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This chapter explores the constitutional path that was laid down for the process by which the Provisional Government constructed the civil service of the Irish Free State. It is stressed that ‘it [was] of the highest importance for the Provisional Government to get in touch with and take the fullest advantage of the experience of the Irish civil service generally’. The split in the republican movement profoundly affected the Dáil Éireann civil service. Under the terms of the 1920 Act, there were three categories of applicant to the Wylie committee: those discharged by the Irish government, those seeking permission to retire and those opting to retire under the statutory conditions provided by the Act. The Provisional Government squandered the goodwill of its civil service, ans as 1923 dawned and the Irish Free State came into office, the attitude of the civil service was one of suspicion and defensiveness.

This chapter details events in Syngman Rhee’s life during and after his stint as president of the Korean Provisional Government (KPG). Topics covered include the four men who opposed Rhee in Beijing and Shanghai, as well as his perception of each of them; setbacks in Rhee’s diplomatic efforts with the United States at the Washington Disarmament Conference of 1921–1922; his impeachment by the Shanghai Provisional Government in March 1925; his decision to reshape the principles and direction of the Comrade Society of Great Korea to suit his needs, shifting its focus away from the importance of the Shanghai Provisional Government and placed instead on Rhee’s legitimacy as the sole leader of the Korean independence movement; and Rhee’s business ventures.

This chapter examines the Russian nobility from February to late summer 1917. Initially, the nobility played a prominent role in national and local government, and this was something that its main body, the United Nobility, sought to promote. Increasingly, however, the popular movement forced nobles out of local government as the former privileged classes, whilst their prominence in the Provisional Government declined. The increasing social conflict and attacks on former elites forced the United Nobility to focus on preserving the nobility. Yet nobles seemed unconvinced that this class‐based body was effective, and instead favoured new, professional unions that represented particular interest groups within the elites, such as the Union of Homeowners. An attempt to transform the United Nobility into such a group, the Society of Nobles, to safeguard its property was a hesitant process.

The French revolution of 24–6 February 1848 was not the first of the many uprisings in Europe during that year. Those troubles had started in the Italian peninsula, when a revolt in Palermo on 12 January had quickly spread to the Neapolitan mainland of the kingdom of Two Sicilies, forcing Ferdinand II to grant a constitution on the 29th of that month. The political cataclysm in France has provided the crux of the great contrasting ideological reconstructions of 1848. The immediate trigger of the revolution of 24–6 February was Guizot's decision on the 21st to ban a mass reform banquet planned for the following day during the twelfth arrondissement of Paris. The year which had begun with the overthrow of the monarchy ended with a Republic headed by a populist president, another Bonaparte. None of the members of the former Provisional Government were allowed to serve in this new administration.

This chapter narrates the systematic efforts of nationalist leaders in the diaspora to establish a national Korean state in the aftermath of the large-scale 1919 March First uprising. Japan’s brutal suppression of the national uprising in Korea made it necessary for national liberation activities to be carried out from abroad, ushering in a new phase in the nationalist movement as the locus of political activities occurred largely outside the Korean peninsula. These activities resulted in the formation of the Korean Provisional Government (KPG) in Shanghai, which developed out of multiple ideological and strategic strands within the diaspora. The globalization of American power following World War I empowered the U.S. component of the Korean diaspora to play significant roles, ideologically and organizationally, in defining the vision of a new Korean nation-state that was embodied in the KPG. For the next several years, the activities of the KPG would remain at the center of the national liberation movement.

This chapter argues that sections of the tsarist elite played an important role during the February Revolution of 1917 as popular unrest broke out in Petrograd. Duma leaders saw an opportunity to enact the political change that they had desired for years. Military leaders, whose support was crucial to the Tsar, came out in support of the Duma, believing that political change offered the best chance of victory in the war. The Provisional Government was formed before the majority of elites had a chance to react, but its liberal ideals and their fear of further unrest persuaded them to support it. Elites felt that they had participated in the revolution alongside other social groups, but the extent of the political change had been further than most had initially desired, whilst popular demands for social reform threatened their future position.

