, how to establish a means of “develop[ing]...new forms of political organization for the country’s multiethnic population”.[7] The Bolsheviks were guided by two initial central concerns regarding a nationality policy to establish a multiethnic state. Firstly, the Bolsheviks held nationalism to be a “dangerous idea” to the federal structure, engendering secessionist and independence sentiments, that must be appropriately addressed and nullified before the proper implementation of socialism.[8] Crucially, the Bolsheviks were wary to avoid being “seen as simply re-defined Russian imperialists”, a concern Lenin identified as “Great Russian chauvinism”.[9] Importantly, for Stalin, native nationalism was a far greater danger than Russian nationalism.[10] Initial Soviet policies regarding state formation were significantly affected by Joseph Stalin’s 1913 article ‘Marxism and the National Question’, commissioned by Lenin.[11] The central tenet of Stalin’s article was his definition of a nation: “a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture.”[12] Stalin’s position as an ethnic Georgian, a minority within Russia, led to him becoming “the most significant figure in determining the structure of the Soviet state”.[13] This ethnocentric perspective led to Stalin‘s creation of what Ben Fowkes aptly describes as the structure of ”Soviet ethnofederalism”.[14] The embracing of ethnofederalism as a state structure for the Soviet Union, after 1917, was based principally in this “Stalinist linkage of ethnicity, territory, and political administration...enshrined in the idea of national statehood.”[15] The Soviet federal structure institutionalised ethnicity through the creation of ethnicity-based titular entities with differing levels of autonomy.[16] The federal hierarchy, in descending order, was: (1) Union Republics such as Georgian[17], Armenian[18] and Azerbaijanian SSRs[19], as well as the Transcaucasian SFSR[20]; (2) autonomous republics such as the Abkhazian ASSR; (3) autonomous oblasts namely the South Ossetian SAO within the Georgian SSR; and (4) okrugs. For Lenin, “nationalism and separatism were neither natural nor inevitable” but rather an oppressive byproduct of imperialism, “reflect[ing] only the interests of the bourgeoisie”, thus initially rejecting the idea of national federalism.[21] However, Lenin, and Stalin, appreciated that ”the cultural autonomy”, provided upon the ”institutionalisation of ethnoterritorial divisions with the creation of a quasi-federal Soviet state system”, would ”provide legitimacy” to Bolshevik rule.[22] Thus, to consolidate the multiethnic structure of the Soviet Union, and successfully attract support for Bolshevism from non-Russians, Lenin adopted the political strategy of korenisatziya or ”indigenization” in 1923, based upon his principle of ”the right of nations to self-determination".[23] Korenisatziya aimed to integrate non-Russian peoples into the Soviet system through developmental education and cultural autonomy, whilst also utilising it as an apparatus for containing Great Russian chauvinism.[24] Korenisatziya became official Soviet policy in 1923[25], mandating the: (a) promotion of the usage of native languages in native administrations; (b) obligatory education for workers to learn native languages; (c) establishment of native-language schools; (d) issue of newspapers, journals, and books in native languages; and crucially (e) the introduction of indigenous non-Russian populations into the cadres of government.[26] Suny surmises the policy of korenisatziya as the ”consolidation of nationality” through three important processes: the state ”support of native languages, the creation of a national intelligentsia and political elite, and the formal institutionalisation of ethnicity in [the] state apparatus.”[27] Furthermore, korenisatziya was a successful apparatus of “divide-and-rule".[28] The Soviet government tasked the titular nations[29] with ”the imposition and the maintenance of control over ethnic minorities”. This allowed local party cadres to ”pursue the national policies of forced assimilation, demographic dilution, and cultural genocide of the ethnic minorities within [the] framework of [korenizatsiya] policy”[30], for example the cadres of Georgian SSR vis-a-vis the Abkhazians. In effect, Soviet nationality policy exacerbated ethnic tensions and inequalities to consolidate its overarching political control. Stalinist nationality policy largely followed that which was implemented under Lenin until 1928. However, during this time, Stalin increasingly preferred a statist understanding of nationhood—that of ‘socialism in one country’—which opposed the established ethnic understanding. Historians, such as Blitstein, identity Stalin’s consolidation of power—the implementation of the First Five-Year Plan and the initiation of the ‘Revolution from Above’—as a “crucial turning point” in nationality policy[31], for the contradictions of a statist and ethnic approach to nationhood intensified amidst industrialization and the ‘war on backwardness’.[32] The early 1930s saw korenisatziya flourish, with a renewed reaffirmation from Stalin that the ‘Revolution from Above’ did not equate to the “abolition of ethnic distinctions”.[33] Rather, ethnic cultures would continue to “blossom” in a state of “socialism in one country”.[34] However, nation-building efforts all but ceased in 1934, precipitated, as suggested by Gerhard Simon, by Stalin’s mistrust of non-Russians.[35] Simultaneously, korenisatziya was ”denounced” as an existential ’threat to Soviet unity’.[36] By the culmination of the Great Purge of 1936-1938, korenizatsiya had, by and large, been replaced by xenophobic Russification.[37] To assess the difference in Stalinist nationality policy depending on different ethnic groups, it is requisite to set parameters for measuring the implementation of korenisatizya in the titular nations. As identified by Fowkes, korenisatziya sought to implement native non-Russians into the cadres of government, establish native-language schools, and promote the cultural autonomy of the nationalities.[38] Thus, the parameters within which to assess the extent nationality policy was implemented in Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, and, subsequently, Abkhazia and Nagorno Karabakh, will be through the quantitative and qualitative analysis of party membership by ethnicity, linguistic education and cultural development, and political repression. Analysing party membership by ethnicity in the more autonomous Union Republics of the South Caucasus reveals a relative uniformity in Stalinist nationality policy. A 1924 report on government institutions in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi revealed that ethnic Georgians accounted for 36% of the city’s population, 54% of all posts in government institutions, and 67% of the overall republican population.[39] By 1927, testament to the successes of korenisatziya, Georgians equalled 74% of all working within republican and government institutions in Tbilisi. Suny identifies that in the decade 1922 to 1932, the implementation of korenisatziya managed to increase the native integration into the Soviet regime.[40] New native Bolshevik cadres formed from the former opposition parties, such as the Georgian Mensheviks, the Armenian Dashnaks, and the Azerbaijani Mussavists, increasing the already high percentages of native cadres in government.[41] For example, Georgians increased their share from 62% to 66%; 89% to 90% in Armenia; and 39% to 44% in Azerbaijan.[42][43] Similarly, Gerhard Simon identifies that, by 1929, representation of the native population had filtered into both the cadres of the republic and the raion. For instance, in Armenia, Armenians controlled 93.5% of the republic and 94.6% of raions; Georgians 74% and 81% respectively in their region; and Azerbaijan 36% and 69% respectively.[44] Overall, in the Union Republics of Transcaucasia, korenisatziya achieved an increase in usage of native languages, employing a universal approach. The scope of korenisatziya’s implementation can also be discerned through an analysis of linguistic education and cultural development. The ‘Georganisation’ process implemented from 1922 to 1931 saw ethnic Georgians continue to improve their position in education, administration, and government, facilitated through an increase in Georgian literacy.[45] By 1926, over 96% of ethnic Georgians claimed Georgian as their first language.[46] In Armenia, korenisatziya brought relative peace, ceasing fighting over the territory.[47] It also facilitated the creation of a haven for the Armenian diaspora. Stalinist nationality policy not only ”allowed the Armenian language and... culture to strike deep roots” but it also served to reverse the Russification of the Armenian cadre.[48] Prior to korenisatziya, many of the Armenian elite had a ”tenuous grasp of their ancestral language”.[49] For Azerbaijan, as with Armenia and Georgia, the establishment of a ”state apparatus endowed with the features of a modern nation-state...provided a sense of political and sociocultural security” for their respective titular nation.[50] For Azerbaijanis, by 1934, the ”net result” of Stalinist nationality policy was the ”creation of an ethnic administrative elite” that remained durable until the collapse of the Soviet Union.[51] Furthermore, the proliferation of cultural representations encouraged nation-building within the more autonomous titular nations. The status of “titular nationality”, as a Union republic, afforded the given ethnic community the “cultural hegemony within its own territory”. For instance, the formation of the Azerbaijani Writers’ Union in 1934 afforded the Azerbaijani’s the agency to “organize and regulate the production of Soviet Azerbaijani literature”.[52] Similar cultural production drives, such as establishing creative unions of artists, and writers, were evident in Armenia and Georgia.[53] Whilst it is important to assess the intended effects of korenisatziya in assessing the difference in Stalinist nationalist policy vis-a-vis different ethnic groups, it is also critical to assess the extent to which Armenians, Azerbaijanis, and Georgians were politically repressed by Stalin. This represents a clear deviation from the original Stalinist doctrine inherited from, and formulated with, Lenin, and signifies a resolute shift in policy away from Lenin’s fear of Russian nationalism to Stalin’s preoccupation with the threat non-Russian nationalism. We can understand Stalin’s policy of terror to be conducted through Lavrentiy Beria, another native Georgian[54], who served as the first secretary of the Georgian Communist Party from 1934 to 1938. Stalin’s “Great Terror” of 1936-1938 affected Transcaucasia, repressing nationalism for fear of anti-Soviet agitation and secessionist intent. In Georgia, according to a secret report from Beria to Stalin in October 1937, more than 12,000 Georgians were arrested, of which 7,374 were convicted.[55] There are also estimates to suggest that over 10,000 Georgians were sentenced to death by a Special Troika, instructed by Beria and Stalin.[56] In Armenia, the terror commenced in 1936 when Beria had Aghasi Khanjian, the first secretary of the Armenian Communist Party, killed to win the power struggle the two were engaged in.[57] Between 1937-1938 alone, Beria oversaw the execution of 4,530 Armenians, and the purge of some 8,837.[58] Azerbaijan, too, was subject to the repressions of the Great Terror. In June 1937, the Politburo adopted a quota for 1,000 to be executed, and 3,000 to be expelled.[59] The Troika decided, instead, to have 1,500 executed, 3,750 imprisoned, and 150 families evicted.[60] Stalinist nationality policy towards the more autonomous titular nations has been shown to be uniform in its consistency for advancing the promotion of native non-Russians into the cadres of government, promoting the ethnolinguistic culture of the native peoples and utilising its celebration as a means to ingratiate non-Russians into the Soviet Union. Moreover, once korenisatziya had all but died, Stalin retained an element of uniformity in his approach[61] of repressing the more autonomous titular nations of Transcaucasia. To demonstrate the varying degrees in which Stalinist nationality policy differed, depending on ethnic group, vis-a-vis the more autonomous titular nations, it is requisite to assess nationality policy in the less autonomous titular nations of Abkhazia and Nagorno Karabakh, to the same proscribed parameters. Table 1: Demographic changes in Abkhazia[62] In 1921, the Bolshevik regime established Abkhazia as a Union Republic, and it became a constituent of the Transcaucasian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic the following year. Both Russian and Abkhazian was designated as official languages in the republic.[63] A 1925 treaty recognized the equality of rights of Georgians and Abkhazians with Abkhazia unifying with the Georgian republic.[64] The same year, Stalin introduced the Latin script to Abkhazia to develop the indigenous literature. However, unlike with the more autonomous republics, Stalin disregarded korenisatziya in Abkhazia to enable Beria to consolidate his power grab over the South Caucasus. For example, between 1933 and 1939, the Georgian authorities imposed a “comprehensive integrationist anti-Abkhazian policy” centred upon “cultural genocide and mass settlement of Karvelians in Abkhazia”. The Abkhazian script was changed from Latin to Georgian, teaching of, and in, Abkhazian was prohibited, and Abkhazian schools closed, Abkhazian literature publications were banned and, by the end of 1938, the Abkhazian cultural elite had been eliminated. This policy of anti-Abkhaz coincided with the process of Georgianisation, resulting in Abkhazians becoming a minority in Abkhazia by 1939. The effects of anti-Abkhaz integrationist policy vis-a-vis Georgianisation can be evidenced through the demographic changes in Abkhazia, displayed in Table 1.[65] The development, and subsequent repression, of the Abkhaz nationality can also be demonstrated in its membership of the party cadres and demographic shifts. Under the initial korenizatsiya, ethnic Abkhaz were promoted into the Communist Party. Between 1922 and 1926, ethnic Abkhaz grew from 8% to 27.8% of the population, with membership in the party jumping from 10% to 25.4%.