Abstract
In 1919, shortly after the end of World War I, the Paris Peace Conference created a magic moment of reordering international relations on a global scale. Contemporary observers described this moment in unusual metaphors. For E. J. Dillon, an Irish journalist and former professor of oriental languages, Paris in 1919 went beyond Western-shaped urban cosmopolitanism and turned into “a vast cosmopolitan caravanserai.”
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Notes
- 1.
Emil Joseph Dillon, The Inside Story of the Peace Conference (New York and London: Harper, 1920), 4.
- 2.
Ibid.
- 3.
James Thomson Shotwell, At the Paris Peace Conference (New York: Macmillan Co., 1937), 131.
- 4.
Charles Peden, Newsreel Man (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran & Company, 1932), 15.
- 5.
Ibid.
- 6.
Ibid., 27.
- 7.
For the self-concept of Kipling as an “imperialist, as a citizen of a world-wide empire” see Carl David af Wirsén, “Presentation Speech for Rudyard Kipling as the winner of the Nobel prize of literature in 1907,” accessed March 10, 2011, http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1907/press.html.
- 8.
“War Graves: Work of Imperial Commission, Mr. Kipling’s Survey,” The Times, February 17, 1919, 4.
- 9.
The Times announced the government’s decision to abstain from requesting passports for relatives visiting graveyards.
- 10.
In February, the British War Office explained that the delayed delivery of these pictures was partly due to staff “depleted by illness”. See “14,000 Photographs of War Graves,” The Times, February 24, 1919, 11.
- 11.
In the second week of February 1919, 279 persons died in Paris. See “La grippe,” Le Figaro, February 23, 1919, 3.
- 12.
E.g. Edward Mandell House and Charles Seymour, What Really Happened at Paris; the Story of the Peace Conference, 1918–1919 (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1921).
- 13.
Matthias Middell, Welt- und Globalgeschichte in Europa, World and Global History in Europe (Köln: Center for Historical Social Research, 2006). Christopher A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780–1914, Global Connections and Comparisons (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004).
- 14.
Caroline Walker Bynum, “Perspectives, Connections and Objects: What’s Happening in History Now?,” Daedalus 138, no. 1 (2009).
- 15.
John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920).
- 16.
See Leila J. Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), 210ff.
- 17.
“Documenting a Democracy: The Treaty of Versailles 1919 (including Covenant of the League of Nations),” National Archives of Australia, accessed March 10, 2011, http://www.foundingdocs.gov.au/item.asp?sdID=94.
- 18.
For an introduction see Sebastian Conrad and Dominic Sachsenmaier, Competing Visions of World Order: Global Moments and Movements, 1880s–1930s, Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series (New York: Palgrave, 2007). For network theories see: Manuel Castells and Gustavo Cardoso, eds., The Network Society: From Knowledge to Policy (Washington, D.C.: Center for Transatlantic Relations, 2006).
- 19.
Peter Burke, Cultural Hybridity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009). Joel Kuortti and Jopi Nyman, Reconstructing Hybridity: Post-Colonial Studies in Transition (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007).
- 20.
Janet Siltanen and Andrea Doucet, Gender Relations: Intersectionality and Beyond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Gudrun-Axeli Knapp, “‘Intersectionality’ - Ein neues Paradigma der Geschlechterforschung,” in Was kommt nach der Genderforschung? Zur Zukunft der feministischen Theoriebildung, ed. Rita Casale (Bielefeld: 2008).
- 21.
Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 2002). Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000). For this approach, slavery is the key element in their historical rationale. In addition, the metaphor of the ship and the introduction of new media, especially music, as a neglected form of communication introduce a methodologically innovative aspect. Transculturality, however, presumes that the motley crew are also inside well-established societies, and not exclusively outside.
- 22.
Statistical research on migrants is illustrative of this point of view. An American study of immigrants and their children based on a census published in 1927 explained that the available official statistics gave details on parentage for “the white population only”, see Niles Carpenter, Immigrants and their Children 1920, a Study Based on Census Statistics Relative to the Foreign Born and the Native White of Foreign or Mixed Parentage (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1927), 2.
- 23.
Jürgen Kleist and Bruce A. Butterfield, The Spoils of War: the Bright and Bitter Fruits of Human Conflict, Plattsburgh Studies in the Humanities, vol. 5 (New York: Lang, 1997). Ana Filipa Vrdoljak, International Law, Museums and the Return of Cultural Objects (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
- 24.
The Treaty of Versailles mentioned The Mystic Lamb by the van Eyk brothers. Created in the 15th century, therefore long before the Belgian state existed, the altarpiece experienced adventurous travels: hidden during the Reformation, brought to Paris among spoils of war during the Napoleonic regime, sold to the Prussian king, given back to Belgium as a consequence of the Versailles treaty and taken back to Germany as war booty, the masterpiece ultimately returned to Ghent.
- 25.
Andrea Gattini, “Restitution by Russia of Works of Art Removed from German Territory at the End of Second World War,” European Journal of International Law 7, no. 1 (1996): 70f.
- 26.
G. S. Adam, “Demand Royal Booty,” The Washington Post, May 30, 1919, 1.
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Herren, M., Rüesch, M., Sibille, C. (2012). Introduction: What is Transcultural History?. In: Transcultural History. Transcultural Research – Heidelberg Studies on Asia and Europe in a Global Context. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-19196-1_1
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