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The women of the Socialist/Communist Unione Donne Italiane and the lay Catholic Centro Italiano Femminile are the protagonists in this study that examines the relationship between national Italian women’s associations and international women’s movements from 1943, when the associations became active, to 1968, when another generation of activists led women’s movements in a new direction. It shows that Italian women were active political participants during the tumultuous decades of the Cold War by considering their reach and impact in relation to Italian bipolarism and world events. The book pays particular attention to the UDI’s work with the largest international postwar women’s organization, the pro-Soviet Women’s International Democratic Federation, and the CIF’s relationship with the global Catholic organization, the World Movement of Mothers, to better understand the ways in which the Cold War affected both national and international agendas for women’s rights. The Italian case is particularly significant in placing women’s movements in a broader context because it exemplifies many of the political and ideological dichotomies that characterized this period. With the Christian Democrats at the helm of the Italian government and the powerful opposition of the Communists, the Italian women’s associations developed and utilized creative negotiation strategies to advance their visions of womanhood in a new era. They applied similar practices in their international work.

This volume collects a series of reports from maritime historians across Europe, aiming to provide a coherent historical trajectory of the lives of European sailors and their dealings with the maritime labour market; the reports were presented at The Hague’s 1994 conference, ’European Sailors, 1570-1870.’ The core areas discussed in the first half of the volume include: the national maritime labour market; the international maritime labour market; working conditions for sailors; and career patterns. The second half features reports detailing the sailing history of a selection European countries:- the Netherlands; England; Scotland; Britain as a whole; Iceland; Norway; Finland; Denmark; Germany; Belgium; France; and Spain. Each report responds to a set of questions distributed by the commissioning editors, so that the data from each country can be compared and contrasted. Questions considered include the number of sailors represented in the navy, mercantile, marine, or whaling industries; the socio-economic background of sailors; wage details; recruitment policies; strikes; mutinies; and career mobility amongst sailors. The volume provides an overview of the history of sailors to enable a strengthening of data in the field of maritime history as it continues to develop and extend.

The Birth of the New Justice explains the history of plans for ad hoc and permanent international criminal courts and new international criminal laws to repress aggressive war, war crimes, terrorism, and genocide. Rather than arguing that these legal projects were attempts by state governments to project a “liberal legalism” and create an international state system that limited sovereignty, the book shows that European jurists in a variety of transnational organizations developed their ideas due to diverse motives—liberal, conservative, utopian, humanitarian, nationalist, and particularist. European jurists at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 created a controversial new philosophy of prosecution and punishment, and during the following decades, jurists in different organizations, including the International Law Association, International Association of Criminal Law, the World Jewish Congress, and the International Committee of the Red Cross, transformed the idea of the legitimacy of post-war trials and the concept of international crime to deal with myriad social and political problems. The concept of an international criminal court was never static, and the idea that national tribunals would form an integral part of an international system to enforce new laws was frequently advanced as a pragmatic—and politically convenient—solution.

During the 1920s and 1930s radio was transnational in its reach and appeal, attracting distant listeners and encouraging hopes that broadcasting would foster international understanding and world peace. As a new medium, radio broadcasting transmitted speech, music, news, and a range of exotic and authentic sounds across borders to reach audiences in other countries. In Europe radio was regulated through international consultation and cooperation to restrict interference between stations and to unleash the medium’s full potential to carry programmes to global audiences. A distinctive form of ‘wireless internationalism’ emerged, reflecting and reinforcing the broader internationalist movement and establishing structures and approaches which endured into the Second World War, the Cold War, and beyond. Distant listeners, meanwhile, used new technologies and skills to overcome unwanted noise, tune in as many stations as possible, and comprehend and enjoy what they heard. The BBC and other international broadcasters sought to produce tailor-made programmes for audiences overseas, encouraging feedback from listeners and using it to inform production decisions. The book revises our understanding of early British and global broadcasting, and of the BBC Empire Service (the precursor to today’s World Service), and shows how government influence shaped early BBC international broadcasting in English, Arabic, Spanish, and Portuguese. It also explores the wider European and global context, demonstrating how fascism in Italy and Germany, the Spanish Civil War, and the Japanese invasion of China, combined to overturn the utopianism of the 1920s and usher in a new era of wireless nationalism.