[66] By 1936, the autonomy of Abkhazian leader Nestor Lakoba was nonexistent. As with overseeing the murder of Armenian Communist Party leader Khanjian, Beria also participated in the murder of Lakoba in 1936.[67] Beria was, essentially, given carte blanche to implement Georgianisation, the most visible aspect of such being the increased migration of Mingrelian Georgians into Abkhazia. In 1926, Abkhazians made up 28% of the Abkhaz population, Georgia 34%.[68] By 1939, this figure was at 18% and 30% respectively.[69] The approach of development and subsequent suppression was also evident in Nagorno Karabakh. In 1923, Nagorno Karabakh was granted the status of an autonomous region within Azerbaijan, having been under Armenian control since 1920.[70] Following its incorporation into Azerbaijani, the native authorities began implementing discriminatory practices to displace Armenians in the region. As the titular nationality of the union republic, Azerbaijan thus controlled the cultural, political, and educational cadres of Nagorno Karabakh.[71] These policies oversaw a steady depletion of Armenians from Nagorno Karabakh—an enforced ethnic cleansing resultant from Stalinist nationality policy. For instance, in 1921 Armenians accounted for 94.4% of the population of Nagorno Karabakh.[72] By 1939, this number had depleted to 88.1%.[73] The process has been referred to as Nakhichevanization.[74] An assessment of both Abkhazia and Nagorno Karabakh reveals the ways in which Stalinist nationalist policy deviated from its relative uniformity, as seen in Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, to contradict the tenets of korenisatziya. Whilst Armenian, Azerbaijani, and Georgian literature, culture, and political status was celebrated and encouraged, Abkhazians were denounced and demoted from their titular position, a deviation not seen elsewhere in the South Caucasus. For the Armenian population of Nagorno Karabakh, a similar process of ethnic cleansing known as ‘Nakichevanization’ suppressed their ability to promote their culture, politics, and education vis-a-vis the Azerbaijani authorities. In conclusion, the extent to which Stalin’s nationality policy in the South Caucasus, depending on ethnic group, has been demonstrated to be broad, varying from uniformity in policy towards the more autonomous republics, to significant deviations and anti-ethnic policies when assessing Abkhazia and Nagorno Karabakh. Whilst it has been shown that the effects of korenisatziya differed within the Union Republics of Transcaucasia, with a weighting in favour of Armenia and Georgia at the expense of Azerbaijan, it has been shown these are not resultant from a different policy approach. However, when assessing the position of Nagorno Karabakh, and, in particular, Abkhazia, a different interpretation of korenisatziya becomes apparent. The cultural national autonomy of Abkhazians and Armenians in Nagorno Karabakh was ceded by Stalin to the respective dominant ethnic titular, Georgia and Azerbaijan respectively, to enforce the ethnofederal structure of ‘divide-and-rule'. In this view, korenisatziya in the South Caucasus was not uniformly implemented and thus has been proven to differ greatly contingent upon ethnic group. More specifically, Stalin’s nationality policy differed depending on an ethnic group’s standing in the ethnofederal structure of the Soviet Union. Will Kingston-Cox is currently in his 3rd year of a BA in History and Politics at the University of Warwick. Notes: [1] Matthew Lerner, ‘The Soviet Riviera: The Impact of Soviet Nationality Policy on Abkhazia, 1921-1953', Master’s research paper, University of Carleton, (2016), p. 15; Peter A. Blitstein, ‘Stalin’s Nations: Soviet Nationality Policy between Planning and Primordialism, 1936-1953', PhD thesis, University of California, Berkeley (1999), p. 2 [2] Armenian, Azerbaijani and Georgian SSRs federated into Transcaucasian SFSR in 1922 [3] Alexander Murinson, ‘The secessions of Abkhazia and Nagorny Karabagh. The Roots and patterns of development of post-Soviet micro-secessions in Transcaucasia’, Central Asian Survey, 23(1), (2004), p.7 [4] Admittedly, this is not a comprehensive list of all ethnic groups in the South Caucasus existent under the Soviet Union. For instance, the Lezgins, Yezidis, and Jews are omitted. [5] “By the outset of the Great Patriotic War, a permament shift” in korenizatsiya nationality policy was evident; in Matthew Lerner, ‘The Soviet Riviera: The Impact of Soviet Nationality Policy on Abkhazia, 1921-1953', Master’s research paper, University of Carleton, (2016), p. 22 [6] 1917-1921; even prior as Bolshevik thinker [7] Mark Saroyan, ‘Beyond the Nation-State: Culture and Ethnic Politics in Soviet Transcaucasia’, The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review, 15(2-3), (1988), p. 220 [8] Matthew Lerner, ‘The Soviet Riviera: The Impact of Soviet Nationality Policy on Abkhazia, 1921-1953', Master’s research paper, University of Carleton, (2016), p. 15 [9] Teresa Rakowska-Harmstone, ‘Chickens Coming Home to Roost: A Perspective on Soviet Ethnic Relations’, Journal of International Affairs, 42(2), (1992), pp. 519-548 cited in Lerner, ‘The Soviety Riviera’, p. 15; Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 (New York: Cornell University Press, 2001), p. 2 [10] Ronald G. Suny, ‘State-Building and Nation Making: The Evolution of Ethnonationalism under Soviet Rule’, The National Council for Soviet and East European Research, (1992), p. 28 [11] Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 (New York: Cornell University Press, 2001), pp. 17-18 [12] Joseph Stalin, Works, Vol. 2, (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1953), p. 307 cited in Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire, pp. 17-18; see also Stalin, ‘Marksizm I Natsionalniy Vopros’, 296 [13] Stephen Kotkin, Stalin, Vol. 1: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928, (New York City: Penguin, 2014), p. 349 cited in Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire, p. 18 [14] Ben Fowkes, ‘The Evolution of Soviet Nationality Policy: The Epoch of Indigenization’ in The Disintegration of the Soviet Union: A Study in the Rise and Triumph of Nationalism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997), p. 41 [15] Mark Saroyan, ‘Beyond the Nation-State: Culture and Ethnic Politics in Soviet Transcaucasia’, The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review, 15(2-3) (1988), p. 221 [16] Svante E. Cornell, Small Nations and Great Powers: A Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict in the Caucasus, (London: Routledge Curzon, 2001), p. 25 cited in Nevzat Torun, ’Soviet Nationality Policy: Impact on Ethnic Conflict in Abkhazia and South Ossetia’, Karadeniz Arasturmalari, 9(70) (2021), p. 253 [17] 1921-1922; 1936-1991 [18] 1920-1922; 1936-1990 [19] 1920-1922; 1936-1991 [20] 1922-1936; formed of Armenian, Azerbaijanian, and Georgian SSRs [21] Ronald G. Suny, ‘State-Building and Nation Making: The Evolution of Ethnonationalism under Soviet Rule’, The National Council for Soviet and East European Research (1992), p. 4 [22] Alexander Murinson, ‘The secessions of Abkhazia and Nagorny Karabagh. The Roots and patterns of development of post-Soviet micro-secessions in Transcaucasia’, Central Asian Survey, 23(1) (2004), p. 19 [23] Nevzat Torun,’ Soviet Nationality Policy: Impact on Ethnic Conflict in Abkhazia and South Ossetia’, Karadeniz Arasturmalari, 9(70) (2021), p. 250 [24] Ibid. [25] At the 12th Congress of the Russian Communist Party - Matthew Lerner, ‘The Soviet Riviera: The Impact of Soviet Nationality Policy on Abkhazia, 1921-1953', Master’s research paper, University of Carleton (2016), p. 20 [26] Ben Fowkes, ‘The Evolution of Soviet Nationality Policy: The Epoch of Indigenization’ in The Disintegration of the Soviet Union: A Study in the Rise and Triumph of Nationalism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997), p. 46 [27] Ronald G. Suny, ‘State-Building and Nation Making: The Evolution of Ethnonationalism under Soviet Rule’, The National Council for Soviet and East European Research (1992), p. 25 [28] See Philip Roeder, ’Soviet federalism and ethnic mobilization’, in Rachel Denber (ed.), The Soviet Nationality Reader (Boulder, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992), pp. 2-5 [29] Soviet terminology for a political administrative unit dominated by a single ethnic group – applicable to Union Republics (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia), autonomous republics (Abkhazia, Nagorno Karabakh) and autonomous oblasts (South Ossetia) [30] Alexander Murinson, ‘The secessions of Abkhazia and Nagorny Karabagh. The Roots and patterns of development of post-Soviet micro-secessions in Transcaucasia’, Central Asian Survey, 23(1) (2004), p. 19 [31] Peter A. Blitstein, ‘Stalin’s Nations: Soviet Nationality Policy between Planning and Primordialism, 1936-1953', PhD thesis, University of California, Berkeley (1999), p. 8 [32] Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 (New York: Cornell University Press, 2001), ch. 5 cited in Peter A. Blitstein, ‘Stalin’s Nations: Soviet Nationality Policy between Planning and Primordialism, 1936-1953', PhD thesis, University of California, Berkeley (1999), p. 8 [33] Blitstein, ‘Stalin’s Nations’, p. 8 [34] Joseph Stalin, Marxism and the National and Colonial Question, (New York City: International Publishers, n.d.), pp. 261-263 cited in Blitstein, ‘Stalin’s Nations’, p. 8 [35] Gerhard Simon, Nationalism and Policy toward the Nationalities in the Soviet Union (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991): p. 138 cited in Richard Terrell, ‘Soviet Nationality Policy and National Identity in the Transcaucasian Republics: Drawing Together or Tearing Apart?’, Master’s thesis, University of Indiana (1993), p. 15 [36] Richard Terrell, ‘Soviet Nationality Policy and National Identity’, p. 16 [37] Peter A. Blitstein, ‘Stalin’s Nations: Soviet Nationality Policy between Planning and Primordialism, 1936-1953', PhD thesis, University of California, Berkeley (1999), pp. 95-96 [38] Ben Fowkes, The Disintegration of the Soviet Union: A Study in the Rise and Triumph of Nationalism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997), p. 46 [39] Stephen Jones, ‘The Establishment of Soviet Power in Transcaucasia: The Case of Georgia 1921-1928, Soviet Studies, 40(4) (1988), p. 625 [40] Ronald G. Suny, ‘State-Building and Nation Making: The Evolution of Ethnonationalism under Soviet Rule’, The National Council for Soviet and East European Research (1992), p. 26 [41] Ibid., pp. 21-22, 26 [42] Ibid., p. 26 [43] Fowkes, The Disintegration of the Soviet Union, p. 49 [44] Gerhard Simon, Nationalismus und Nationalitatenpolitik in der Sowjetunion: Von toltalitaren Dikatur zur nachstalinschen Gesselchaft (Baden-Baden Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 1986), p. 51 [45] Stephen Jones, ‘The Establishment of Soviet Power in Transcaucasia: The Case of Georgia 1921-1928, Soviet Studies, 40(4) (1988), p. 620 [46] Ibid. [47] Fowkes, The Disintegration of the Soviet Union.p. 48 [48] Ibid. [49] Ibid. [50] Mark Saroyan, ‘Beyond the Nation-State: Culture and Ethnic Politics in Soviet Transcaucasia’, The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review, 15(2-3) (1988), p. p. 221 [51] Ibid. [52] Ibid., p. 223 [53] Ibid. [54] Beria was, in fact, a Mingrelian; ethnographers in the Soviet Union at the time regularly classified Mingrelians as a subethnicity within Georgians; see Francine Hirsch, ’The Soviet Union as a Work-in-Progress: Ethnographers and the Category Nationality from the 1926, 1937, and 1939 Censuses’, Slavic Review, 56(2), (1997): 251-278 [55] Levan Avalishvili, ‘The “Great Terror” of 1937-1938 in Georgia: Between the Two Reports of Lavrentiy Beria’, Caucasus Analytical Digest, 22(1) (2010), pp. 2-6 [56] Appendix to the Archival Bulletin, ‘Correspondence Between L. Beria and J. Stalin (1937), The Journal of Archive Administration of MOIA, no. 3, (2008) [57] Eduard Melkonian, ‘Repressions in 1930s Soviet Armenia’, Caucasus Analytical Digest, 22(1) (2010), pp. 6-9 [58] Ibid. [59] Eldar Ismailov, ‘1937: “Great Terror” in Azerbaijan’, Caucasus Analytical Digest, 22(1) (2010), pp. 9-13 [60] Ibid. [61] Or Beria’s approach – we can assume Beria to have largely acted with the permission, and support, of Stalin [62] Report of a UNPO Mission to Abkhazia, Georgia, and the Northern Caucasus, The Hague, Netherlands (1992) p. 28 cited in Alexander Murinson, ‘The secessions of Abkhazia and Nagorny Karabagh. The Roots and patterns of development of post-Soviet micro-secessions in Transcaucasia’, Central Asian Survey, 23(1) (2004), p. 18 [63] Stephen Jones, ‘The Establishment of Soviet Power in Transcaucasia: The Case of Georgia 1921-1928, Soviet Studies, 40(4) (1988), p. 618 [64] See ’Chronology of Abkhazia through August 1999‘, Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs, Washington, D.C., (1999) [65] See p. 11 [66] Stephen Jones, ‘The Establishment of Soviet Power in Transcaucasia: The Case of Georgia 1921-1928, Soviet Studies, 40(4), (1988), pp. 617-618 [67] Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: Court of the Red Tsar (London: Phoenix, 2003), p. 206 cited in Matthew Lerner, ‘The Soviet Riviera: The Impact of Soviet Nationality Policy on Abkhazia, 1921-1953', Master’s research paper, University of Carleton, (2016), p. 43 [68] Ibid., p. 49 [69] Ibid. [70] Alexander Murinson, ‘The secessions of Abkhazia and Nagorny Karabagh. The Roots and patterns of development of post-Soviet micro-secessions in Transcaucasia’, Central Asian Survey, 23(1) (2004), p. 20 [71] Ibid. [72] Claude Mutafin, ’Karabagh in the twentieth century’ in Levon Chorbaijan, Patric Donabedian and Claude Mutafin, eds. The Caucasian Knot, (London: Zed Books, 1994), p. 142 cited in Alexander Murinson, ‘The secessions of Abkhazia and Nagorny Karabagh. The Roots and patterns of development of post-Soviet micro-secessions in Transcaucasia’, Central Asian Survey, 23(1) (2004), p. 21 [73] Ibid. [74] Alexander Murinson, ‘The secessions of Abkhazia and Nagorny Karabagh. The Roots and patterns of development of post-Soviet micro-secessions in Transcaucasia’, Central Asian Survey, 23(1) (2004), pp. 20-21

