This edited volume offers the first comprehensive historical overview of the Belgian medical field in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its chapters develop narratives that go beyond traditional representations of medicine in national overviews, which have focused mostly on state–profession interactions. Instead, the chapters bring more complex histories of health, care and citizenship. These new histories explore the relation between medicine and a variety of sociopolitical and cultural views and realities, treating themes such as gender, religion, disability, media, colonialism, education and social activism. The novelty of the book lies in its thorough attention to the (too often little studied) second half of the twentieth century and to the multiplicity of actors, places and media involved in the medical field. In assembling a variety of new scholarship, the book also makes a contribution to ‘decentring’ the European historiography of medicine by adding the perspective of a particular country – Belgium – to the literature.
70 DISCIPLINES 5 History peter calvert The main purpose of this chapter is to show how historians have contributed to our understanding of the processes of democratization. In the course of this the main focus will be on the different views historians have taken of alternative paths to democracy and particularly its early stages – the so-called ‘first wave’ (see Huntington 1991). To do this, however, we have first to take into account the ways in which different historians have approached the writing of history. Democratization here is taken to be a process by
T A C I T E A N H I S T O R Y 17 1 Tacitean history: Francis Bacon’s History of the Reign of King Henry VII On 30 April 1621, a ‘Confession and Humble Submission’ was read before the House of Lords. In this document, Sir Francis Bacon acknowledged that, as Lord High Chancellor, he had received bribes and was, therefore, ‘guilty of corruption’.1 The Lords responded with a harsh sentence: Bacon was given a fine of £40,000, imprisoned at the King’s pleasure, and barred from holding office or high employment in the state and from coming within twelve miles of
134 COMMERCE, FINANCE AND STATECRAFT 7 Jacobite history: Thomas Carte’s General History A more far-reaching critique both of Rapin’s History and Whiggish ideas of credit was developed by the Oxford historian Thomas Carte in the 1740s and 1750s.1 Carte was a diligent and able scholar, and the author of a series of well-documented historical works including a three-volume History and Life of James Duke of Ormonde (1735–36) and the four-volume General History of England (1747–55).2 He was also a Non-Juror and an active Jacobite conspirator. In the 1720s he
T O R Y H I S T O R Y 117 6 Tory history: Thomas Salmon’s Modern History The popularity of Rapin’s Histoire ensured that it generated a large number of responses from other historians. Indeed, both Thomas Salmon’s Modern History (1724–38), the subject of this chapter, and Thomas Carte’s General History (1747–55), the subject of the next, provided direct attacks on Rapin’s account. However, whereas Rapin had shown little interest in contemporary debates about public credit, Salmon’s and Carte’s analyses were structured around criticisms of the system of
102 COMMERCE, FINANCE AND STATECRAFT 5 Whig history: Paul de Rapin de Thoyras’s Histoire The latter years of the seventeenth century saw a series of calls for a complete account of England’s history from the Roman invasion to the present, which would be able to rival both in quality and scale the work of Livy.1 Initial attempts at such an endeavour were made by, among others, John Milton, William Temple and Jonathan Swift, while more substantial accounts emerged from Robert Brady and James Tyrrell, both of whom reached Richard II.2 A success, of sorts, was
By expanding the geographical scope of the history of violence and war, this volume challenges both Western and state-centric narratives of the decline of violence and its relationship to modernity. It highlights instead similarities across early modernity in terms of representations, legitimations, applications of, and motivations for violence. It seeks to integrate methodologies of the study of violence into the history of war, thereby extending the historical significance of both fields of research. Thirteen case studies outline the myriad ways in which large-scale violence was understood and used by states and non-state actors throughout the early modern period across Africa, Asia, the Americas, the Atlantic, and Europe, demonstrating that it was far more complex than would be suggested by simple narratives of conquest and resistance. Moreover, key features of imperial violence apply equally to large-scale violence within societies. As the authors argue, violence was a continuum, ranging from small-scale, local actions to full-blown war. The latter was privileged legally and increasingly associated with states during early modernity, but its legitimacy was frequently contested and many of its violent forms, such as raiding and destruction of buildings and crops, could be found in activities not officially classed as war.
Bertrand : I would like to start with a very simple question: why should we care about the history of the Biafran conflict today? Lasse: What I have tried to understand in my work is how the Nigerian civil war became a global issue. Initially of very marginal international interest, the conflict from around summer 1968 on was perceived as the epitome of humanitarian crisis. I wanted to understand how it has become this ‘Biafra’, how
6 Chapter 4 The spoken word Speaking of history Speaking of history: conversations about the past in Restoration and eighteenth-century England Daniel Woolf F or the past two or three centuries we have become rather used to thinking of history as something found in books. Just as we ourselves are trained to read and criticize documents, and to take these as the basis of all historical knowledge, so we tell our students which books to go off and read, what ‘authorities’ to rely on, which journals to consult, and so on. The advent of the Internet has changed
Introduction This essay discusses Red Cross museums as a medium of humanitarian communication. A long-neglected theme in public history and the historiography of humanitarianism, Red Cross museums today are vital agents in the movement’s work to communicate the values, missions, and historical achievements of Red Cross societies around the world. Local publics find those museums in the United States, the UK, or Germany – which has more than a