Review of Filmography of World History. Greenwood. 2007. 232p, 0313326819, $59.95

This dissertation examines the histories of international adoption and child sponsorship in China from the 1930s to the 1950s to illustrate China’s crucial but unrecognized role in shaping the politics and practices of global humanitarianism. After the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937, Chinese child welfare organizations developed a new form of humanitarian fundraising in which private citizens across the world “adopted” Chinese children by funding their lives at orphanages in China. Under the adoption model, Chinese children and their foreign “foster parents” built personal relationships through the exchange of photographs, gifts, and translated letters that used familial terms of address. The relationships forged between children and their foster parents constituted a new mode of affective and material exchange across national, racial, and cultural boundaries that I call “global intimacy.” At the same time, the adoption plan was also deeply ideological, embedding the relationships between children and their sponsors within the politics of WWII and the Cold War. At once emotional and economic, humanitarian and political, the adoption plan transformed the emotional loyalties of children into a key battleground on the affective terrain of these global conflicts. The emergence of the adoption plan as one of the most successful methods of humanitarian fundraising in China precipitated a broader “intimate turn” in global humanitarian practice. During WWII, Chinese child welfare organizations developed new discursive and material practices—as well as new global administrative structures—that made the adoption of Asian children into a distinct form of humanitarian rescue. After the war, an American organization called China’s Children Fund utilized the rhetoric of Christian love to transform the adoption plan into one of the largest humanitarian programs in Asia, systematizing the transnational flow of gifts and letters to create a paradoxical bureaucracy of global intimacy. When the Chinese Communist Party came to power in 1949, rather than dismiss the adoption plan as a tool of the reactionary Nationalist Party and their American imperialist allies, they instead sought to transform it into a centerpiece of a new form of “revolutionary humanitarianism.” However, during the Korean War the CCP ultimately decided to dismantle all foreign humanitarian institutions in China, leading transnational aid organizations to again remake the adoption plan as a lynchpin of a new “Cold War humanitarianism” across East Asia. “Adopted by the World” sheds light on the global history of humanitarianism, the intertwining of intimate relations and international relations during the WWII and Cold War eras, and the political significance of children in modern Chinese history. By analyzing how Chinese child welfare institutions utilized children’s letters to mold international opinion of China, I show how children were enlisted as key actors within the political campaigns of both the Nationalist and Communist parties. Engaging with recent scholarship that has argued that the provision of global humanitarian aid served the Cold War foreign policy interests of Western powers, this dissertation explores how the recipients and critics of humanitarian aid in China both shaped and challenged the post-WWII global humanitarian order.

This thesis examines the evolution of the junior officer positions of the Roman army in the period 91BC – AD14, and the motivations, background, and status of their holders. Two introductory chapters consider the nature of the available evidence and the way in which the agendas and survival patterns of our sources have influenced modern perceptions. There follow three chapters of diachronic analysis, each analysing the number of officer positions available, the roles and functions of the junior officers, and the status of the junior officer positions in the periods 91 – 50BC, 49 – 31BC, and 30BC – AD14, and finally three thematic chapters examining professionalism and other motivations for service, the perception of service as a junior officer, and the role of the municipal elite within the junior officer corps. In addressing these issues, the thesis challenges the modern view that the junior officer corps suffered a dramatic decline in status at the start of the first century BC through unwillingness to serve on the part of the Roman social elite. Instead, emphasis is placed on the important changes which occurred within the junior officer corps during the period 49 – 31BC, when the increasing demands for both manpower and loyalty among the warring commanders had a significant impact on both the junior officer positions and the men who held them, and which also led to innovation in the organisation of auxiliary forces. The reforms of Augustus that followed, and the junior officer corps of the earliest years of the Principate are also discussed, in particular the notable military innovations of the Augustan period and the role of the Italian and provincial equestrian ordo. Furthermore, this thesis analyses the development of professionalism within the junior officer corps and the perceptions of service as a junior officer as expressed in literature as well as in epigraphic and iconographic commemoration. The thesis concludes with a series of appendices which list all attested junior officers of the period, as well as those considered junior officers by modern authorities, with discussion of those officers whose careers or dating might be considered controversial.

This study unearths the lost world of early-nineteenth-century Canton. Known today as Guangzhou, this Chinese city witnessed the economic dynamism of global commerce until the demise of the Canton System in 1842. Records of its commercial vitality and global interactions faded only because we have allowed our image of old Canton to be clouded by China's weakness beginning in the mid-1800s. By reviving this story of economic vibrancy, I restore the historical contingency at the juncture at which global commercial equilibrium unraveled with the collapse of the Canton system, and reshape our understanding of China's subsequent economic experience. I explore this story of the China trade that helped shape the modern world through the lens of a single prominent merchant house and its leading figure, Wu Bingjian, known to the West by his trading name of Houqua. I demonstrate that a large measure of Houqua's success stemmed from his ability to maintain an intricate balance between his commercial interests and those of his Western counterparts, all in an era of transnationalism before the imposition of the Western world order. The story of Houqua is at once local, regional, and global. Houqua’s business success certainly amplified the economic vitality in Canton. However, this analysis of his business success is less an examination of the Canton system than a study of the impact of an exceptional operator within this system who, through his personal business endeavors, set in motion changes that had ramifications for China’s development and the global system at large. His success in global business illustrates the construction of networks of trust for the purpose of facilitating economic exchange in the advent of an enforceable, unified international system of arbitration. The experience of his successors tells the story of the diverging economic fortunes of global traders operating formerly on equal footing. This is a story not only of an exceptional individual but also of the dynamic setting of transnational business when regional networks negotiated their connections in the emerging modern world. / History