In the period between the conquest of Constantinople and the end of the sixteenth century, the Ottoman Empire rapidly increased in strength and prestige, and consequently those in power had to develop an advanced legal system to effectively govern their vast territory. For most of this time, the government was intent on presenting the empire as a pious, Sunni state to both citizens and rival polities, which it accomplished by propagating the idea that shari’a law, and in unavoidable cases kanun derived from its principles, was the sole method of governance. There has been much debate among historians regarding the truth of this statement; some claim that the Ottomans considered any form of law other than shari’a unnecessary and insignificant, while others argue that several legal theories coexisted and reinforced each other.[1] Administering the whole empire through Hanafi jurisprudence alone was not feasible, even though government rhetoric maintained that it was. The presence of both secular and independent courts meant that people were not always tried under Islamic law. More importantly, while shari’a was considered authoritative and supposedly could not be superseded, in many cases it proved impractical to adhere to it religiously. Due to the theoretical nature of certain sections of Hanafi legislation, such as criminal and land laws, it was necessary for rulers to supplement shari’a with kanun. In addition, sultanic and Islamic law legitimised one another and were relatively codependent. In the Ottoman Empire during these centuries, shari’a was prevalent, but it can be seen that different legal structures intertwined to govern the state and administer justice efficiently. It must be acknowledged that even though shari’a was not the exclusive legal force in the empire, it did dominate this sphere, especially after Süleyman I’s ascendance to the throne. Many primary accounts, such as that of Theodore Spandounes, paint a picture of a state whose courts were entirely controlled by kadis and muftis. While Spandounes’s description of Ottoman life is problematic, as it was written in part to instigate a Christian attack on the Turks, it provides valuable information about law in the early sixteenth century. The author maintains that kadis were vested with “supreme judicial authority” and therefore had control over all legal matters, and that the kadiasker oversaw all of the provincial courts and was “the most learned in law.”[2] The author also illuminates the extent of the şeyhülislam’s influence at this time; he is referred to as “the supreme expounder of shari’a, to whom the sultan pays great deference.”[3] Technically, a mufti’s fatwa was not binding, but by the sixteenth century, the şeyhülislam was the most powerful legal figure in the empire and his opinions were often considered law by rulers and kadis alike. He had even asserted that disregarding his rulings was akin to heresy.[4] Largely due to Ebussuud, over time the role took on a political facet and these muftis grew closer to the secular authorities, a development exemplified by Süleyman’sdesire to obtain a fatwa sanctioning war against the Safavids.[5] The religious class clearly possessed authority in the empire, and influenced many legal matters, both secular and religious. The case of Molla Kabiz further illustrates the importance of shari’a and the ulema in the sixteenth century Ottoman Empire. Kabiz was a member of the Istanbul religious class who “entered the path of free thought and heresy,” thereby committing a religious offence.[6] Celelzade Mustafa recorded the events of the trial; in his work, he is quite critical of the military judges who first tried Kabiz, claiming that they were of bad character and did not have the ability to refute the heretic’s claims due to lack of understanding of Islamic jurisprudence.[7] Eventually, Süleyman insisted on the use of shari’a, and a kadi and mufti condemned Kabiz. This trial is a representation of how the Ottoman legal system ideally would have functioned; Islamic law takes precedence, and Hanafi judges prove more adept at administering justice than army adjudicators. This idea of the ulema’s supremacy became more pronounced in the mid-sixteenth century due to Süleyman’s endeavours to portray himself as the defender of orthodox Islam and deter the infidel by endowing his empire with a pious veneer. According to these foreign and Ottoman sources, the state was under the complete control of Islamic law and its exponents, but both Spandounes’s chronicle and Mustafa’s description of Kabiz’s case are reflections of the unnuanced view propagated by the government and were also influenced by their own agendas. While shari’a was the prevailing type of law, legal matters were not as clearly defined as rulers and the ulema claimed. There are several caveats to this paradigm that demonstrate that Islamic law was not unaided in its regulation of the Ottoman Empire. Mustafa’s description of Kabiz’s trial shows that kadis and muftis were joined by secular judges in the process of administering justice. Provincial kadis cooperated with local sancakbeyis who, assisted by the subaşi, investigated criminals and carried out punishments after sentencing.[8] Sancakbeyis were officially sanctioned to adjudicate disputes among members of the military without interference, but technically they could not punish any other member of the populace without the kadi’s approval.[9] In practice, Hanafi judges determined the outcome of larger trials, but for lesser offences, military officials often oversaw the entire procedure, including judgement.[10] This meant that sancak-specific kanun was utilised to determine the outcome of these smaller cases. Sixteenth century court records further exemplify the involvement of secular officials in the process of bringing criminals to justice, even in the central city of Istanbul.[11] The existence of authorities who used kanun to judge cases either in their courts with official approval or, especially in the provinces, outside such institutions without the explicit consent of the government, proves that the empire was in part ruled by secular law. In addition to the sancakbeyis, independent courts compromised shari’a law’s supremacy. The most widespread were Jewish institutions, and much was written about them throughout the sixteenth century. Several authors, such as Samual Usque and Simhah Luzatto, said that Jews living in Ottoman lands enjoyed many liberties, one of the most important being the ability to freely adjudicate cases within their community using their own type of law.[12] These authors overstate the power of the Jewish courts, as they were only semi-autonomous and not officially recognised by the state, meaning that judges were quite restricted in their actions. They were largely confined to settling internal religious affairs, such as marriage, divorce, and community-specific cases, and their decisions were not indisputable, unlike those of the kadis. For this reason, Jews sometimes wished to be tried by an Islamic judge, whose ruling provided more security.[13] Despite their obvious limitations and the fact that they were not autonomous, there are many records of citizens utilising these unofficial courts.[14] Jewish judges were able to determine the outcome of smaller community cases, and their continued presence and influence meant that shari’a was unable to enjoy a full legal monopoly. A reason of arguably greater importance why the empire was not governed by shari’a law alone was because kanun answered questions that Hanafi jurisprudence failed to address. Some historians have claimed that since kadis were designated as official state judges and administered both sultanic and Islamic law, there can be no genuine distinction drawn between the two.[15] This statement could be considered true in theory, since kanun was supposed to conform to shari’a tenets and concentrate only on subjects the latter did not discuss, but most Ottomans accepted that it was the sultan’s prerogative as protector of the re’aya to enact additional legislation deemed “necessary for the order of the state and society.”[16] This dual structure had its precedent in the original Islamic conception of the ideal ruler, who was obligated to enforce both sultanic law to ensure justice and shari’a to preserve morality.[17] While it was rejected to some extent by the ulema as they became more powerful, this stipulation allowed fifteenth century rulers to codify a legal system separate from that of the Hanafi school. Mehmed the Conqueror faced opposition from the religious class when his laws appeared to circumvent shari’a, but since he did not want limit Ottoman jurisprudence, he continued to rely heavily on kanun and the concept of the sultan’s supreme authority to rule his territory.[18] Bayezid II expanded this strain of secular law with his creation of the specialised kanunname, which by the sixteenth century was a widespread phenomenon and allowed for the existence of law codes tailored to each individual sancak.[19] The actions of these sultans curtailed shari’a’s influence and created laws better suited to provincial realities that made governing the disparate citizenry of the empire simpler. Kanun was also employed in a more traditional fashion; to supplement the topics that shari’a legislation left unaddressed, such as criminal and land law. The crime punishments detailed in the Hanafi code were often rhetorical and could not be applied to real cases, so sultanic law was used.[20] Land and tax regulations were also placed under the jurisdiction of kanun, since shari’a rules proved too abstract. For example, Islamic law viewed all land as private property and lacked regional specificity, while in actuality, much Ottoman territory was not privately owned and local practices remained influential in determining guidelines in this sphere.[21] Süleyman’s support of cash vakifs is another instance of the sultan bringing “kanun mindedness to bear on shari’a” in a situation where the formulation of an efficient legal system triumphed over the policy’s incompatibility with Hanafi doctrine.[22] There were many such cases during the reign of the Ottomans where Islamic law needed to be enhanced by imperial statutes. Interestingly, the ulema used shari’a to contest specific elements of kanun by arguing that they did not conform to Hanafi precepts, but this group never challenged the legitimacy or existence of sultanic law in its entirety.[23] This is perhaps the best illustration of the fundamental importance of maintaining kanun alongside shari’a; even religious authorities, who supposedly believed that Islamic law should be the sole governing force of the state, acknowledged the necessity of having a dual structure to rule the diverse territory. Despite sixteenth century sultans’ attempts to characterise the empire as orthodox Sunni, shari’a could never be the only form of law utilised, since the importance of kanun precluded its monopoly. In addition to kanun providing important additions to Hanafi jurisprudence, these two main types of law were codependent in terms of legitimisation. During the sixteenth century, the need to justify kanun policies through shari’a increased due to the ulema’s rise and Süleyman’s orthodoxy campaign. This is evident in Ebussuud’s efforts to “harmonise the Ottoman kanuns with the noble shari’a…”[24] The şeyhülislam rephrased many sultanic laws using language borrowed from Hanafi legislation to eliminate discrepancies between the two, at least on a superficial level, so as to gain the approval of the kadis and other religious figures without hindering functionality.[25] Ebussuud’s reforms likely did not change the fundamental nature of any kanuns and were meant only to create sultanic law for the ulema’s consumption, but his efforts illustrate that shari’a could serve as a legitimisation device by providing kanun with a religious facade. Sultanic law was validated by shari’a, but it was also in large part the basis for the extensive power and reach of the latter. Rulers and administrative officials can be partially credited with aiding the standardisation and rise of the Hanafi school from the fifteenth to late sixteenth centuries, as this process was facilitated by kanun.[26] The ulema’s extensive power was also supported by sultanic law. Khalil al-Muradi admits that even though jurists had a role in the creation and growth of the religious learned hierarchy, its codification was also aided by kanun.[27] For example, the officially appointed şeyhülislam significantly expanded the legislative influence of the religious class, but much of his power was conferred upon him through an imperial edict that gave the ruler increased control over his position.