This chapter describes the emergence of a ‘landed movement’ during 1917. The agrarian policies of the Provisional Government were broadly acceptable, but landowners reacted to the steady increase in the peasant movement by forming their own local unions to defend the right to own land. In May, the nationwide Union of Landowners, which had existed since 1916, was revived to unite the numerous local bodies. The union's new, liberally‐inclined leadership targeted peasant landowners to broaden their support, and these landowners quickly formed the vast majority of members. However, as rural unrest gathered pace, the union faced several problems. The sheer scale of the unrest overwhelmed its own size, whilst it struggled to prevent the government from introducing policies that undermined landownership. It also faced growing opposition from socialist parties, and its peasant members proved susceptible to socialist propaganda. All of this led to increasing disillusionment by August 1917.

This chapter examines the rise of paramilitary forces in Paris in 1848. The collapse of the July Monarchy was followed by the emergence of leaders of different political persuasions both inside and outside the Provisional Government. Private armies were soon formed to support or oppose that government. Before discussing the political and military events of that uncertain period, this chapter considers both the composition of the Provisional Government and the various paramilitary organizations that developed in revolutionary Paris. These include the normal or Sedentary National Guard, the Republican Guard, the Garde du Peuple or Montagnards, the Lyonnais, and Vésuviennes.

The conclusion argues that elites in Russia were far from obsolete by 1917 and that a move from a class‐based identity to one focused on professional concerns provided a basis for them to exist in the absence of Tsarism. The Russian Revolution facilitated this move, with elites responding to the mass movement by establishing new organizations. Elites engaged with the revolution and were far from an inert, counter‐revolutionary force. This demonstrates that revolutionary democracy enabled groups to participate, irrespective of popular support. Changing identities, however, fuelled the divisions that led to the failure of Kornilov's revolt and undermined the White armies in the civil war. The conclusion examines the weaknesses of White ideology. Finally, it argues that elites influenced the revolutionary process, fostering popular fears of counter‐revolution and encouraging Russians to see Bolshevism as preferable to the Provisional Government, offering real change and defending the revolution.

This chapter details events in Syngman Rhee’s life in the 1940s. Topics covered include his diplomatic efforts in Washington, D.C.; lobbying of the State Department by the Korean–American Council; lobbying of the U.S. Congress by the Christian Friends of Korea; collaboration with the Office of Strategic Services; and diplomatic and propaganda efforts at the United Nations Conference in San Francisco. During the Pacific War, Rhee failed to obtain recognition of the Korean Provisional Government (KPG) from the United States government despite the tireless diplomatic and propaganda campaign he carried out in collaboration with the Korean–American Council and the Christian Friends of Korea—with the full backing of the KPG and the Comrade Society. He attributed the cause of his failure to the deeply ingrained pro-Japanese and anti-Korean bias of the officials in the State Department.

The so-called insurrection in October and November 1917 catapulted the Bolsheviks to power in Russia. The Russian Revolution, which began with the fall of the tsar in February 1917, led to a political crisis. Power was initially divided between the Provisional Government and the soviets, but Bolshevik extremists soon secured a dominant place in the latter. They were aided by Vladimir Lenin, who identified himself with the strongest forces of dissatisfaction. Despite this obvious political success, it remains perplexing why the Bolsheviks would launch an armed uprising that looked like a gamble. Lenin wanted a violent uprising to get a chance for an independent Bolshevik Party takeover and realize the personal dictatorship to which he aspired. It appears that overthrowing the Provisional Government through the Russian Revolution was not planned or expected.

This chapter narrates the events that happened after the fall of the Tsarist Autocracy in February 1917. The abdication of the tsar was universally acclaimed as the dawn of liberty—the beginning of a new era in the history of the various peoples inhabiting the empire. In a series of sweeping reforms, the Provisional Government abolished all legal distinctions between citizens on the basis of rank, religion, sex, or ethnicity, and granted every citizen over the age of twenty the right to vote. The government also guaranteed the absolute freedom of the press and of assembly. In general, the fall of the Tsarist Autocracy gave way to the cultural mobilization of Turkestan.