This volume seeks to critically review the contemporary state of maritime historiography, as it stands at the volume’s publication date of 1995. The volume is comprised of thirteen essays, each focused on the recent research into the maritime concerns of a particular geographical location, listed as follows: Australia; Canada; China; Denmark; Germany; Greece; Ibero-America; India; the Netherlands; the Ottoman Empire; Spain; the United States; and a final chapter concerning historians and maritime labour in Britain, Australia, and New Zealand. One concern made evident by the collection is the lack of stable identity and cohesive aims within maritime history, the subject holds many conflicting definitions and concepts. The purpose of this volume is to explore the recent developments in maritime history, plus the growth of scholarly interest, to provide a ‘beacon and stimulus for future work’ and to clearly direct and define maritime historiography toward a solid position in the field of history.

This work is a reprint of a 1962 book, British Shipping and World Competition, by maritime economist Dr S. G. Sturmey. It seeks to explain why the tonnage of ships registered in the United Kingdom declined from forty-five percent of the world total in 1900, to sixteen percent by 1960. It presents four possible answers and proceeds to examine them in detail: changes in approaches to competition resulting in changes to the economic structure of the industry; international interference in competitive structures; unrelated factors, such as government policies that didn’t directly concern shipping but still caused an impact; and the internal actions within British shipping relating to changes in industrial circumstances. It is comprised of fifteen chapters, an appendix tabling the contribution of British shipping to the balance of payments, a bibliography, comprehensive index, epilogue, and a foreword from the series editor which states that the Sturmey’s arguments remain resonant in the field of maritime history in the present day. Sturmey makes a particular effort to place the activity in the British shipping industry into an international context for the sake of comparative analysis. It concludes that the decline of the industry was primarily due to internal decision-making rather than external factors - a conclusion that was considered divisive and provocative upon initial release, but has stood the test of time. The epilogue attempts to predict the future of British shipping post-1960, suggesting shipowners could improve the industry’s prospects: however, few of these predictions came to be.

This book examines how Syngman Rhee and the Korean independence movement used the rhetoric of American exceptionalism to lobby the U.S. government and the American public for support between 1905 and 1945. Alleging that Theodore Roosevelt violated the 1882 Korean-American Treaty when he tacitly supported the Japanese annexation of Korea in 1905, Rhee argued that Germany was not the only nation guilty of regarding treaties as “mere scraps of paper” and exhorted Americans to right this historical wrong by supporting Korean independence. He argued that doing so would prove Americans were the exceptional people many of them believed themselves to be. Rhee’s message gained credibility, not only because the concept of American exceptionalism resonated with Americans, but also because at various junctures certain Americans found the Korean cause useful. During the fight over the Versailles Treaty, the so-called Irreconcilable senators used the Korean issue to criticize President Wilson and to deflect the charge that they were isolationists. During the denouement of World War II, anticommunist politicians and civic organizations argued that Korea must not be abandoned to communism and that the United States’ treatment of Korea would be a test of American resolve in establishing a new rules-based order. The publicity Korea received from these and other episodes transformed Korea into an issue that could not be ignored in the postwar period. The irony and tragedy of Rhee’s efforts is that not only did they fail to regain Korea’s independence, but they directly contributed to the decision to divide Korea—an outcome he never foresaw or supported.

This book maintains that container shipping is vital to the actualisation of globalisation, and that without it, globalisation would remain a concept rather than reality. It argues that container shipping has been academically overlooked as a global business sector in favour of more prominent sectors such as oil or arms trade, and aims to provide a complete history of containerisation from the 1950s to the turn of the millennium. This history explores the growth of the container industry due to prominent innovation in vessel design, early adoption of the internet, large international mergers, and significant physical alterations to the global port system. With particular emphasis on the east-west trade, the chapters cover the growth and development of the container industry, to the social changes experienced by seafaring labour forces, the cultural impact of the container - bringing a domineering land-presence to maritime activity, through to the environmental concerns surrounding the industry. The study is not a quantitative economic analysis of the industry, rather, an updated history that strives to demonstrate the importance of transport infrastructures to any consideration of global business sectors, by providing evidence of the container industry’s stimulation of the global economy.