[28] Kanun and the sultan, here a representative of secular power, supported the authority of this influential figure and the rest of the ulema, thereby bolstering Islamic law. Ultimately, drawing a firm line between these two legislations and subordinating kanun to shari’a misrepresents the complex reality of Ottoman governance, as these legal systems influenced one another and often relied on each other for legitimisation. Kanun modified Islamic law to make it more effective when applied to the realities of Ottoman life, and it also provided the basis for Hanafi jurisprudence’s authority. Sultanic law was written in the language of shari’a to make it appear more Islamic, allowing Ottoman rulers to avoid the ulema’s criticism and support their claim to be defenders of Sunnism. While shari’a played a significant role in the governance of the Ottoman state, it was not the only type of law employed in the administration of the vast empire. Sultans, particularly Süleyman, and members of the ulema presented Hanafi jurisprudence as the foundation of the state’s legal procedure, but this was not entirely true, especially in the provinces where law was influenced by unavoidable realities and local customs, and the government had less control over its application. Secular and independent courts, such as those of the sancakbeyis and Jews respectively, allowed minor offences to be judged by institutions that did not utilise shari’a. More significantly, Islamic law could only control the empire partially because the theoretical parts of its legislation had to be supplemented by kanun. Additionally, these main forms of law provided validation for each other and were therefore often inextricably intertwined. Shari’a played a large role in supporting the existence of kanun, while kanun substantiated the power of the ulema and Sunni institutions. Shari’a governed the empire to a great extent, but it was bolstered by other types of law that were essential to successfully control the polity, and together they formed the essential fabric of the Ottoman legal system. Dorothy Green is currently in her 4th year of an MA in Middle Eastern Studies at the University of St. Andrews. Notes: [1] Guy Burak, The Second Formation of Islamic Law: The Hanafi School in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (New York, 2015), p. 63. [2] Theodore Spandounes, On the Origin of the Ottoman Emperors, trans. and ed. Donald M. Nicol (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 115, 135-136. [3] Ibid, p. 118. [4] Burak, Second Formation, p. 42. [5] R.C. Repp, The Mufti of Istanbul: A Study in the Development of the Ottoman Learned Hierarchy (London, 1986), pp. 295, 279; Halil Inalcik, ‘State, Sovereignty, and Law During the Reign of Suleyman’, in Halil Inalcik and Cemal Kafadar, Suleyman the Second and His Time (Istanbul, 2010), p. 69. [6] Celalzade Mustafa, ‘The Trial of a Heretic’, in Hakan T. Karateke and Helga Anetshofer (eds), The Ottoman World: A Cultural History Reader, 1450-1700 (Oakland, 2021), p. 62. [7] Ibid, pp. 62, 65. [8] Spandounes, Origin, pp. 135-136. [9] Gilles Veinstein, ‘Religious Institutions, Policies and Lives’, in Suraiya N. Faroqhi and Kate Fleet (eds), The Cambridge History of Turkey Vol. 2, 1453-1603 (Cambridge, 2013), p. 329. [10] Colin Imber, ‘Government, Administration and Law’, in Suraiya N. Faroqhi and Kate Fleet (eds), The Cambridge History of Turkey Vol. 2, 1453-1603 (Cambridge, 2013), p. 233. [11] ‘Women at Courts of Law: Court Records, Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, in Hakan T. Karateke and Helga Anetshofer (eds), The Ottoman World: A Cultural History Reader, 1450-1700 (Oakland, 2021), pp. 97-98. [12] Joseph Hacker, ‘Jewish Autonomy in the Ottoman Empire: Its Scope and Limits’, in Avigdor Levy (ed), The Jews of the Ottoman Empire (Princeton, 1994), pp. 157-158. [13] Ibid, pp. 183-184. [14] Ibid. [15] Hacker, ‘Jewish Autonomy,’ p. 162. [16] Marlene Kurz, ‘Gracious Sultan, Grateful Subjects: Spreading Ottoman Imperial ‘Ideology’ throughout the Empire’, Studia Islamica, 107:1 (2012), p. 102. [17] Dina Rizk Khoury, ‘Administrative Practice Between Religious Law and State Law on the Eastern Frontiers of the Ottoman Empire’, Journal of Early Modern History, 5:4 (2001), p. 308. [18] Veinstein, ‘Religious Institutions,’ p. 325. [19] Colin Imber, The Ottoman Empire, 1300-1650: The Structure of Power (New York, 2002), p. 199 and Inalcik, ‘State,’ p. 78. [20] Ibid, p. 223. [21] Imber, ‘Government,’ pp. 235-236. [22] Madeline Zilfi, ‘Sultan Suleyman and the Ottoman Religious Establishment’, in Halil Inalcik and Cemal Kafadar, Suleyman the Second and His Time (Istanbul, 2010), pp. 116-118. [23] Khoury, ‘Administrative Practice,’ p. 327. [24] Repp, Mufti of Istanbul, p. 279. [25] Imber, Structure of Power, p. 244. [26] Burak, Second Formation, pp. 12-13. [27] Burak, Second Formation, p. 64. [28] Ibid, p. 62.

It is an undisputable fact that enslaved Africans were put through violent, horrific practices in all areas of enslavement. Some particularly draconian practices include the Middle Passage, which was used to destroy the culture and humanity of the enslaved Africans, and subsequently the violent punishments suffered by enslaved workers. One argument used to provide some reasoning to this is through mercantilism and capitalism. It is important in this context, to define capitalism and mercantilism in order to decisively understand their roles in enslavement. Mercantilism centres around the benefits of profitable trading while capitalism specifies that the profiteers are private owners, rather than the state. While this idea of profit for private owners shows some reasoning for the horrific treatment of the enslaved Africans, there are more prominent arguments in psychological standpoints such as white supremacy and religious justifications. Primarily focussing on the works of Williams, Rodney and Chinweizu, we will see that mercantilism and capitalism alone do not provide adequate reasons to explain the violence of enslavement, unless combined with other factors like the belief in white supremacy, religion, racial discrimination, and a need for control. To begin, it is important to first label the ways in which capitalism and mercantilism may provide somewhat adequate reasons for the horrific treatment of the enslaved. The institution of trans-Atlantic chattel slavery possesses its origins in wealth-seeking entrepreneurs pursuing profit away from Europe. As Ignatius Sancho writes, ‘The grand object of English navigators—indeed all Christian navigators—is money—money—money.’[1] Stikkers argues that ‘the Caribbean slave trade was an early manifestation of capitalism rather than its antithesis.’[2] This idea is evident through much of the Caribbean planter class consisting of petty nobility and commercial wealth searchers such as John Gladstone, seeking the Caribbean as a place of fortune with a competitive, aggressive intention. This aggression and competition led to the brutal treatment of the enslaved workers to achieve maximum output and profit. We see examples of this throughout narratives of enslaved people such as Mary Prince who, aside from the direct punishments she suffered from her enslavers, also suffered awful injuries from her work itself, such as salt blisters from the ponds where she worked which ‘afflicted the sufferers with great torment.’ [3] This presents a notion of capitalism being the reasoning behind a more indirect form of violence against the enslaved, through an absence of concern for their wellbeing. The year in which Mary Prince began her forced work as an enslaved person at the salt ponds is very significant; she was sold to the enslaver at the salt ponds in around 1802[4] meaning that, at this point, as C.L.R James states, ‘slaves could always be bought, and profit was always high.’[5] As a result, this harsh plantation system was only harshened further after 1807 when restrictions were imposed on the trading of enslaved people as their supply was cut, leading to an increase in demand. As Morgan states, ‘planters needed to work slaves hard to keep up output levels […] more so after the British slave trade ended in 1807 and problems ensued in breeding slaves from existing stock.’ [6] Through the gruelling labour, such as that described by Mary Prince, as well as systems of forced breeding, this plantation methodology succeeded in capitalist and mercantilist objectives by increasing wealth through commodity output and increasing the number of enslaved people, who were a commodity themselves. This methodology of using people as an inexhaustive supply demonstrates aggressive mercantilism and industrial capitalism as a motivation for controlling enslaved people as it establishes the perspectives of the use of the enslaved to achieve goals in acquiring profit above anything else. Another form of control that was essential to create the enslaved workforce needed to produce the capitalist goods was the destruction of the human psyche and the personality of an individual. This was a long process, beginning with the Middle Passage. The Middle Passage was a mechanism for the destruction of the African personality through extreme physical and psychological violence, spiritual destruction, loss of human identity and culture, degradation, and deprivation of liberty. This destruction of the African personality was vital in the building of a submissive, enslaved workforce. On the subject, Chinweizu comments on how the African personality ‘was wrenched off its trajectory and dragged into the devastating orbit around Europe.’[7] We see this ‘dragging’ of the African personality by the Europeans through the horrors of the Middle Passage as the primary objective was to destroy any trace of the religions and cultural practices of primarily West Africa from the minds of the enslaved Africans and subject them to a breaking process in order to rebuild them into submission. In his eighteenth-century narrative, Olaudah Equiano recalls his experience of the Middle Passage: ‘every circumstance I met with served only to render my state more painful, and heighten my apprehensions, and my opinion of the cruelty of the whites.’[8] He describes flogging, beatings, murder, and starvation upon the ship taking him to Virginia. Equiano’s experience of the Middle Passage is crucial to our understanding of the atrocities practiced by the Europeans in order to enslave Africans psychologically, as well as physically. These practices, in turn, formed the enslaved workforce required for capitalistic endeavours of raw commodity production. Similarly, after the Middle Passage, the enslaved Africans were subject to draconian punishments for even minor offences, such as working slowly: solitary confinement, sexual violence, beatings, lashings, amputations, disablement, and death were among many possible punishments that they may have been subjected to. This was used to set a precedent for both the enslavers’ control over the enslaved, but also to keep up production and output of goods. For the most part, however, it was important that an enslaved worker should be kept alive and useful to fulfil their function for their enslaver and damaging them would be a crime against the master’s property. From their origins in Africa to the plantations across the Atlantic, as Rodney states, ‘African workers and peasants produced for European capitalism goods and services of a certain value.’ From this, it can be argued that the abuse of the enslaved Africans was primarily due to capitalist and mercantilist reasons as they served the function as a means of production of goods, thereby increasing the wealth of their enslavers. On the other hand, it has been argued that while chattel slavery may have begun as a capitalistic endeavour, it was also brought down by what it sought to create. Williams argues that, alongside the decline of the economies in the Caribbean,[9] enslavement was successful in ‘providing the capital which financed the Industrial Revolution in England,’ and subsequently, as was ‘mature industrial capitalism in destroying the slave system.’[10] He also distinguishes the commercial capitalism of the eighteenth century, which developed Europe’s wealth through the institution of slavery, from the subsequent industrial capitalism of the nineteenth century which the former helped to create, ‘which turned round and destroyed the power of commercial capitalism, slavery, and all its works.’[11] Here, Williams alludes to the spread of abolitionist beliefs and opinions in the industrial cities of Britain such as Birmingham and Manchester and the support they provided for abolition, originally stemming from the commercial capitalism of enslavement. Brandon comments on the ‘mounting challenge by the industrial bourgeoisie to mercantilism,’ [12] offering support to Williams’s theory of growing industrial wealth in England, which was likely to have had some link or its roots in enslavement and its link to the rise in industrial capitalism over commercial capitalism and therefore, enslavement itself. Due to this, some argue that capitalism may have created the institution of slavery, but it was also the trigger for its end. This argument has been criticised, however, as others such as Eltis and Engerman claim that ‘the new developments in particular segments of the labour market provided a key basis for the attack on the slave trade, and apparently did so on grounds that were more ideological than economic.’[13] This argument contrasts Williams’s view as it suggests that the development of industrialised labour was a much more important factor in the cause of the rise of abolition than the rise of industrial capitalism at the time. Both ideas hold probity and the reason for the decline of enslavement and rise of abolition was likely a combination of both the reformation of industrial labour and the rise of industrial capitalism over commercial capitalism. Either way, both arguments demonstrate the link of industrial capitalism to the abolition of slavery, and in turn, the violence used to enslave Africans and, as James states, ‘nothing, however profitable, goes on forever.’[14] The institution had to come to an end and capitalism, through both the emergence of wealth of industrial capitalists and the evolution of the labour force in Britain, played its part in its downfall. Moreover, one could argue that there were clearer explanations for the violence against the enslaved. These explanations take on more of a psychological and ideological nature such as white supremacy and, in turn, its place in science and religion. The emergence of the science of race demonstrates the manipulation of facts used to justify the abuse of enslaved Africans. Through beliefs of polygenesis and the works of those such as Linnaeus, Blumenbach and Meiners, the violence against Africans becomes justified in the mind of society, as they are not seen as the same level of human, if human at all. A moral gloss is placed over the aggressive discrimination as the belief was that they are underdeveloped evolutionarily, so the most economically sound solution was to enslave them to fund the economies of higher people.[15] For example, Linnaeus’ 10th Edition of Systema naturae, which became the basis for scientific racism, attempted to add moral attributes to the four separate races he pinpoints in his work, thereby encouraging the absurd generalisation of humanity into groups varying in intelligence and morality depending on race.[16] It is important to note that Linnaeus’ 10thEdition of Systema naturae was published in the mid-eighteenth century when the enslavement of Africans was already in full effect, meaning that Linnaeus’ pseudoscientific conclusions were likely rooted in the pre-existing societal racialisation of the African subcontinent in Europe at that time and subliminally and retrospectively attempts to justify the violence and enslavement of Africans. As Rodney claims, ‘while capitalism was willing to exploit all workers everywhere, European capitalists in Africa had additional racial justifications for dealing unjustly with the African worker.’