Britain as a global power in the twentieth century

This chapter examines the extent to which Britain's status as a global power in the twentieth century was underpinned by the existence of its empire. It suggests that, in a military sense, empire represented an uncertain resource. While the mobilization of the empire in the two world wars was ultimately crucial to British victory, its latent power in the years leading to those conflicts was poorly appreciated, not least by UK policy‐makers themselves. As such, it had limited value as a deterrent to Britain's enemies. Furthermore, the process of mobilizing the empire for war placed an almost intolerable strain on the fragile structures of imperial control. Britain's continuing aspirations to play the role of a global power following post‐war decolonization reflect the extent to which its overseas interests had always transcended the formal boundaries of empire. Meanwhile the Anglo‐American alliance provided Britain with a degree of security that its empire had never offered.

Sharing power? Prospects for a U.S. concert-balance strategy

The Pax Americana and the grand strategy of hegemony (or “Primacy”) that underpins it may be becoming unsustainable. Particularly in the wake of exhausting wars, the Global Financial Crisis, and the shift of wealth from West to East, it may no longer be possible or prudent for the United States to act as the unipolar sheriff or guardian of a world order. But how viable are the alternatives, and what difficulties will these alternatives entail in their design and execution? This analysis offers a sympathetic but critical analysis of alternative U.S. National Security Strategies of “retrenchment” that critics of American diplomacy offer. In these strategies, the United States would anticipate the coming of a more multipolar world and organize its behavior around the dual principles of “concert” and “balance,” seeking a collaborative relationship with other great powers, while being prepared to counterbalance any hostile aggressor that threatens world order. The proponents of such strategies argue that by scaling back its global military presence and its commitments, the United States can trade prestige for security, shift burdens, and attain a more free hand. To support this theory, they often look to the 19th-century concert of Europe as a model of a successful security regime and to general theories about the natural balancing behavior of states. This monograph examines this precedent and measures its usefulness for contemporary statecraft to identify how great power concerts are sustained and how they break down. The project also applies competing theories to how states might behave if world politics are in transition: Will they balance, bandwagon, or hedge? This demonstrates the multiple possible futures that could shape and be shaped by a new strategy. viii A new strategy based on an acceptance of multipolarity and the limits of power is prudent. There is scope for such a shift. The convergence of several trends—including transnational problems needing collaborative efforts, the military advantages of defenders, the reluctance of states to engage in unbridled competition, and hegemony fatigue among the American people—means that an opportunity exists internationally and at home for a shift to a new strategy. But a Concert-Balance strategy will still need to deal with several potential dilemmas. These include the difficulty of reconciling competitive balancing with cooperative concerts, the limits of balancing without a forward-reaching onshore military capability, possible unanticipated consequences such as a rise in regional power competition or the emergence of blocs (such as a Chinese East Asia or an Iranian Gulf), and the challenge of sustaining domestic political support for a strategy that voluntarily abdicates world leadership. These difficulties can be mitigated, but they must be met with pragmatic and gradual implementation as well as elegant theorizing and the need to avoid swapping one ironclad, doctrinaire grand strategy for another.

Femininity, feminism and the terrorist

This chapter aims to discuss the relationship between femininity and representations of women involved in violence, focussing on visual representations. Miranda Alison has made the point that the repeated necessity to qualify the term 'combatant' with the descriptor 'female' draws attention to how women soldiers, female freedom fighters, female suicide bombers and female terrorists are exceptional figures. That the female combatant or the female terrorist is an aberration or a deviation from a masculine norm is undermined by the lengthy history of women as warriors, fighters, and terrorists. In that sense it is not so much that fighting women are rare but that there is amnesia within cultural memories concerning the woman fighter. However, in representations of conflict, the dominant image associated with femininity is passive; that is as the defenceless and the defended, or as the allegory of peace. Moreover, representations of men in wars as defeated or wounded means feminising such figures. Miriam Cooke, in her Women and the War Story, 1996, points out how a mythic war story provides men with political roles, in the politikon or public arena, whereas women are domesticated in the space of the oikon. In the mythic war story women may function as Mater Dolorosa, Patriotic Mother or Spartan Mother. It follows then that there are conditions in which it is permissible to represent women fighting on behalf of their children or in defence of the home, and in the absence of men. These images are also found in wider culture: Sarah Connor in Terminator or Ripley in Alien, for example. Images of the female terrorist raise new issues but I want to argue that it is also the case that discussing femininity and the terrorist must involve relating such imagery to representations of the female warrior over a longer timespan. Some questions have shifted since the late twentieth century. Dating from the early 1990s, most Western nations increasingly incorporated women into combat roles within their armed forces. This paper will aim to unpick some of the intricate connections between the increasing presence of women in the armed forces, what relationship this has to emancipation and the participation of women in violence classed as terrorist.

