Even though the crucial importance of World War II has never been called into doubt by historians, it has not featured as a focal point for the interpretation of the 20th century in recent narrativ...

The British Protectorate of the Ionian Islands, and particularly Corfu, was a nodal point in maritime communications. Since its very creation under the Treaty of Paris (November 1815), it gave the ...

This article traces what hindsight shows to be the failure paths of the Ottoman ruling elites in dealing with the Greek revolution of 1821–1832. It considers why Sultan Mahmud II and the Ottoman mi...

Slavery remained a problem for Central Europeans after the defeat of Napoleon. Concerns over White, Christian enslavement animated German-speaking European responses to the Greek Independence movem...

Virtually every publication on the Greek Revolution signals the Battle of Navarino (20 October 1827) as a turning point in international involvement with events in Greece. What the historiography t...

This contribution examines the position of the Habsburg Empire vis-à-vis the Greek Revolution of 1821–1830 with a special focus on policing. It suggests that with its undeniable transnational signi...

The unification of Italian public debts in 1861 has been analysed until now without any detailed investigation into the changes that occurred in pre-existent public finance models, particularly as ...

This article investigates the changing ideas of representation during one of the European upheavals of the 1830s, the Polish November Uprising. Studying the Polish Sejm proceedings, we ask about th...

Histories of the freedom of movement during the Cold War often focus on issues of immigration. Yet, national security frameworks set up after the Second World War also involved restrictions of the ...

This article investigates the first generation of peasant farmers elected to modern representative assemblies in Denmark. I argue that the contributions of the first peasant farmer politicians are ...

The article presents the idea of a third unit in the Habsburg Monarchy prior to World War I as seen through the eyes of Slovenian liberals. The author presents the broader political context in whic...

In the 20th century, Sweden distinguished itself as one of the most organized and participatory democracies in the world. But in the late 19th century the situation was much the opposite – Sweden h...

One route out of continental Europe for Jewish refugees seeking to escape Nazi and Vichy persecution was via Franco’s Spain. Yet hundreds of these refugees were imprisoned soon after arriving in th...

This article investigates the struggle for control over the violence that the Second Polish Republic and the First Czechoslovak Republic fought during their early independence in 1918. As violence ...

This article draws together historical sources and political science insights to test the emergence of civil war at the end of empire. It focuses on civil conflict in two French colonial territorie...

This article examines the process of disintegration and reconstitution of political authority in civil war with reference to the Russian (1918–1921) and Greek (1946–1949) civil wars. These conflict...

This article discusses the background and diplomatic strategies of the Turkish delegation at Lausanne and their selective understanding of self-determination, excluding non-Turkic and non-Muslim pe...

This article assesses the occurrence of civil war in the Balkans during World War II and the Axis occupation. It draws on the wartime experiences in the border areas of Kosovo (‘Greater Albania’)/S...

For most Turks the emergence of the Republic of Turkey out of the ashes of the Ottoman Empire involved a four-year period of national struggle/milli mücadele. In the version of events canonised by ...

The aim of this article is to explain why and how two formerly hostile states such as the USSR and West Germany concluded a gas deal in 1970 that lasted not only the 20 years that had been initiall...

Democratic support for measures to combat climate change has been increasing throughout Europe across the political spectrum, among liberals, social democrats and confessional parties alike.1 Acknowledging heightened environmental concerns among voters, most European governments have set up generous subsidies for windmills, solar panels and electric cars in order to stimulate decarbonization.2 Yet

Taking an analysis of relevant statements and campaigns of the right-wing extremist group ‘Identitarian Movement’ in German-speaking countries as a starting point, this article will reconstruct the...

This article demonstrates how anti-gender discourse – originating in the Vatican and spreading through ultra-conservative networks such as the World Congress of Families – draws on traditions of co...

Heightened awareness and alarmism about climate change have prompted politicians, public intellectuals and scholars alike to reconsider the political values, structures and institutions with which to confront it. A number of recurring directions of thought and experiment may be distinguished. For one, ecological authoritarianism – the strand of thought that proposes to abolish or suspend democracy

This article explores gender and the far-right in the United States with specific attention to female actors and gendered ideologies in the realms of culture and media. By focusing on several femal...

Fascination – even nostalgia – for the post-war years, which is widespread in scholarship and the public sphere in Western Europe, makes the era a key reference point in efforts to understand the development of politics and society since 1945. In scholarship, the period's resonance is readily apparent in the sparkling superlatives that have been used to describe it. In his seminal history of the short

Amid the many discussions of how environmentalism and democratic politics might intersect, perhaps the greatest challenge for historians has come from the simultaneously emergent and epochal shift into the Anthropocene. This is because the Anthropocene signals a world ‘after nature’, but that means at least two things. First, that human beings have become geological agents, and that we have become

Contemporary reactions to neofascist movements for the most part focus on national contexts, and frequently pursue a simplistic argument about a dangerous ‘repetition of history’. Warning that historical fascism might rise again like a revenant, commentators miss the fundamentally altered strategies of fascist actors in the era of digital communication and agitation. Introducing the critical term reflexive