[17] Through this idea it becomes clear that, while capitalism may provide some motivation for the systemic violence against Africans and people of African descent, the lack of humanity in the violence it produced was employed primarily due to racial discrimination through misinformed biology. Aside from science, religion further cements racial discrimination and violence through biblical means such as the Curse of Ham, the Mark of Cain, and the association of blackness with the Devil. The original enslavement of Africans was morally justified using the notion that they are ‘infidels’ and their ungodliness gives reason to enslave them. [18] Overtime, this notion of religious morality developed into a system of control; as the enslaved Africans became Christianised, they were taught by their masters that their souls will turn white and go to heaven, but only if they serve their European masters well and perform their functions. This was furthered by the indoctrination of the belief that the soul of an African descendant could not enter heaven, thereby providing the enslaved workers with an aim that serves European desires; enslaved Africans will work hard and loyally with the promise of heaven in death, as opposed to striving for liberty in life. This racialised perversion of biblical teachings demonstrates a methodology of enslaving Africans which, although not necessarily violent in this case, was systemic and effective. One could argue, however, that the violence comes with European doubts to their own superiority, whether through either scientific or religious means. For example, as Jordan comments, ‘castration of blacks clearly indicated a need in white men to persuade themselves that they were really masters.’[19] This idea suggests that, while science and religion motivated the European belief of their superiority, the systemic violence used against the enslaved Africans was a means of retaining their control and superiority over them. This idea of maintaining control as a justification for violence can further be seen in the brutal suppression of rebellion and revolution, such as that of the Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica in which, although no longer legally enslaved, formerly enslaved people of African descent were suppressed brutally by Governor Edward Eyre, which resulted in an estimated death toll of 439.[20] On this idea of violence for control and its roots in racism, Chinweizu notes the ‘psychotic violence of those possessed by its spirit,’ [21] suggesting that, more so than capitalism or mercantilism alone, racial discrimination and its justifications through science or religion, paired with an intense desire for control, provided a much more adequate explanation for the atrocities to undermine and control Africans, thereby reducing them into enslaved people. In conclusion, mercantilism and capitalism provide somewhat adequate reasoning as to the systemic violence used against people of African descent. The origins of trans-Atlantic chattel slavery being founded in the search for wealth away from Europe associate the institution itself with capitalism, mercantilism and, in turn, the necessity of commodity output for profit. The violence and horrors of the Middle Passage, used to break down the humanity of the enslaved people, converted them into the submissive workforce necessary for capitalist production. Maintaining an efficient rate of production was attained using systemic violence on the plantations through punishment, offering some argument to capitalism’s role in the violent enslavement process. Williams’ argument opposes this notion, however, suggesting that capitalism and mercantilism served as the foundations of the institution of enslavement but also resulted in its downfall through the emergence of industrial capitalism in the place of the antiquated commercial capitalism and, in turn, the social, political, and financial support for the abolitionist movement from industrialists and the major industrial centres. However, mercantilism and capitalism only provide adequate reasoning for the systemic violence against enslaved Africans when combined with the scientific and religious rationalisation of the abuse, which argued that people of African descent were not human in the same way as Europeans and therefore should not be treated as such. Scientific explanations such as those of Linnaeus arguing that Africans had lesser levels of morality and intelligence than Europeans attempted to rationalise their enslavement. Religious explanations used biblical notions such as the Curse of Ham and Mark of Cain to associate Africans with the devil, thereby using their supposed ungodliness as a justification for the abuse and violence against them, while also controlling them through Christianisation and the promise of heaven through loyal work. When considering the reasons for the systemic violence against Africans, one can see that, while mercantilism and capitalism provide a foundation, the rationalisation from science and religion combined with an intense desire to control are the stimuli of maintaining the system of violence. With their motives originally founded in capitalist endeavours, morality unquestioned through the dehumanisation of Africans through science and religion, and an intense desire for control, we can see that systemic violence against Africans to reduce them and enslave them came from a complex combination of reasons, as opposed to capitalism and mercantilism alone. Japneet Hayer is currently studying towards an MA in History at the University of Nottingham. Notes: [1] I. Sancho and J. Jekyll, Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, An African. In Two Volumes. To Which Are Prefixed, Memoirs of His Life, Vol. 2, (2013), p. 4 [2] K.W. Stikkers, 'The Spirit of Capitalism and the Caribbean Slave Trade', The Pluralist, 10/2 (2015), p. 194 [3] S. Strickland, The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave, dict. M. Prince, (1831), p. 10 [4] M. Rowney, ‘Preserver and Destroyer: Salt in The History of Mary Prince,’ European Romantic Review, 29/3 (2018), p. 358 [5] C.L.R James, The Black Jacobins (London, 1938), p. 18 [6] Kenneth Morgan, ‘Slave Women and Reproduction in Jamaica c. 1776-1834’, History, 91/2 (2006), p. 235 [7] Chinweizu, The West and the Rest of Us (New York, 1975), p. 221 [8] O. Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Oladuah Equiano (London, 1789), p. 80 [9] E. Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill, 1944), p. 135 [10] Ibid., p. ix [11] Ibid., p. 210 [12] P. Brandon, ‘Reconsidering The “Making of” the Williams Thesis’, International Review of Social History, 62/2 (2017), p. 319 [13] D. Eltis and S.L. Engermen, ‘The Importance of Slavery and the Slave Trade to Industrializing Britain’, The Journal of Economic History, 60/1 (2000), p. 139 [14] James,Black Jacobins, p.21 [15] P.D. Curtain, ‘“Scientific” Racism and the British Theory of Empire,’ Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria, 2/1 (1960), p. 43 [16] I. Charmantier, Linnaeus and Race, 2020, < https://www.linnean.org/learning/who-was-linnaeus/linnaeus-and-race> [17] W. Rodney How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (London, 1972), p. 130 [18] C. Raymond Beazley, “Prince Henry of Portugal and the African Crusade of the Fifteenth Century,” The American Historical Review, 16/1 (1910), p.16 [19] Winthrop B. Jordan, The White Man’s Burden: Historical Origins of Racism in the United States (New York, 1974), p. 82 [20] P. Daniel, ‘The Governor Eyre Controversy,’ New Blackfriars, 50/591 (1969), p. 574 [21] Chinweizu, ‘What “Slave Trade”? (Toward an Afrocentric Rectification of Terms)', Black Renaissance, 10/2 (2012), p. 139

No one can deny that the Napoleonic Wars represented a turning point for the Russian Empire. Not only did the so-called Great Patriotic War breathe life into a national consciousness, but Russia’s hard-won victory and subsequent liberation of Europe gave rise to calls for social change, culminating in the revolutionary action of the Decembrist movement. There is a danger, however, of perpetuating the popular mythology that enshrouds the traditional patriotic narrative and thereby over-simplifying the effects of the war on the cultural and intellectual currents within Russian society.[1] A major historiographical trope is the notion that a new national identity was formed on the back of a combined sense of patriotism and xenophobia that sprang from Russia’s experience of 1812, causing the urban elite to reject Gallicisms and simultaneously embrace their native language, customs, and culture.[2] In reality, this manifestation of national consciousness was far from universal. Inspired by Alexander Martin’s analysis of the split between conservative and liberal interpretations of Russian nationhood, this essay seeks to present a more nuanced picture of the Russian Empire after 1812, making the case that the Napoleonic Wars elicited a struggle between new waves of liberal and conservative thought, which had a far-reaching impact on the direction of Russian society in the remainder of the nineteenth century. I start by briefly contextualising this societal rift and the role that the wars played in its genesis. I then argue that the liberal interpretation of 1812 fueled the growth of a reformist mindset among young officers, opening up a significant generational gap in elite society. Lastly, I investigate the ramifications of the conservative interpretation, positing that it brought about a long-lasting period of reaction which, in turn, stoked the consequential Decembrist rising of 1825. Following its monumental victory against France, Imperial Russia was launched into the very heart of European affairs, and its image as a ‘despised collection of barbarians teeming behind a Chinese wall’ gave way to a new reputation as an important military power, whose superior strength could no longer be questioned.[3] There is no doubt that, at the national level, this new perception was internalised by the Russian people, who began to take great pride in their country and its historical achievements. In the elite sphere, however, the narrative is more complex. In the wake of Napoleon’s defeat, two divergent interpretations arose as to what it meant to be Russian. The terminology used to describe this split varies from historian to historian: while Orlando Figes writes of a struggle between theories of national liberation and imperial salvation, Alexander Martin uses the more straight-forward terms ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’, which are used in this essay for the sake of concision.[4] The essence of the conservative interpretation was that the Napoleonic Wars had not only vindicated the traditional conception of the tsar as the main driving force in Russian history, but they had shown that there was no need for political change: victory was taken as evidence that Russia’s existing institutions stood on firm ground, while the defiant patriotism of the masses proved that they could always be counted on to rally behind the tsar in times of national emergency.[5] For conservatives like Karamzin, whose influential book History of the Russian State glorified the historical role of the autocracy and advocated for the restoration of patriarchal Russia at the expense of constitutional reform, strength lay in the status quo.[6] By contrast, the liberal reading of the wars was all about looking forward. According to more liberal-minded members of the Russian elite, the defence of 1812 had demonstrated their country’s readiness for transition into the family of European states and ought to be followed by the dismantling of its repressive, antiquated institutions in favour of enlightened, European ones.[7] Furthermore, in place of the conservative conception of the tsar as the pillar of the nation, liberals began to frame the peasantry as the hidden motor in Russian history, asserting that victory had been achieved not through the efforts of the state, but by virtue of the Russian people, spurred by an attachment to their soil.[8] Marc Raeff put it well when he argued that a ‘double bond of solidarity’ formed during 1812 and the European campaign that followed. Firstly, a bond between young, educated army officers, who found that they were not alone in their ambitions to reform Russia; and secondly, a bond between these officers and the common soldiers whom they led into battle.[9] The latter can only be explained in terms of a revolution in the minds of young noblemen: whereas, prior to 1812, they had seen serfs as little more than ‘human beasts’, over the course of the war, they discovered that their social inferiors were just as capable of displaying such virtues as courage and loyalty, and therefore deserved to be treated with equal dignity.[10] Therefore, the liberal understanding of national identity can be said to have transcended social class, being built not around love for the tsar so much as a sense of solidarity among the Russian people. This new way of thinking was in no small part responsible for the democratic, reformist mindset that developed among young officers in the post-war period. When Hugh Seton-Watson remarked that ‘Sustained patriotic effort tends to create a demand for a “New Deal”’, he identified a historical pattern to which Russia’s national defence in 1812 was no exception.[11] The new sense of collective identity as it took root among the officer class produced a strong desire for social change as well as a sense of care and responsibility for the peasant masses.[12] An early manifestation of this sentiment can be observed in the Semenovsky Guard Mutiny of 1820, when the men of that regiment, on the initiative of its former commander, Yakov Potyomkin, protested against the heavy-handed punishments of Schwartz, Potyomkin’sreplacement. S.M. Volkonsky, a Guards officer who later joined the Decembrists, pointed to the democratic, anti-disciplinarian reasoning for the mutiny when he stated, ‘We rejected the harsh discipline of the old system, and tried through friendship with our men to win their love and trust.’[13] Not only did liberal-minded officers begin to sympathise with their soldiers, they took the view that, given it was the peasantry that had carried Russia to victory, it was only fair that their lives should be improved.[14] Many, including the Decembrists Mikhail Orlov and Vladimir Raevsky, began to engage in philanthropic activities, such as setting up schools in rural areas and educating the children of peasant war heroes.