This chapter examines the rise of the paramilitary organization Garde Nationale Mobile, or Mobile National Guard, as the most important armed force in Paris between February 24 and May 16, 1848. The Mobile National Guard was created by the Provisional Government to operate as a full-time armed force that would supplement both police and army. The Mobile Guard was comprised of unemployed Parisian youths aged sixteen to thirty, many of whom had fought on the barricades in the February Revolution. This chapter first considers how the Mobile Guard was formed and its recruitment of young activists who took part in the February Revolution. It then discusses some of the problems of divided command suffered by the Mobile Guard, along with its use of regular army cadres to train volunteers. It also assesses the issue of discipline in the Mobile Guard and concludes with an analysis of the organizational, disciplinary, and supply problems of the Mobile Guard as well as the group's politics and motivations.

This chapter seeks to establish that the “Russian” Civil Wars began with Central Asian Revolt of 1916, before going on to argue that subsequent events — the February Revolution, the travails of the Russian Provisional Government of 1917, the Kornilov Affair, the October Revolution, and the closure by the Soviet government of the Constituent Assembly — should be viewed as essential elements of the civil wars, not precursors to them. It focuses too on the views on civil war of the Bolshevik leader, V.I. Lenin, the fighting that took place from Belorussia through the Urals to Siberia from 1917 to 1918 and examines early efforts to combat the Bolshevik seizure of power by General M.V. Alekseev and others. It explains also the diverse origins of the Allied intervention in Russia that began in early 1918.

This chapter describes the sudden changes that engulfed Tianjin during the Boxer Uprising of 1900, when an international force comprised of the troops of eight different imperial powers invaded and occupied the city. The foreign suppression of the Boxers, and the dramatic impact it had on subalterns and elites alike in Tianjin, highlights the role of violence in the Chinese experience of modern technologies under the curious regime that some have called semicolonialism. The Tianjin Provisional Government had been formed at a significant moment in the history of medicine. It also established a special “epidemic prevention police” who were empowered to enter homes to investigate suspected cholera cases. The establishment of a weisheng system was one of the most urgent, and most complex, aspects of the Qing's new autonomy. Weisheng as a discourse of deficiency allowed Chinese elites to distance themselves from the violence of the Boxer suppression.

This chapter explores the outbreaks of vigilantist violence between settlers and Kyrgyz in Semirech’e, and the measures taken by the colonial authorities to confine the latter to upland regions and reserve more fertile lowland areas for Russian settlers and Cossacks. It shows that this process continued into 1917, as Kyrgyz refugees began to return from China but were refused permission to return to their land. The separation of the Russian and Kyrgyz populations continued despite the February Revolution, and the Provisional Government was powerless to prevent ongoing settler violence. These ongoing tensions, rather than revolutionary politics, help to explain the patterns of violence in Semirech’e that persisted into 1918 and beyond.

The Anglo Irish Treaty of December 1921 established the Irish Free State as a dominion within the British Commonwealth at a time when the dominions did not have their own foreign policy or diplomats abroad. The Free State did not legally exist until December 1922. In the interim, a Provisional Government managed the transition from British rule while the revolutionary Dáil government continued to exist in parallel. Chapter 4 looks at the awkward cohabitation between the two, the split in the foreign service established by Dáil Éireann as Ireland slid towards civil war over the terms of the Treaty, and the consequences for the efforts of George Gavan Duffy and Michael Collins to craft a foreign policy for the new state.

This chapter explores the basis on which the formerly colonial state of Vietnam begins its development by establishing the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. It introduces provisional president Hồ Chí Minh as a vanguard of the formation and explores the establishment of a National People's Assembly. David Marr capitalizes on the formation and standardization of government by mapping out the many stratified councils, committees, and other assorted hierarchies that shaped the political landscape of Vietnam through to the present day.