The article examines the far-right idea of a Jewish-led ‘conspiracy of homosexualisation’ between the 1970s and the late 1990s. To this end, it primarily scrutinizes the monthly magazine Instauration, edited by Wilmot Robertson. Embedded in a broader narrative that claimed that a Jewish-led regime of ‘liberal-minority racism’ would discriminate against white people in general and White men in particular

Since the 1980s, feminist scholars have explored the dynamic linkages between nationalism and gender. Case studies have shown representations of women as reproducers, transmitters of culturally sanctioned behaviour, signifiers of ethnic groups and markers of national identity and honour. The emergence of social media created a new digital arena for the circulation of tropes related to gender and nationalism

This special issue explores the entangled history of contemporary far-right nationalism and gender. Seven case studies apply a distinct historical perspective and analyse gender as a meta-language ...

The introduction outlines content and scope of this special issue on "Housing, Hiding and the Holocaust". It points out that during World War II-ccupation accommodation became a scarce commodity, with collapsing housing markets. As a consequence, in those places where the German army (and navy) was stationed, direct contact between the occupiers and the occupied couldn't be avoided. Worst hit by housing

As elsewhere in Poland, the German occupation deeply disrupted the relations and social dynamics between the non-Jewish population and the Jews in Tarnów from the very first day. Investigating housing, property and the urban space in a society under occupation, in a Kräftefeld dominated by the German occupiers, offers new insights into this relationship. It traces the notions of an ethnically encoded

Shooting associations represented one of the most popular expressions of sociability in Imperial Germany. Their club houses were to be found in large and medium-sized towns, in villages, and in overseas colonies, too. Middle class men would regularly gather to practice shooting and to organize competitions, activities characterized by clearly gendered rituals of social life. Based on values of loyalty

The article analyses the German requisition and quartering practices in Norway in the light of international law and traces their impact on everyday relations between the enemies. With an average of 350,000 soldiers stationed in Norway, the German demand for housing was enormous. Space became a highly coveted resource. It was both the object of power struggles and a reflection of those struggles. The

During the occupation of the Netherlands, the Jewish population was systematically robbed and deprived of their property rights. Their economic and social isolation went hand in hand with a loss of social status, connectedness, security and identity, as homes were expropriated and furniture was confiscated. The process of depriving the Jews of everything they owned, which happened with such apparent

During World War II, France faced a housing crisis with over 1.2 million dwellings destroyed or damaged. In addition to the destruction, the German occupiers requisitioned thousands of accommodations including some 6–7,000 locales in Paris. Anti-Jewish persecution forced thousands of Jews from their homes and the average non-Jewish French resident, facing their own housing issues, benefited from the

Recent historiography has been more positive about the Wilhelmine German Empire, which long had a poor reputation. This might be partly due to the trend towards transnational history with a specific focus on transfer and exchange. This article argues that from such a perspective the re-evaluation of the German Empire may easily overshoot the mark. Focusing on a comparative study of Hamburg and London

“Religiöse Lektüre können wir gar nicht finden”, notierte der Hamburger Jurist Ferdinand Beneke 1809 in sein Tagebuch. Beneke, der sich uns als typischer, wo nicht gar idealtypischer Vertreter der gebildeten Stände in seinem immensen Tagebuchcorpus präsentiert, scheiterte bei seiner Suche allerdings nicht etwa daran, dass es keine religiöse Literatur gegeben hätte. Vielmehr gefiel ihm nicht recht,

With his concept of neuständische Gesellschaft, Reinhard Blänkner suggests that education or, rather, Bildung, becomes the practice that defines one's social status in the German lands between 1750 and 1850. I build on this argument by pursuing two separate but closely intertwined ideas: first, that Bildung stems from and, at the same time, displaces an older foundation of social status, honour; and

AmAnfang stand ein recht simples Instrument, umGrenzen neu zu ziehen: Das Visum ermöglicht die Auslagerung von Grenzkontrollen auf das Territorium anderer Staaten. Konsulate der Transitund Ankunftsländer kategorisieren Intention und Merkmale einer potentiell mobilen Person bereits vor einer Durchoder Einreise und legen Reisebedingungen (Zeitpunkt, Dauer, Sicherheitsleistungen) fest. Menschen können

‘Refugees welcome!’ In September 2015, pictures of crowds of asylum-seekers arriving at Munich’s central railway station were broadcasted around the world. The message that this image conveyed suggested an open-minded Germany, awakening memories of the autumn of 1989 when thousands of people from the German Democratic Republic flooded into the West. This time, however, the migrants were largely displaced

Amira hatte wenig Grund zur Hoffnung. Im Jahr 2015 war sie eine von vielen, eine Frau mit Kind wie ein Viertel der weltweit 65 Millionen Flüchtlinge. Ihre syrische Heimatstadt Homs war im Bürgerkrieg zerstört worden. Was 2011 als Teil des arabischen Frühlings begonnen hatte, spitzte sich in Syrien innerhalb weniger Jahre in einer verheerenden Spirale der Gewalt zu. Bis heute sind dem Syrienkrieg 600