[15] Nationalism of the liberal variety did not evolve in Russia alone. If 1812 yielded a feeling of national solidarity accompanied by greater concern for the peasantry, it was the experiences of young officers in Europe that came after that really hammered home the need for social change. It was while in pursuit of Napoleon’s retreating army in Germany and France that they came into contact with western ideas and institutions and the principle of individual freedom that underpinned them, which revealed how backwards and benighted Russia was by comparison. The experience prompted discussions that focused on the contrasts between Western Europe, with its civil liberties and rule of law, and what Vissarion Belinsky called the ‘cursed Russian reality’, characterised by its total lack of basic rights.[16] This trend was only reinforced when, upon their return, they found that nothing had changed. Consequently, a coterie of young, educated members of the gentry became even more convinced that the peasantry — and, indeed, Russia as a whole — needed a better deal.[17] The main impact of this reformist mindset on Russian society came in the form of a generational gap. Where their parents’ generation was characterised by dutiful obedience to the state and a predilection for order and conformity, the so-called generation of 1812, brimming with energy and ambition and filled with ideas of liberal reform, had trouble fitting back into elite society.[18] Ivan Iakushkin’s memoirs epitomise this discord: ‘Now [i.e. after 1812] it was unbearable to look at the empty life in Petersburg and listen to the babbling of the old men who praised the past and reproached every progressive move.’[19] Insofar as the conservative brand of Russian nationhood they gave birth to reinforced Alexander I’s dismissal of liberal reform and concomitant entrenchment of autocracy, the Napoleonic Wars can be said to have instigated a reactionary turn in the policies of the tsarist regime. If before 1812, it looked like Russia might follow in the footsteps of Western Europe and undergo major social transformation at the direction of Mikhail Speransky, then, in the aftermath of Napoleon’s defeat, the trajectory of Russian society was completely reversed. War — or, more to the point, the resolution thereof — was partly to blame for this, since Alexander’s preoccupation with the ensuing peace process gaveSperansky’s reactionary replacement, Aleksey Arakcheyev, full rein to curb intellectual freedom and instate an oppressive system of military colonies.[20] However, it was chiefly the notion that Russia’s triumph vindicated the status quo that brought about this change of direction because it ‘removed an incentive for radical domestic reform’.[21] Alexander’s internalisation of the conservative interpretation fed into his increasingly illiberal stance: taken over by a sense of personal messianism, compounded by his ‘spiritual awakening' after the Moscow fire in 1812, his focus shifted to reform of a religious rather than secular nature.[22] For example, he appointed the head of the Holy Synod, A.N. Golitsyn, as Minister of Education, a role in which he oversaw the implementation of Alexander’s spiritual brainchild, The Bible Society, encouraging the mass publication of bibles in all different languages of the Russian Empire. Only through an awareness of the struggle between liberalism and chauvinism that took root after the Napoleonic Wars can the consequential rise of the Decembrists be fully understood. Few would disagree that the Decembrist movement had its origins in the European campaign of 1813-15, when young Russian officers first became attracted to the ideals of the French Enlightenment and popular patriotic movements like the Tugendbund and Carbonari.[23] However, the creation of the Northern and Southern societies really began with the advent of a feeling that, if Alexander was not going to implement much-needed reforms, they would have to do it themselves.[24] Perhaps most instrumental in this regard was Alexander’s rejection of constitutionalism, which — to add insult to injury — followed hard on the heels of his announcement of a constitution for Napoleon’s former ally, Poland. Understandably, nobles who had been filled with hope by Alexander’s earlier moves towards reform were incensed; Aleksandr Murav’ev echoed this frustration when he wrote: ‘Poland received a constitution, while Russia as a reward for 1812 received — military settlements!’[25] In spite of its failure, the Decembrist revolt played a significant part in the future development of Russian society because it inspired subsequent generations of intellectuals to push for radical change. Though Richard Pipes argues that the Decembrist agenda had ‘no antecedents or issue’,26 doubts as to whether their individual ideas stood the test of time overlook the salient point, namely that they set a trend among future populists and revolutionaries of organising concerted resistance to the tsarist regime. Certainly, their goal of bringing different social classes together in a new, unified society provided inspiration for the populists of the 1860s and ‘70s.[26] The Napoleonic Wars impacted Russian society in several, interconnected ways. Having stimulated the growth of Russian patriotism, the wars gave birth to two polar opposite visions for the future of Russia: one — the liberal interpretation — which posited that 1812 reflected Russia’s new-found civic maturity and another — the conservative reading — which read victory as a sign that Russia did not need to change. Whereas the liberal conception of nationhood created a desire for democratic change and the abolition of serfdom, the conservative interpretation produced the conditions for Russia’s regression into a state of reaction and religiosity. In turn, without this political reversal, the reformist orientation of the officer class may not have manifested itself in the coup of 1825, which later revolutionaries venerated as the ‘opening round in their battle against autocracy’.[27] Ally Addison is currently in his 4th year of an MA in Modern History & Russian at the University of St. Andrews. Notes: [1] Dominic Lieven, Russia Against Napoleon: The Battle for Europe, 1807 to 1814 (London, 2009), p. 10. [2] Orlando Figes, Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia (New York, 2002), pp. 101-108. [3] Isaiah Berlin, Henry Hardy and Aileen Kelly (Eds.), Russian Thinkers (London, 1979), p. 118. [4] Figes, Natasha’s Dance, p. 137. A. Martin, ‘Russia and the Legacy of 1812.’ in D. Lieven (Ed.), The Cambridge History of Russia (Cambridge, 2006), p. 145 [5] Anatole G. Mazour, The First Russian Revolution 1825, The Decembrist Movement: Its Origins, Development, and Significance (Berkeley, 1937) (Stanford, 1961), p. 29. [6] Marc Raeff, ‘At the Origins of a Russian National Consciousness: Eighteenth Century Roots and Napoleonic Wars.’ In The History Teacher, vol. 25, no. 1, Society for History Education (1991), p. 16 [7] Martin, ‘Russia and the Legacy of 1812’, p. 145. [8] Figes, Natasha’s Dance, p. 134. [9] Marc Raeff, ‘At the Origins’, p. 13. [10] Figes, Natasha’s Dance, p. 75. [11] Hugh Seton-Watson, The Russian Empire 1801-1917 (Oxford, 1967), p. 184. [12] Raeff, ‘At the Origins’, p. 13. [13] S.M. Volkonsky, Zapiski, p. 327, quoted in Figes, Natasha’s Dance, p. 75. [14] Figes, Natasha’s Dance, p. 75. [15] Ibid. [16] Bernard Pares, A History of Russia (Rev. ed.) (London, 1962), p. 360. [17] Raeff, ‘At the Origins’, p. 14. [18] Figes, Natasha’s Dance, p. 78. [19] I.D Iakushkin, Zapiski, p.13, quoted in Mazour, The First Russian Revolution, p. 56. [20] Tim Chapman, Imperial Russia, 1801-1905 (London, 2001), p. 42. [21] Lieven, Russia Against Napoleon, p. 523. [22] Richard Wortman, Scenarios of Power, Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy (Princeton, 1995), p. 193. [23] Geoffrey Hosking, Russia and the Russians: From Earliest Times to 2001 (London, 2001), p. 260. [24] Ibid. [25] Aleksandr Murav’ev, ‘Moi Zhurnal’, p. 124, quoted in Hosking, Russia and the Russians, p.260. [26] Richard Pipes, Russia Under the Old Regime (2nd ed.) (London, 1995), p. 188; Hosking, Russia and the Russians, p. 264. [27] Edward Acton, Russia: The Tsarist and Soviet Legacy (London, 1995), p. 63.

The masculine paradigm cannot be detached from the ideology of fascism. With the strong notions of blood and the staunchness of virility embodied within the practice of fascism, it is not a surprise that the masculine man became the archetype of fascist success. Before discussing how this image was characterised, perceived by society, and received by the fascist progenitors, it is important to outline the fundamental maxims of the fascist archetype. It is also worth stating early on that the case study for the thesis in progress is British fascism, meaning that most of the theory and evidence will be used in this context. Fascism sought to actualise the idea of the new man. The Nietzschean proselytization that man had to become his inner self in order to avoid the enslavement of a rationale would prove to be poignant in fascist thought.[1] It was this man that would save the western world from a perceivable decay. It is in this regard that the fascist man was considered the absolute. He was the answer to the cyclical failures of materialism and history.[2] As the Italian fascist theorist Giovanni Gentile expressed, the fascist individual was the only solution to the failures of the historical matters of the 19th and early 20th century.[3] In Gentile’s eyes, the fascist man was the true incarnation of the Hegelian absolute. Others stretched the concept of the absolute further than materialism and history. Not only would the fascist man be the answer to cyclic historical failures, but he would also be the solution to the abject deformations of humanity. His blood and race, his skin, and even the way he expressed his sexuality would follow a codification seen akin to purity. The National Socialists, the Hungarian Arrow Cross, and the Romanian Legion of Archangel Michael (The Iron Guard) are some of the European fascist organisations that expressed this search for purity. For the British fascists, the image of what the ideal man constituted varied between the different organisations. Within the different fascist cohorts there were commonalities in some of the masculine ideals, but this does not mean there was unification in the masculine image they sought. The British Fascisti (BF), the Imperial Fascist League (IFL) and the British Union of Fascists (BUF) – arguably the three main organisations – had similarities in that their masculine archetype was rooted in the imperial superiority of Britain of a yesteryear. Within all three of the organisations there was a belief that the British man held a prerogative of superiority over the rest of the world. However, the commonalities stop here. The IFL for instance – co-formed and led by Arnold Leese from 1928 to 1940 – moulded their masculine archetype more so on the lines of blood and genetic composition. The Nordic supremacy that Leese ingrained into his brand of fascism did mirror the embodiment of the Aryan myths used in National Socialism. In contrast, the British Fascisti – whom Leese separated from in 1924 – sought an ideal that centred around the protection of the British sphere of interest from the encroaching influence of bureaucratic praxis. In the words of their founder Rotha Lintorn-Orman, the British man and the BF would have ‘no past traditions to fetter its actions’.[4] They would be free to dictate their own realm. The BUF, the largest fascist party in Britain during the interwar period, sought the ideal of something even more grandiose than its counterparts. Oswald Mosley and BUF believed that the fascist was above the dictums of revolution, democracy, bolshevism, and the degeneracies of the 20th century. Historians such as Richard Thurlow and Kenneth Lunn have drawn parallels between Gentile and Mosley in that they both framed the fascist man as the absolute.[5] It is difficult to judge how intellectually versed Mosley was on the fundamentals of Hegelian idealism, but nonetheless this comparison helps one conceive what Mosely characterised as the fascist man. In Mosley eyes, he would be the answer to the contradictions of historical progress and would be suited to policing the world to assure its existence in peace and prosperity. The image of the fascist man certainly acted as a superlative. More can be revealed about this exhibition when the antithesis is examined alongside the ideal. The archetype of the fascist man holds as great a significance as what he was not. It is not possible to uncover the totality of the fascist in this essay, but it worth outlining some of these traits against the antithesis. One of the precedents in the ideal fascist archetype was his sexuality and how it was used. Sex and the function of it was separate from hedonism. Moreover, it was predominantly heteronormative. Even where there was the expression of pleasure, there was no degeneracy present. Androgynous forms and erotic perversions were not conducive to the superiority of the sexuality of fascism. One can see this in the German surrealist Otto Dix’s portrait of Sylvia Von Harden.[6] The depiction of her ambiguity was considered deplorable by the Nazis. When they came to power Dix was removed from his position at Dresden academy and most of his notable paintings were burnt after the 1937 Munich art exhibition of degenerate art.[7] Another exploration of this superlative in sexual form comes from the Italian director Tinto Brass in the film Salon Kitty. In one scene the SS commandant Wallenburg (Helmut Berger) guides the viewer down through a corridor of sexual degeneracy. In each room or chamber there is a form considered to be the antithesis of the fascist sexual superlative. This takes the shape of an amputee, a dwarf, a Jew, a homosexual act, and two expressions of masculine hyperbole.[8] After the inspection, the subjects – both men and women – are referred to as ‘rejects’, the men because of their sexual transgressions and the women for partaking in the act of sex with the antithesis.[9] The fascist man’s physique was as equally measured. It was not ambivalent or flabby, nor was it disproportionate. The synthesis of balance was prioritized over the spectacular: a comparison between Arno Breker’s sculptor Der Wäger and the Apollo Belvedere is an example of this.[10] Like the Apollo, Breker’s depiction of the iron body was poised and symmetrical. It is not herculean and there is not the hint of the proclivity to aggression, something that would usually be associated with muscularity.