International terrorism, domestic political instability, and the escalation effect

What are the main causes of international terrorism? Despite the meticulous examination of various candidate explanations, existing estimates still diverge in sign, size, and significance. This article puts forward a novel explanation and supporting evidence. We argue that domestic political instability provides the learning environment needed to successfully execute international terror attacks. Using a yearly panel of 123 countries over 1973–2003, we find that the occurrence of civil wars increases fatalities and the number of international terrorist acts by 45%. These results hold for alternative indicators of political instability, estimators, subsamples, subperiods, and accounting for competing explanations.

Impegno nero: Italian intellectuals and the African-American struggle

In the aftermath of the Second World War, Italian intellectuals participated in Italy’s reconstruction with an ideological commitment inspired by the African-American struggle for equal rights in the United States. Drawing on the work of many of the leading figures in postwar Italian culture, including Italo Calvino, Giorgio Caproni, Cesare Pavese, and Elio Vittorini, this essay argues that Italian intellectual impegno—defined as the effort to remake Italian culture and to guide Italian social reform—was united with a significant investment in the African-American cause. The author terms this tendency impegno nero and traces its development in the critical reception of African-American writers including W.E.B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, and Richard Wright. Postwar impegno nero is then contrasted with the treatment of African-American themes under Fascism, when commentators had likewise condemned American racism, but had paradoxically linked their laments for the plight of African Americans with defenses of the racial policies of the Fascist regime. Indeed, Fascist colonialism and anti-Semitism were both justified through references to what Fascist intellectuals believed to be America’s greater injustices. After 1945, in contrast, Italian intellectuals advocated an international, interdependent campaign for justice, symbolizing national reforms by projecting them onto an emblematic America. In this way, impegno nero revived and revised the celebrated "myth of America" that had developed in Italy between the world wars. Advancing a new, postwar myth, Italian intellectuals adopted the African-American struggle in order to reinforce their own efforts in the ongoing struggle for justice in Italy.

Economic crises in England, 1270-1520: a statistical approach

The chapter examines how far medieval economic crises can be identified by analysing the residuals from a simultaneous equation model of the medieval English economy. High inflation, falls in gross domestic product and large intermittent changes in wage rates are all considered as potential indicators of crisis. Potential causal factors include bad harvests, wars and political instability. The chapter suggests that crises arose when a combination of different problems overwhelmed the capacity of government to address them. It may therefore be a mistake to look for a single cause of any crisis. The coincidence of separate problems is a more plausible explanation of many crises.

Paix et guerre selon Christine de Pizan

Analysis of the thinking on just war and conflict mediation of the only classical woman strategist, who lived around 1400, and wrote this with a view to the Hundred Years' War and civil wars and insurgencies taking place in her lifetime. Christine de Pizan's Feats of Arms and Chivalry would later become the first printed and widely distributed field manual, translated into English and printed by Caxton for Henry VII Tudor.

Palaeoenvironmental evidence for the impact of the crusades on the local and regional environment of medieval (13th–16th century) northern Latvia, eastern Baltic

This paper evaluates the impact of the crusades on the landscape and environment of northern Latvia between the 13th–16th centuries (medieval Livonia). The crusades replaced tribal societies in the eastern Baltic with a religious state (Ordenstaat) run by the military orders and their allies, accompanied by significant social, cultural and economic developments. These changes have previously received little consideration in palaeoenvironmental studies of past land use in the eastern Baltic region, but are fundamental to understanding the development and expansion of a European Christian identity. Sediment cores from Lake Trikāta, located adjacent to a medieval castle and settlement, were studied using pollen, macrofossils, loss-on-ignition and magnetic susceptibility. Our results show that despite continuous agricultural land use from 500 BC, the local landscape was still densely wooded until the start of the crusades in AD 1198 when a diversified pattern of pasture, meadow and arable land use was established. Colonisation followed the crusades, although in Livonia this occurred on a much smaller scale than in the rest of the Ordenstaat; Trikāta is atypical showing significant impact following the crusades with many other palaeoenvironmental studies only revealing more limited impact from the 14th century and later. Subsequent wars and changes in political control in the post-medieval period had little apparent effect on agricultural land use.

Varieties of parliamentarianism

From the start of the English civil war, the parliamentarians were a fragmented coalition, held together by distrust of the king and a belief that Parliament was entitled to lead action to remedy his government’s deficiencies. The driving motivations of parliamentarians were various, including the religious commitments of puritanism, legalistic thought about the ancient constitution, and more radical notions of republicanism or natural rights. Historians have disputed whether parliamentarianism had an inherent strand of radicalism – or radical potential – from the early 1640s, but radicalization certainly took place as the civil wars went on, alongside more ‘conservative’ reactions against the propaganda and wartime measures employed by parliament. Parliamentarian radicalism itself was varied in character, embracing the Levellers’ populism, parliamentary absolutism, and millenarian and providentialist ideas.