This dissertation describes how innovations in the science of mind -- laboratory measurements, psychoanalysis, and mental testing -- changed the ideas and institutions of British imperialism. Psychology did not function as a tool of empire in any straightforward way: in many cases, the knowledge it generated called racial stereotypes into question, uncovered the traumatic effects of British rule, and drew unflattering contrasts between the hierarchical values of imperialism and an idealized vision of meritocracy. Psychology did, however, strengthen the authority of Western experts to intervene in other cultures. While they kept their distance from the political culture of officials and settlers, psychologists embraced a modernizing mission, arguing that knowledge of abilities and emotions could make colonized societies fairer and more efficient. The development projects which defined the postwar and postcolonial periods -- usually seen as the golden age of abstract, impersonal, "high modernist" planning -- relied in significant ways on the measurement and management of minds. / History

This dissertation provides an intellectual history of statelessness from the First World War to the Cold War. Statelessness arose as a distinctive legal and bureaucratic category after 1921. In the following decades, lawyers and civil servants looked to the growing numbers of stateless people in their efforts to elaborate a new liberal international order in Europe and the wider world. It contends that the problem of mass statelessness after World War I motivated the idea that individuals, rather than states, are the subjects of international legal order. Despite the celebrated turn to the language of universal human rights in the postwar era, the problem of statelessness in this period supported the consolidation of the nation-state as the central unit of global organization. International legal scholars who had celebrated the rise of supranational forms of belonging in the interwar period turned to arguments for citizenship as the basic postulate for inclusion within international legal order. The debates among legal scholars, international civil servants, and state officials serve as crucial resources for charting the impact of statelessness on international political thought. I argue that the transformation of statelessness from an important intellectual problem in the period after World War I to an ambiguous moral problem associated with human rights after 1948, contributed to its marginalization as an object of humanitarian concern and as an important category for comprehending international political and legal order. This dissertation contributes the first in-depth account of how the problem of statelessness informed developing theories of the state and international law in the twentieth century, and of the consolidation of the concept of statelessness out of practical political and humanitarian considerations. Drawing on archival sources from England, France, Switzerland, Austria, and the United States, as well as published materials, I show that the concept of statelessness was built up by a variety of transnational figures, including stateless people demanding official recognition of statelessness as an international legal category in court cases after World War I. / History

<p> The abstract is not available from PDF copy and paste.</p>

<p> Decisions have both short and long-term consequences. Sometimes we cannot see the consequences and do not know the outcomes, but we take a step and make a choice. Some after-effects are irrevocable, and some are fixable. Some decisions affect us immediately and exclusively while others have consequences that are global. When we make decisions, we sometimes doubt our decisions and ask ourselves what might have happened if another choice was made. We make choices daily, small or great, for good or bad. After World War II, South Korean president Rhee Syngman put many alleged Communists in a rehabilitation program known as the National Guidance League. Many of them were executed between 1945 and 1953 to prevent them from joining the Communist north. Rhee's decision affected many families including my own. What we choose to do has intentional and unintentional consequences. Extreme choices produce dire consequences that can subsequently influence future generations and, on a larger scale, an entire nation for decades.</p>

Thesis (doctoral)--Universitetet i Lund, 1980. / Inserted t.p. with thesis statement; in Swedish. Includes index. Bibliography: p. 153-155.

This doctoral dissertation traces how the Red Cross Movement was able to gain a foothold on the Indian subcontinent and came to play an important part in colonial civil society and in the nation-building process from the last third of the nineteenth century onwards up until the end of the interwar period. Far from being at the mere receiving end, it suggests that India played a crucial role in shaping and making the Red Cross Movement. It argues that India became an important hub of transnational and international Red Cross humanitarianism in Asia. The developments on the subcontinent had deep regional, international and global repercussions and were crucial in transforming the Red Cross into a global movement From the last third of the nineteenth century onwards, Indians started to organise humanitarian missions and institutions to help their co-religionists and co-citizens, but also as an act of claiming citizenship and of stressing their role in the ethical community of humanity. Like the Swiss Red Cross founders, Indian intellectuals too constructed a moral universe couched in universal terms, yet it was rooted in their own moral, geographical and imagined spaces of allegiance and affection. It was based on pan-Asian, pan-Islamic and anti-colonial conceptions of a supranational ethical community. By the end of the interwar period, the different humanitarian initiatives culminated in a distinctively Indian Red Cross and Red Crescent tradition. It recast the Christian mid-nineteenth programme of civilising war into a pan-Asian, anti-colonial, anti-communal and anti-racial internationalist movement that had deep reverberations beyond the Indian locality. It was upon such a humanitarian tradition that Nehru's non-alignment policy was built. By reconstructing a distinct Indian Red Cross and Red Crescent tradition this dissertation attempts to de-centre the rigorously Eurocentric and institutional focus of the current body of research on the Red Cross movement and humanitarianism more generally. It enhances our understanding of the relationship between British imperialism, decolonisation, nation-building in Asia and international and transnational humanitarianism.