Search Results

This chapter describes Johnson’s experience of translating A Voyage to Abyssinia during a period of mental illness, which resulted in his discursive possession. The chapter analyzes how the multiple conflicting sources of the textwould have contributed to such.

Johnson was drawn to Voyage historique d'Abissinie, this chapter proposes, by its African Christianity. That is, translating it was a way of thinking about what it meant to be a Christian and how differently Christianity could be imagined. That Johnson’s interest in the text was that of a religious explorer becomes clear when examining his reading, his religious beliefs, and his editing of Voyage historique d'Abissinie.

On September 19, 1931, Japan began the process of converting the Chinese province of Manchuria into its own puppet state of Manchukuo, thus calling into question an earlier pronouncement about the prospects of peace just nine days before, However, peace movements fare best when optimism is seasoned with a dash of pessimism: although the former gives their ideas plausibility, the latter is needed to give them urgency. In the early 1930s, the mixture was therefore ideal: the optimism carried over from the post-Locarno period ignited with the pessimism generated by Japanese, German, and Italian behaviour to stimulate the most intense phase of peace activism ever, of which unquestionably the highlight was the extraordinary Peace Ballot of 1934–5.

Britain's attitude towards international relations was altered by the triple crisis of 1936: the remilitarization of the Rhineland, the final defeat of Abyssinia in May, and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Both the peace movement and public opinion had started to polarize. One current of opinion was drawn to the pole of accommodation: many pacifists advocated peaceful change: many defencists supported appeasement; unprecedented numbers of pacifists threw in their lot with the Peace Pledge Union and other new associations; and a section of the far left still favoured war resistance. Another current of opinion was attracted by the opposite pole of containment: the leaders of the League of Nations Union still supported collective security even though they now understood that it required rearmament: many socialist pacificists came to advocate a ‘peace front’ of the progressive states against the fascist ones: and those defencists who shared the concerns of Winston Churchill, since 1929 a backbencher, called for more energetic rearmament.

This chapter talks about a musical ensemble known as the “Memphis Students”. It tells of how Cook stole the group away from their original organizer, took them on a European tour, and how their performances were praised. It narrates that In Abyssinia represented the most elaborate efforts to date of Jesse A. Shipp, Alex Rogers, Bert Williams, and Will Cook. It also discussed that Cook also composed and conducted stage shows at the Pekin Theater in Chicago. It shows that the theater encouraged many talented performers to become members of its Negro Stock Company and that it was also responsible for the early development of many singers and actors who later acquired national fame. It then tells of the end of the golden age of black musical comedies, brought by the death of Ernest Hogan, George Walker, and Bob Cole.

This chapter examines the case of Harry Foster Dean, whose “The Pedro Gorino: The Adventures of a Negro Sea-Captain in Africa and on the Seven Seas in His Attempts to Found an Ethiopian Empire” recounts the tale of his ambition to build a black empire in Africa. Dean's effort led one of the major British participants in the Scramble for Africa to call him “the most dangerous ‘negro’ in the world.” The chapter also addresses the unofficial diplomatic role of William Henry Ellis, a flashy African American millionaire and the first American to visit with Emperor Menelik in 1903. Ellis was not the only African American to visit Abyssinia prior to the Second Italo-Abyssinian War. In 1922, A'Lelia Walker, daughter of the famed Madame C. J. Walker and host of a Harlem Renaissance salon, visited Empress Zauditu. Ellis did his best to curry favour with Emperor Menelik but was rumored to be planning to oust the emperor in order to take his seat on the throne.

This chapter traces the history and origins of zar in order to elucidate how it migrated with Abyssinian slavery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to Egypt. It lays the basis for understanding zar spirit possession as practiced in Cairo from the nineteenth century until today. Following a short overview of the history and origin of zar in the Red Sea region and the reasoning behind thinking about zar in Egypt as a transnational phenomenon, the chapter discusses zar practices in Cairo based on the author's fieldwork. It also considers the relationship between zar and Islam, the zar ritual placation process, spirit afflictions and their symptoms, and the role of gender and class in zar participation. Finally, it looks at zar professionals (leaders and musicians), zar music and dance, and zar paraphernalia.

While most naval action within the Mediterranean during the First World War took place in the east and in the Adriatic, in waters that lapped the shores of the disintegrating empires of the Ottomans and the Habsburgs, the entire Mediterranean became the setting for rivalry between 1918 and 1939. At the centre of the struggle for mastery of the Mediterranean lay the ambitions of Benito Mussolini, after he won control of Italy in 1922. His attitude to the Mediterranean wavered. At some moments he dreamed of an Italian empire that would stretch to ‘the Oceans’ and offer Italy ‘a place in the sun’; he attempted to make this dream real with the invasion of Abyssinia in 1935, which, apart from its sheer difficulty as a military campaign, was a political disaster because it lost him whatever consideration Britain and France had shown for him until then. At other times his focus was on the Mediterranean itself: Italy, he said, is ‘an island which juts into the Mediterranean’, and yet, the Fascist Grand Council ominously agreed, it was an imprisoned island: ‘the bars of this prison are Corsica, Tunisia, Malta and Cyprus. The guards of this prison are Gibraltar and Suez.’ Italian ambitions had been fed by the peace treaties at the end of the First World War. Not merely did Italy retain the Dodecanese, but the Austrians were pushed back in north-eastern Italy, and Italy acquired much of Italia irredenta, ‘unredeemed Italy’, in the form of Trieste, Istria and, along the Dalmatian coast, Zara (Zadar), which became famous for the excellent cherry brandy produced by the Luxardo family. Fiume (Rijeka) in Istria was seized by the rag-tag private army of the nationalist poet d’Annunzio in 1919, who declared it the seat of the ‘Italian Regency of Carnaro’; despite international opposition, by 1924 Fascist Italy had incorporated it into the fatherland. One strange manifestation, which reveals how important the past was to the Fascist dream, was the creation of institutes to promote the serious study (and italianità, ‘Italianness’) of Corsican, Maltese and Dalmatian history.