Post-conflict recovery and peacebuilding

Civil wars are the most common type of large scale violent conflict. They are long, brutal and continue to harm societies long after the shooting stops. Post-conflict countries face extraordinary challenges with respect to development and security. In this paper we examine how countries can recover economically from these devastating conflicts and how international interventions can help to build lasting peace. We revisit the aid and growth debate and confirm that aid does not increase growth in general. However, we find that countries experience increased growth after the end of the war and that aid helps to make the most of this peace dividend. However, aid is only growth enhancing when the violence has stopped, in violent post-war societies aid has no growth enhancing effect. We also find that good governance is robustly correlated with growth, however we cannot confirm that aid increases growth conditional on good policies. We examine various aspects of aid and governance by disaggregating the aid and governance variables. Our analysis does not provide a clear picture of which types of aid and policy should be prioritized. We find little evidence for a growth enhancing effect of UN missions and suggest that case studies may provide better insight into the relationship between security guarantees and economic stabilization.

Profits, malversations, restitutions. Les bénéfices des financiers durant la guerre de la Ligue d’Augsbourg et la taxe de Chamillart

Profit, embezzlement, restitution. The role of the traitants in the Nine Years War and Chamillart’s tax on financial benefits The aim of this article is to revisit the question of the financiers in Old Regime France. It starts with an analysis of the discourses about the financiers under the Absolute monarchy that underlines the complexity of their relationship with the government and the public. It then reviews the secondary literature and highlights the existence of competing historical interpretations (functional, political, utilitarian), which raise the question of their overall capacity to account for the role and impact of the financiers at different times. On this ground, the article focuses on a specific group of financiers, the so-called traitants d’affaires extraordinaires, during the Nine Years War. Further to a description of the specific role and scope of the activities of the various financiers responsible for helping the monarchy to raise the funds it needed to pay for its peace and wartime expenditure, the article examines the conditions and profits granted by the king in his contracts with the traitants whose services were hired for the purpose of selling royal offices in the public and advancing the revenue to the Treasury. It also explores the contractual arrangements of the companies established by the financiers to manage their operations as well as the rights and the responsibilities of their various stakeholders. These bases being laid, the article relies on the administrative correspondence relating to the traités during the Nine Years War to address a range of issues, in particular the extent to which these contracts, and other control procedures, were robust enough to deter fraud. The accounts of two traitants’ companies offer an opportunity to analyse and compare the structure of their income and expenditure (including the volume and cost of the promissory notes sold in the public to finance their payments to the Treasury), to explore the strategies of the contractors, to calculate their net profits and further discuss the problem of embezzlement. The article ends with the study of the context and debates which led to the introduction by finance minister Michel Chamillart, in 1700, of a shortfall tax on the financial profits of the gens d’affaires or traitants, the method used to determine its rate (50 % of the net benefits), its distribution among the various stakeholders (including the bailleurs de fonds or backers), and the related procedures. In total, the article argues that the relationship between the monarchy, society and the financiers under the Ancien Regime was not static and, therefore, suggests that the broad question of control and fraud must be examined against changing circumstances. With regard specifically to the Nine Years War, the article concludes that within the constraints of the Absolute monarchy, contractors offered valuable services by raising capital for the benefit of a king who ruled over a country which, at the time, was by far the wealthiest in Europe, and where ministers failed to foresee long wars of attrition and whose financial strategy was limited by the very existence of privilege. Overall, the traités were too costly to be a viable system of war financing. In these conditions, the substantial fortunes made by a handful of very successful traitants suffice to explain that the government easily gave in to public criticism against the wealth of the financiers and felt compelled, when peace resumed, to cancel the advantageous conditions offered in the treaties by taxing financial profits.

The history of the practice of strategy from Antiquity to Napoleon

This chapter outlines the history of the practice of strategy, predating the introduction of the term. It homes in on episodes of European history since Antiquity for which historians claim to have found evidence of the practice of strategy, defined by Kimberly Kagan as ‘the setting of a state’s objectives and of priorities among those objectives’ in order to allocate resources and choose the best means. While focusing only on Europe, this chapter covers case studies over nearly 2500 ranging from the wars of Ancient Greece, of the Romans to Medieval warfare (here with a focus on English history), the warfare of Philip II of Spain, Louis XIV of France, Frederick II of Prussia, the French Revolutionaries and Napoleon.