[11] Rather, the balance of the male physique is more desirable because of the connotations of control and command. In juxtaposition to this was the image of the grotesque. The depiction of the Jew proves to be one of the archetypes used in order to consolidate the masculine ideal. As with Gustav Dore’s The Wandering Jew and ‘the cuckoo’ found in the Hidden Hand, a magazine published by the Anti-Semtic Britons Publishing Society, there is nothing of the proportion found in the previous depictions.[12] The limbs, if the subject has any, are obtrusive, the nose has a phallic quality that is obscene, and the expression on both depictions is somewhat conniving. These images convey the importance of poise in the masculine ideal of fascism. One final masculine archetype worth discussing is the importance of age. Youth is strongest connotation of virility, and the fascist ideal required insurmountable energy. There was no room for the aged or the stigmatized, and the ability of youth took precedence over any symptom of physical decay. The extent to which the youth was stressed as the symbolic vigour of a fascist nation is an illustration of its importance in the attachment to the image of masculine virility. In Nazi Germany the Hitler Youth carried the banner of the future of the party, in fascist Italy the Partito Nazionale Fascista (PNF) channelled this symbolic importance through their youth section the Opera Nazionale Balilla (ONB).[13] Even where there were not official party affiliations or groups, the echo of the importance of youth in the image of fascist success is evident. Oswald Mosley proves to be one of these cases. He encouraged the younger members of the BUF to embrace the joys of hiking, exercise and the exploration of the land in which they had a definitive communal bond with.[14] The young man harboured the future of fascism, hence the significance they had towards its projection as an ideology of virility. To understand the potency of the image of the fascist man, it is critical to outline what it was contextualised against. This will also reveal more about how the image of man was received, and why such an extremity of ideal failed. The absolute of man that could bring forth the fascist utopia can be framed as a precipitant of war. The results of the Great War – a chasm for both the victors and those defeated – carved apart nations and destroyed bodies. In the words of J.F.C. Fuller, a member of the BUF, it was the ‘materialist orgy of destruction, a perfect counterpart of the materialist orgy of construction that preceded it’.[15] In this disillusioning realty, the heroic ideal of chivalry in combat was well and truly buried. The man of interwar Europe existed in a world in which he survived yet carried the phenomenological experiences that still lingered upon the panoply of violence. Considerable work has been done on understanding trauma and its impact on the habitus of behavioural capacities. However, in the historical paradigm, it is rarely attached to the subconscious phenomenon in how a subject interprets something like an ideology. This appears to be something worth discussing in greater detail as fascism can be argued as being causal to the trauma of an extremity like war. The utopia it seemingly offered was indicative of the intensity of pain and imminence the subconscious had with violence. The masculine universe harboured such phenomenological disturbances, and yet it was dislocated from the objective surroundings. Fascism appealed to such disturbances. Alongside the context of war, fascism also offered solution to the shifts in modernity and thought. A man embroiled in the notions of war, and the protection of something as arbitrary as the confines of a race or nation, stood at odds with these expressions in absurdity. The artistic narratives of expressionism, vorticism, cubism, and many more looked increasingly like the individual pains of the subconscious. In response to this, the fascist ideal lurched into a cry for simplicity. As much as the collective meanings of blut und boden or mare nostrum were consolidations of man’s purpose within the fascist realm, they were also simplifying measures made against the absurd horrors of modernity. It is worth stating that even within the trends of rejection, there were discrepancies in the artistic narrative of man. However, within these inconsistencies the essence of virility and violence is still conceptualised. Futurism and the intellectual contemporaries of Marinetti’s movement are examples of this. The human projection of action in hyperbolic velocity became one of the adopted flavours of the PNF. Within this narrative the capacities of man would be unified alongside the machine, and once again, this gave man a meaning. Despite the somewhat ambiguous narratives of the futurists – met with a degree of distaste from the National Socialists – there was a definitive arc of agency that man could reason with. Reception and Projections of the Image of Man: How these perceptions and contextualisation of the fascist man were received can be answered in two parts. Firstly, it is worth looking at who adopted the fascist discourse, and at which point they did so. Briefly analysing the different social backgrounds of those took up the fascist cause will clarify the difference between the masculine ideal and the individuals who sought to further this projection. It is evident from studying the British fascists that there is great diversity in those who saw prospect in the ideal. The second angle deals with the projection of these ideals. How the virile extremity looked in relation to the image fostered in the imagination proves to be the more interesting discussion, as it leads to considerations into how the existential and phenomenological nuances interlope with the ideological matter at hand. At which exact point the ideology moves from the subconscious thought to conscious transgression is particularly hard to pinpoint, yet it is critical to understanding the masculine paradigm within fascism. It is this discussion which will prove to be the most challenging aspect of the thesis. As mentioned above, the case study of research is the British fascists, and so it is entirely appropriate to focus in on these when discussing matters of reception and projection. The list of societal groups and cohorts who joined the British fascist movement: Occultists. Veterinarians/Scientists. War veterans. Established politicians. The Suffragettes. Jews. Former sportsmen. Individuals from blue collar occupations. Transgender people (Victor Barker). Numerically, the British fascists were inconsequential in comparison to their European counterparts. As Roger Griffin has highlighted in his work, the sheer notion that BUF attained a membership of 50,000 strong was a bizarre and unexpected achievement.[16] By the likes of MI5, the British fascists were considered as a haphazard liability with a degree of malicious intent.[17] Figures are hard to corroborate due to the scarcity of source material, but historical estimations have shown that the IFL had around 150 members, the BF 600, and groups like the Britons functioned at one point in 1925 with as little as eight people. All in all, the British fascist conglomerate had eccentricity for its small size. This is one of the fundamental reasons why it is difficult to apply group or sociological frameworks when examining the behaviour of the British fascists. How the fascist ideal was projected is further consolidation of the individuality at play within the different cohorts. There are similarities between some of the European tropes of the masculine ideal and manifestations made by the British fascists. Like the National Socialist, the British fascist had a strong lineage with his own soil and imminent community. Like the Italian Fascist, the British fascist had the guile for an action foreign to the lethargy of democracy. Like the Belgian Rexists and the Spanish Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas (CEDA), there was a presence of Christian manliness at the root of fascist authority – this is particularly prevalent in Mosley’s BUF. What transpired in image and thought for the British fascists was not detached from Eurocentric associations often made with the fascist ideology. However, this is not to say that the projection is one of mimesis. As mentioned above, the greatest existential differences remain with the British contextualisation of empire and monarchy. What the pursuit of the masculine ideal in fascism meant for the British cohorts was, to a degree, attached to different matters. The reason behind the failure of the British fascists is still debated by historians, and many do point towards these perceptual roots of Britain’s imperial prerogative as the major factor in why it failed. As important as this is for understanding the timeline of British fascism, these types of debates undermine fascism as an existence within Britain during the interwar period. It is essential to grasp the fascist place within Britain, though it may have been numerically small. Modernity, sexuality, and proximity to violence with war were still rooted in the existence of man. Despite the failures of British fascism, the masculine ideal still sat at the heart of many of the British fascist’s visions. Moreover, the failures are not separate from the transgressions that occur when the ideal traverses into conscious reality. Many of the British fascist organisations were derelict by 1939. A good degree of the progenitors had killed themselves through abuse or had turned far away from the movement. Many drifted into obscurity after their release from internment, never to be heard of again.[18] For those who continued to wrestle with the vision like Arnold Leese, the reality became evidently more disturbing – he simultaneously denied the holocaust and criticised Hitler only on the grounds that he did not finish the job at hand. The only individuals who seemed to have some malleability to changing times were Oswald Mosley and his wife, Lady Diana Mitford. Contrary to the projections of masculine superiority, the rest disintegrated. The notion that the masculine ideal was conducive to a construct of power or hegemony is difficult to apply when considering the British fascists. Their failures were not due to just the British principles or tradition within empire and governance. Rather, the ideal and its intimate attachments to the subconscious is as definitive a reason into why the ideology failed. The realm of masculinity, whether pursued by some of the women running the organisations or the man who turned his hand to it once, is inextricably attached to the ideological fabric of fascism. However, this does not translate into assurance of power. If one is to concentrate on this one principle, they risk ignoring the death and misery of many of those involved with the course of the ideology during its interwar existence. To understand fascism on a deeper phenomenological level, there is a need to understand the reality of man and the interpretation of the existence he may have alongside the extremity of ideology. Arron Cockell is currently pursuing his PHD at the University of Glasgow, focusing on masculinity, intellectual and societal history, having completed his MA in Modern History at the University of Leeds. Notes: [1] To explore this notion further from Nietzsche: Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil : Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (London, England ; New York, New York, USA : Penguin Books, [1990] ©1990, 1990). Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality. Vol. 9 (Cambridge University Press, 1998). Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra : A Book for All and None (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2006., 2006). For reference to Nietzsche’s thought within the context of fascism: Howard Williams, 'Nietzsche and Fascism', History of European Ideas, 11 (1989), 893-99. Ishay Landa, Fascism and the Masses: The Revolt against the Last Humans, 1848-1945 (Routledge, 2018). [2] For more on the Absolute and the phenomenology of spirit, see: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Miller Arnold V. Findlay J. N. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977). [3] Giovanni Gentile, 'Manifesto of Fascist Intellectuals', A Primer of Italian Fascism (1925), 297-303. Giovanni Gentile, Origins and Doctrine of Fascism: With Selections from Other Works (Routledge, 2017). [4] Rotha Lintorn Orman in the Fascist Bulletin. 26th Sept, 1925. [5] Kenneth Lunn, and Richard C Thurlow, British Fascism: Essays on the Radical Right in Inter-War Britain (Routledge, 2015), p. 13. [6] Otto Dix, ‘Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia Von Harden’, (1926). [7] For more on the Nazis reception on Surrealism and Modernism, see: Michael H Kater, Culture in Nazi Germany (Yale University Press, 2019). [8] Tinto Brass, Salon Kitty (1976). [9] Ibid. [10] Arno Breker, ‘Der Wäger’, (1936). [11] George Mosse points towards the influence of the image of classical antiquity in the construction of masculine myth. See: George L Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 32-39. [12] References to Gustav Dore’s The Wandering Jew (1852) and ‘The Cuckoo’ in The Hidden Hand I, (November 1920). Latter located in: Gisela C Lebzelter, Political Anti-Semitism in England 1918-1939 (De Gruyter, 2011). [13] Melanie Tebbutt, Being Boys: Youth, Leisure and Identity in the Inter-War Years (Manchester University Press, 2017), p. 92. [14] Tony Collins, 'Return to Manhood: The Cult of Masculinity and the British Union of Fascists', The International journal of the history of sport, 16 (1999), p. 150. [15] J.F.C. Fuller in Thomas Linehan, British Fascism 1918-39: Parties, Ideology and Culture (Manchester University Press, 2021), p. 42. [16] Roger Griffin, ‘British Fascism: The Ugly Duckling', in The Failure of British Fascism (Springer, 1996), p. 151. [17] Stephen M. Cullen, 'Political Violence: The Case of the British Union of Fascists', journal of Contemporary History, 28. 2 (1993), 245-67. [18] Many of the British fascist members and progenitors were interned during the WW2. This was permissible under the legislation of the Defence Regulation 18B act which was passed in 1939. As many of the British fascists were hard to pin down, the majority were interned from 1940 onwards.