This chapter describes how Fascism dealt a severe blow to the campaign against malaria through a decision to launch its program of imperial expansion and foreign conquest. Even before the onset of the Second World War, the shift in political priorities led directly to the erosion of funds for the malaria campaign. Italy, the weakest of the European powers, could not afford both war and public health. Mussolini's belligerent foreign policy signified the end of new state initiatives in the struggle against malaria and a steep decline in support for those already in place. Thus, an unspoken corollary of the decision to invade Abyssinia in 1935 was that the period of active Fascist involvement in the war against fever came to an end. Thereafter, preparation for war subverted public health.

In May 1935, the Woolfs view Nazi Germany first hand. Woolf's 1935 diary reveals the three daunting challenges she now faces; it also showcases her great courage and effort as she seeks to counter each negation with a book. However, her inner artistic battle involves a creeping tightness. She wants to keep loose (and supple) even as she tightens The Years. Is this possible? Her diary, as usual, helps her; she turns to other diaries as well. In September, as Mussolini prepares to pounce on Abyssinia, Woolf reads first a country doctor's (Dr. John Salter’s) diary for the years 1849 to 1932 and then a literary critic’s (John Bailey's Letters and Diaries, 1861–1931). She reads, in short, male voices across “the years,” as chronicled in her novel. She enters into a dialogue with these diarists in her public works.

This chapter brings into the narrative the politics of empire as they began to be reshaped in the mid 1860s as part of Benjamin Disraeli’s first term as Chancellor of the Exchequer, then Prime Minister. The chapter argues that during the period under study, the attractiveness and success of learned societies helped, and was helped by, their transformation into collective action institutions. Societies such as the Geographical, or the Anthropological, just as the Ethnological Society before, began to play an active role in domestic politics and the politics of empire. The chapter details the mechanism at work in the context of the British Expedition to Abyssinia, which played such an important role in helping Disraeli articulate what he meant by a new, assertive, imperialism. The criticisms that learned societies voiced against the previous administration (by the Liberal Premier John Russell) came to play an important role in public debates. The Abyssinian War to release King Theodore’s hostages (two of whom being members of the ASL) was supported by such pressure groups as the Anthropological who asserted their right over foreign policy by talking about “practical anthropology” (an expression that would be reinvented by anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski in the 20th century).

This chapter focuses on the attempt to ‘sell’ rearmament – which the National Government increasingly believed was necessary – to the public through a series of White Papers outlining its position on defence in 1935 and 1936. The 1935 general election, the League of Nations Peace Ballot, the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, and the appointment of further subcommittees on defence requirements (and their effects on rearmament) are all discussed. The latter part of the chapter discusses Lithgow’s business empire, part of which was built on information he received through his work as a government advisor.

In the First and Second World Wars the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society was found again to be defending the use of forced labor. Forced labor, in porterage and in raising crops, was extensive under the special conditions of war. At the end of the First War, and then again at the end of the Second, the prospect of international cooperation to fight for the rights of colonial peoples opened up. The Society played a key role in the League of Nations preparing a Convention on Slavery. But its champion, Lady Kathleen Simon, damaged the Society’s reputation by making the case for Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia, to “stamp out slavery”. After the Second War, the Society again sought influence, now in the United Nations, but Britain’s influence was less, and the Society proved a poor example of a champion of native peoples when put next to the national liberation movements of that time.

The Indian Army defeated the Italians in Abyssinia and played a crucial role in containing Erwin Rommel’s Panzerarmee Afrika in Egypt–Libya in 1941–2. The Indian troops proved themselves masters of mountain warfare in the rolling hills of Abyssinia, in Tunisia, and also in Italy (1944). The pre-1939 Indian Army had a template of war which was geared for conducting Small War along the mountainous tracts of the North-West Frontier. Some of its elements were useful for the Indian units while fighting in the mountainous regions of Ethiopia, Tunisia, and Italy. However, in the course of the various campaigns, the Indian Army also absorbed certain new elements (such as cooperation with aircraft, anti-tank guns and tanks, use of concentrated artillery fire in fluid battlefield scenarios, etc.) for conducting conventional warfare. For instance, use of superior artillery and close air support in a quick and efficient manner at Second Alamein, Tunisia, and in Italy were some of the tactical techniques which functioned as force multipliers.

Iraq's independence seemed a harbinger of things to come, but changing geo-political conditions meant it had no sequel. Between 1933 and 1937, three revisionist powers — Germany, Japan, and Italy — all left the League. Japan's Manchurian adventure and Italy's conquest of Ethiopia were claims for direct — and not internationalized — colonial control. Germany, too, abandoned its earlier support for greater international authority to make colonial and territorial claims. This preface tracks how these crises affected the Mandates Commission and placed the mandates system as a whole under pressure.