History

What can a reader expect from the ‘shortest’ history of anything? Probably something that gives basic information about that subject with a possible admixture of humour and a fresh approach that conceals the gaps that brevity inevitably produces. Mart Kuldkepp’s shortest history of Scandinavia achieves these goals skilfully and can be trusted to provide the general reader with a reliable narrative. It also succeeds in analysing what it is about the countries that we call Scandinavia that makes them special, creating a sense of ‘Nordicness’ that is recognised by both insiders and outsiders.

Of all the revolutionary regimes of the modern era, few sought to remake society as radically as Communist  China during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Launched by Mao Zedong in 1966 to purge ‘class enemies’ and revitalise socialist ideals, the movement quickly spiralled into widespread upheaval that slipped beyond the Party’s control. Amid mass campaigns and brutal struggles, waves of political activism surged from below, jolting the very foundations of the Communist state and reshaping the country’s cultural and political landscape.

The First Cold War is an account of 300 years of British-Russian relations, from mutual incomprehension to the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907, which reached an accommodation between the great powers. This proved remarkably stable and provided the basis for resisting German aggression in the twentieth century. It only ended in 1949 when the next cold war began.

The history of the Pilbara is distinctive, but its contours are those of Australian history in miniature. Successive resource booms have saddled that part of Western Australia with the weight of immense national expectation. The rise and fall of trade unionism was compressed into a few short decades in the Pilbara’s iron ore mines, where compulsory unionism once made workers immensely powerful, and where the decline in union membership now leaves them highly exposed to managerial agendas.

On the evening of Boxing Day 1900, a spectacular pantomime premiered at Her Majesty’s Theatre in Sydney in honour of the imminent federation of the Australian colonies. A theatrical ‘extravaganza’, Australis presented an image of the fledging nation one hundred years hence. In the pantomime’s vision, Australia in the year 2000 is ruled by a former trade unionist, ‘the Boss’, who leads an expedition to annex Antarctica, forming a ‘Great Empire of the South’. One advantage of this move, notes the Boss, is that the capital of the Australian empire can be located on the geographic south pole, thus resolving the dispute between Sydney and Melbourne. Clearly, the pantomime’s librettists (who included theatrical entrepreneur J.C. Williamson) were not above political satire. What Australis also suggests is that there existed genuine popular enthusiasm for an Australian Antarctic empire.

Women give birth to babies, but according to patriarchal myth men give birth to nations. As the eminent political theorist Carole Pateman observed some time ago, literature is full of stories of men giving birth to nations, political orders, or political life itself, an explicitly male appropriation of procreative power. In the new discursive order of modernity, political creativity belongs to masculinity.

Fawaz Gerges is a leading expert on mainstream Islamist movements, jihadist groups, and social movements in the Middle East. He has interviewed hundreds of civil society leaders, activists, and mainstream and radical Islamists in the Muslim world and within Muslim communities in Europe. Two decades ago, his in-depth field research resulted in The Far Enemy: Why Jihad went global (2005). It showed that the 9/11 terror attacks united social forces in the Muslim world against Al Qaeda. The dominant response of jihadi groups was an explicit rejection of Al Qaeda and total opposition to the internationalisation of jihad. The US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and its subsequent occupation gave Al Qaeda a ‘new lease on life, a second generation of recruits and fighters, and a powerful outlet to expand its ideological outreach activities to Muslims worldwide’.