As refugees know, and scholars have demonstrated, there are many ways in which the international refugee regime is Eurocentric. This includes legal definitions of refugeehood, mental maps of who is a refugee, ideas about where refugees come from, and who takes the responsibility for receiving and caring for refugees. In the fields of Refugee Studies and Critical Refugee Studies there exists a robust

Since its outbreak in 2015, the so-called ‘Syrian’ refugee crisis has been routinely dubbed by the media the worst instance of mass displacement in Europe since the end of World War II. Although violence in former Yugoslavia in the 1990s had already brought back scenes of war refugees to the continent, this comparison is not devoid of merits. The scale of population movements following the collapse

In den heißen Monaten der Flüchtlingskrise wurde das europäische Asylrecht vielfach als Begrenzung nationalstaatlicher Handlungsbefugnisse empfunden. Zaghaft rechtfertigte der deutsche Innenminister de Maizière die unterlassene Grenzschließung mit dem Hinweis, dass das deutsche Recht “in vielerlei Hinsicht vom europäischen überlagert” werde. Es schien, als ob humanitäre EU-Vorgaben die Bundesregierung

As we enter the third decade of the new millennium, the categorical distinction between refugees and migrants remains salient, yet problematic. Setting aside the question of its magnitude and causes, the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ unleashed in 2015 disclosed once more the persistent yet convoluted attempts on the part of modern states to determine who qualified as a ‘genuine’ refugee and who was deemed

In this article, I will take a fresh look at the allegedly universal belief in the immediate post-war period that the Jews had no future in post-Holocaust Poland. While providing new analysis of reports from Poland in 1946 that were written by Jewish travellers from United States, Western Europe and Palestine, my revisionist goal is to problematize and question the concept of the ‘Holocaust aftermath

This article seeks to examine the significance of firearms in the making of the frontier and the ways in which societies on the North-East Frontier of British India encountered and adapted firearms between the 1860s and 1910s. It will study the complex ways in which the entry of firearms was mediated and galvanised by a range of processes such as imperial expansion, the intrusion of capital, access

The Brussels Anti-Slavery Conference in 1889–1890 agreed upon a sales ban of modern firearms for large parts of the African continent, a covenant that served joint imperial interests amid the ‘Scramble for Africa’. This article reconstructs the historical context in which the Brussels provisions came into being and explores the inter-imperial co-operation that paved the way for the agreement. To understand

Several days after a failed assassination attempt on the life of the Russian Tsar on 2 April 1879, a new regime of ‘permission to exercise the right to purchase and carry weapons’ was introduced in St. Petersburg. Despite the fact that the first attempt on Alexander II's life occurred in 1866 (also in St. Petersburg), it took 13 years to make a radical departure from the previously unrestricted regime

This article analyses attempts to regulate the access to arms in Central America from the beginning of the World War I to the end of the 1920s. During these years, the USA was not only the politically and economically dominant force in the region – they were also the main provider of weapons. In a region where societies were reshaped by the integration into a global economy, political groups depended

Drawing on research on the international disarmament efforts of the inter-war years as well as on arms control in the empires, this article argues that arms control in the imperial periphery was an integral and very tangible part of the inter-war years’ international disarmament policies. It demonstrates that arms control in the periphery was conceived by the imperial actors involved as a pivotal part

1838 became an annus horribilis for Australian settlers: an endless draught had dried out fields and pastures, the global price for wool had sunk to a dramatic low, and thousands of new settlers flocked to Port Philipp District in New South Wales in search of land. To compound these issues, the legality of British settlers’ claims to the Australian Aborigines’ former land also suddenly seemed to be

In May 2021, the renowned Australian historian and comparative genocide scholar A. Dirk Moses published a widely read article, ‘The German Catechism’, in the Swiss online history journal Geschichte der Gegenwart. His article fed into a broader debate triggered by the publication of the German edition of Michael Rothberg’s Multidirectional Memory (2009 / German edition: 2021) and centred on ‘blindspots’

Writing about a colleague’s book is a considerable investment of time and energy for busy academics, so I am grateful to Beatrice de Graaf, Ulrike von Hirschhausen, and Michael Wildt for their learned commentaries, as well as to the journal’s editors, particularly Robert Gerwarth, for initiating the forum. Before responding to the commentaries, I briefly explain why I wrote the book, summarize its

After World War II, the welfare workers of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration and International Refugee Organization took care of refugee children in post-war Germany and assisted them in returning to their home countries. This article analyses the changes in welfare workers’ decisions about the future of unaccompanied displaced children of presumably Ukrainian origin in the

This article relates the experiences of Polish-Jewish children, born or raised in Germany, who survived the war in the Soviet hinterland, and validates that their traumatic wartime experiences had long-lasting consequences. Over the course of the years 1938 to 1945, as well as throughout the post-war decade, this group of children survived several fundamental, political transformations, which deeply

People born in the 1970s in Estonia spent their childhood during Soviet times and experienced their coming of age during the transition years of the 1990s. Experiencing the Soviet regime as children gave them experiences of that era, but kept them at a distance from involvement in regime’s culpable actions. It also enabled them to start their adult lives during the transition times, adjusting to new