1950s London, an increasingly cosmopolitan capital city, witnessed “vice” pushed to the forefront of public anxieties. Vice came in the form of transgressive sexuality, namely male homosexuality and female prostitution; its composition changed through spatial and public visibility in this decade, but the driving force transforming social developments into significant public anxiety was the media’s era of pruriency and sensationalism. Combined with fears of the Cold War, immigration, concerns for London’s presentation on an international stage, and the focus on strong national identity, the frequency and tone of vice-centred news stories underlined these anxieties. That vice was such a significant focus during the 1950s is indisputable; the resultant Wolfenden Committee, commissioned in 1954 and lasting until 1957, shows the prevalence of these discourses. Vice was depicted and believed to be a direct threat to principled society; with growing xenophobic sentiments throughout this period, there was a growing belief this was a foreign threat imported to an inherently moral Britain. Tabloid pruriency was fuelled both by public titillation and journalistic moral crusading. Concerns with burgeoning competition from television ushered in this sensationalist era of the media, intensifying the coverage of vice emerging from Fleet Street. The sensationalism of the media when conflating other national worries in a context of London on the international stage exacerbated anxieties; none of these forms of vice or their reception were new occurrences in the 1950s, but the extent of their presence in the public sphere intensified fears. When discussing the role of media sensationalism in contributing to the public anxieties of the 1950s, it is vital to consider the motivations of newspapers and journalists to promote these anxieties. Frank Mort has commented on the combination of increasing commercial pressures, the advent of competition from television and a renewed moral responsibility felt by many journalists.[1] The increasing pruriency of the tabloids was a result of these developments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Stories became more dramatic and salacious, increasingly focusing on human and social features as they were profitable either due to the voyeuristic interest of the public or outrage of a morality-centric Britain. Journalists such as Duncan Webb and Douglas Warth exemplify this tabloid revolution; the numerous exposés, largely concerning prostitution connected to organised crime, were promulgated across decades of news stories, often recomposing old information. Warth’s 1949 exposé identified Shepherd Market as hotspot for foreign prostitution while Webb’s notorious exposé series targeted around the Maltese Messina brothers and connections to organised crime. To an extent, these journalists also saw themselves as crusaders of the truth, in a trend of ‘justifiable sensationalism’.[2] Warth, in his series published in the Sunday Pictorial named ‘Evil Men’, outlined his motivations to highlight homosexuality as a vice because previous silence on the topic had allowed it to spread.[3] Likewise, Webb saw his coverage of vice as justified through a sense of duty to the public, despite its’ unsavoury nature.[4] This “unsavoury” nature of vice had previously limited coverage of homosexuality and prostitution but, fuelled by the post-war moral panic, it developed into a more debated subject.[5] Douglas Sutherland touches on the shifts in moral standards in tandem with journalism after the war in his depiction of life in 1950s London. While he recounts that immediately following the end of the war there was a relaxation of moral standards, a so-called “sigh of relief”, this allowed for the flourishing of criminality and frivolity which therefore saw a backlash in this reinvigorated sense of journalistic crusading that Warth took as an opportunity to curb vice.[6] Moral panics were not a new phenomenon in London; this concept of deviancy as a threat to society was almost commonplace in British society. However, the moral panic following from the world wars, in which a mindset of undivided morality was widely promoted, differed from previous panics with the intensity of media attention and its inescapability.[7] This founds the basis for the argument that media was the primary reason behind public anxieties of vice in the 1950s. Both commercial sex and homosexuality were by no means recent occurrences, but the increase in and type of reporting they received saw this explosion in public discourse. Worries about immigration and multiculturalism meant the existence of foreign sex workers clients drew an increasing amount of attention to an already troubled atmosphere, intensified further by fears of espionage. Public imagination often saw female prostitutes as foreign, mainly French, and the connection between commercial sex and pimps from European gangs resulted in a general belief that vice was being imported from abroad and defiling an inherently moral Britain.[8] Helen Self commented on two moral panics across this period. Firstly, the concern over tourists faced with sexual depravity on London’s streets, and secondly, the xenophobic fear of immigration producing foreign gangsters and pimps.[9] The conflation of organised crime with vice exacerbated public anxieties, making it appear as if the whole of London was underneath the thumb of a single criminal entity. Exposé’s such as Webb’s enflamed these anxieties and allowed for an apparent justification of the moral panic against vice. Male homosexuality was also included in this aspect of the moral panic. The ‘Sexual McCarthyism’ which had originated in the U.S. saw witch hunts for homosexual men due to fears of espionage. This began travelling to London by the 1950s and intensified after the Cambridge Five Scandal began to unfold.[10] The Cambridge Five, a spy ring passing information to the USSR, entered public consciousness after members Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess fled there in 1951. Burgess, who was openly homosexual, and Maclean, who was married but understood to be bisexual, gave ammunition to tabloids to connect their espionage to their “vice”; this connection was not made in tabloids immediately, but by 1956 there was a strong assertion that homosexuality impacted moral integrity and thus was a matter of national concern.[11] The narrative provided to the public was that the weak morality and emotional instability of homosexual men made them national security risks. Douglas Sutherland commented that “it has become accepted dogma by readers of the avalanche of print which it has inspired that all homosexuals are a security risk if not active spies”[12] while the Sunday Mirror published ‘How to spot a possible homo’ in 1963 which gave the secret service a guide to identify and remove homosexuals after this scandal.[13] A wider discourse of transgressive sexuality and commercial sex also became attached to treason through a weakness of moral character. In the dichotomous London, an overworld and underworld existed to separate the world of supposed vice to that of morality. Those that were involved with the underworld of vice, especially homosexual men, dealt with secrecy and thus there was a correlation between more homosexual men recruited for espionage, if only due to more extortion material. However, this was promoted as a causation in the frequent prurient stories emerging from Fleet Street, which presented homosexuality as a weakness of character and thus, a target for treason. The role of the tabloids was vital in translating scandals and other anxieties of the 1950s into a general moral panic conflating vice with national integrity, and the Vassall and Profumo scandals of the early 1960s saw the continuation and explosion of this. Gillian Swanson’s discussion of sexuality with morality asserts that the scandals of the 1960s consolidated growing sentiments from the previous decade that a lack of discipline threatened the stability of Britain as a nation; the feminisation of male homosexuality, as well as the unregulated feminine sexuality in commercial sex, were obstacles to achieving a national identity which would be inherently male.[14] This alignment between homosexuality and female promiscuity, frequently equated with sex work in reports, allowed for a further justification by the press in reporting about the dangers of vice. The other moral panic in London concerned the visual presence of vice into the city which would be perceived by tourists. As London further joined European cities as an imperial metropolis, it received more attention on an international stage. In addition to this, London was particularly highlighted in the late 1940s and early 1950s due to large scale events. The London Olympics of 1948 and the Festival of Britain in 1951 witnessed large swathes of tourists arriving in London, but the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953 was the ultimate occasion for London to cement its status as a world city. Mort comments that the coronation gave journalists an opportunity to expose the vice that threatened the capital’s integrity.[15] This aligns with the argument that public anxieties about vice in the 1950s were either formed or intensified by the tabloids, and the spatiality of vice was a key element. The infiltration of female prostitution and male homosexuality into the public sphere and onto the streets brought into question the public versus private dichotomy of sexuality. The rhetoric informing tabloids claiming the streets needed to be cleaned up before the coronation was championed by Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe, Home Secretary from 1951 to 1954, which in turn led to the Wolfenden Committee. Soho, now seen as a vice underworld, became more cosmopolitan thus its longstanding status as a centre of homosexual men and female prostitution for decades was more obvious to the public eye. Commercialised sexuality, in venues such as Murray’s Club witnessed vice entering more public spheres. The changes to the geography of commercial sex in the post-war period is significant in understanding this narrative; the County of London Plan from 1943 aimed for the city to be neatly sectioned and functional, but this did not translate to reality. Laite dissected the movement of prostitution throughout the city, with increases in Hyde Park, Paddington, Mayfair, Victoria and Stepney, each with a distinctive reputation.[16] Stepney, for example, produced the ‘Stepney Problem’ with working class women and mainly immigrant client bases, which fed the narrative that vice was an imported European issue. A large basis for the rhetoric of an imported vice was the arrival of West Indian immigrants; young black men were heavily associated with sexuality and therefore vice. Racial tensions skyrocketed in this decade, and hostilities towards the West Indian diaspora often developed in the form of anxieties of lower moral standards accompanying them to the paragon of Britain. The severity of public reaction to the Profumo scandal could lend to Keeler’s involvement with two West Indian men alongside British high society; miscegenation and vice were seemingly infiltrating British society. Changes to the visible social fabric of London resulted in the exacerbation of pre-existing anxieties about the uncontainable vice, and the depiction of its importation from both West Indian and European immigration. Sex work’s spatial changes throughout the city was equated with a direct rise in prostitution. However, the issue seems to be less that there was an increase in commercial sex, but that there was an increase in its visibility. Rising arrest numbers for solicitation and an increase in the boldness of sex workers on the street were wielded by the tabloids to claim vice was uncontrollable without mention of other factors. For example, there were economic crises for sex workers as less work was available with the departure of soldiers, thus more risks were taken to secure work. The dramatic rise of arrest rates in Soho in the 1950s was partially due to a higher visibility of sex work rather than purely higher rates of solicitation. Caslin and Laite have argued that the transition to peacetime after the war resulted in an increase in solicitation arrests due to this governmental pressure to control the social problem of prostitution.[17] The heightened police action was to an extent self-reinforcing; more arrests were made when more police action was dedicated to curbing street prostitution, and when these arrests were shown an increase in sex work, further police action was called for. The visibility of male homosexuality also rose in public consciousness during the 1950s, partially due to some high-profile cases. Alongside Burgess and Maclean’s defection to the Soviet Union in 1951 other prominent figures such as Baron Montagu, Peter Wildeblood, Michael Pitt-Rovers John Gielgud, William Fielding and Rupert Croft-Cooke were all involved to some extent in public charges or convictions of homosexual practices. A seemingly exponential increase in male homosexuality was a prominent theme in tabloid coverage which, in tandem with concerns over vice infecting new facets of London spatially and socially, exacerbated growing public anxieties. In particular, the Wildeblood, Montagu and Pitt-Rivers trial of 1954 took centre stage in the media, and Waters has argued that this was the catalyst for the decision to call for the Wolfenden Committee along with an increase in the number of arrests. In 1953, 2166 men were tried for homosexual offences, with 1257 found guilty, compared to approximately 400 cases annually in the 1930s.[18] However, as with solicitation arrests, there is a correlation between an increased police presence and their arrests rather than a simple increase in homosexuality but more its visibility. As London became heralded as the vice capital of Europe, the sense of urban spectatorship grew and was capitalised on. The Good Time Guide to London published in 1951 promised the London tourist access to the vice on offer in the city. This leans into the sense of sexual titillation which journalistic sensationalism relied upon, and the duality of the city to both commodify and neutralise the vice meant it was at its height in public consciousness. The increase of media coverage and sensationalism into the public consciousness during the 1950s is paramount in understanding why vice became such a significant focus for public anxieties. In the post-war transitionary period, male homosexuality and female prostitution came into focus as a threat to a moral society. The importation of vice from the European continent was fuelled by external factors and acted to exacerbate the anxieties further; concerns over espionage, immigration and organised crime were connected to vice and repeatedly publicised by journalists. The increased visibility of male homosexuality and female prostitution both physically on the streets and socially in consciousness was consolidated by the media; it became particularly significant in the context of London’s presence on the international stage, with tourists flocking to the city for the Coronation and its creation as an imperial metropolis. Vice was posited as harmful to British society, and its repeated publication meant it was inescapable, resulting in the creation and intensification of public anxieties about vice in the 1950s. Molly Davies is currently in her 3rd year of a BA in History at the University of Manchester. Notes: [1] Frank Mort, ‘Mapping Sexual London: The Wolfenden Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution 1954-57’, New Formations: Sexual Geographies 37 (1999), pp. 92-113. [2] Julia Laite, ‘Justifiable Sensationalism: Newspapers, Public Opinion and Official Policy about Commercial Sex in mid twentieth century Britain’, Media History 20.2 (2014), pp. 126-145. [3] Chris Waters, ‘Disorders of the Mind, Disorders of the Body Social: Peter Wildeblood and the Making of the Modern Homosexual’, in Moments of Modernity: Reconstructing Britain, 1945-1964, ed. by Becky Conekin et al. (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1999), pp.134-151. [4] Laite, ‘Justifiable Sensationalism’, p.128. [5] Adrian Bingham, Family Newspapers? Sex, Private Life and the British Popular Press 1918-1979, (Oxford University Press, 2009), p.160. [6] Douglas Sutherland, Portrait of a Decade: London Life 1945-1955, (London: Harrap, 1988), pp. 90-92. [7] Julia Laite, Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens: Commercial Sex in London 1885-1960, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p.180. [8] Bingham, Family Newspapers?, p.164. [9] Helen Self, Prostitution, Women and the Misuse of the Law: The Fallen Daughters of Eve, (Frank Cass, 2003), p. 69. [10] Waters, ‘Disorders of the Mind’, p.138. [11] Gillian Swanson, ‘Good-Time Girls, Men of Truth and a Thoroughly Filthy Fellow: Sexual Pathology in the Profumo Affair’, New Formations24.1 (1994), 122-154 (128). [12] Sutherland, Portrait of a Decade, pp.175-177. [13] Mary Manjikian, Gender, Sexuality, and Intelligence Studies: The Spy in the Closet, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), p.110. [14] Swanson, ‘Good-Time Girls’, p. 124. [15] Mort, ‘Mapping Sexual London’, p. 96. [16] Laite, Common Prostitutes, pp. 179-182. [17] Samantha Caslin and Julia Laite, Wolfenden’s Women: Prostitution in Postwar Britain, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), pp. 7-8. [18] Waters, ‘Disorders of the Mind’, p. 137.