‘My Russian Self’: The Frustrated Emotions of George F. Kennan

Frank Costigliola, University of Connecticut

Costigliola’s first book, Awkward Dominion: American Political, Economic, and Cultural Relations with Europe, 1919-33, helped introduce culture as a topic in foreign relations history. His second book, France and the United States: The Cold Alliance since World War II, also dealt with the intersection of cultural with political and economic relations while suggesting how nations and their policies could be gendered as a way of valorizing or delegitimating them. His third book, Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances: How Personal Politics Helped Start the Cold War, explored the intersection of personal and political relations, and the role of emotions, in the diplomacy of the Allied leaders who won World War II and then lost the peace. Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances received the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations’ Robert H. Ferrell prize for best book. Costigliola is the editor of The Kennan Diaries and, with Michael J. Hogan, of America in the World: The Historiography of American Foreign Relations since 1941, 2nd edition.

Indigenous Representation By Petition: Transformations in Iroquois Complaint and Request, 1680-1760

Dan Carpenter, Harvard University

Narratives of the Six Nations peoples of Iroquoia have moved from racialized metaphors of military prowess to more historically accurate images of diplomatic skill and ritual. Yet the diplomatic emphasis of recent studies squares poorly with the increasing use of petitions and ever-moreformalized requests and complaints by the Iroquois, particularly in the years after the Albany and Montreal Treaties of 1701. The petition is commonly associated with hierarchical supplication to a sovereign from a subject. Why did the ever-sovereign Six Nations resort to petitioning colonial authorities? I argue that for various Iroquoian peoples, the petition became a means of performing representation to colonial powers. By this I mean the communication, in ritual and words, of the identity, sovereignty and history of a people to often doubtful or malicious colonial authorities who could also serve as allies and partners. Many eighteenth-century Iroquois petitions incorporated older patterns of kaswentha (“Two-Row” diplomacy), yet they also marked innovative departures from earlier practices. I focus upon three dynamics that shaped the petitioning practices of the 18thcentury Iroquois: (1) the expanding spatial arrangements and confederacy politics of the Six Nations, (2) the emergence of new colonial institutions such as legislatures with committees, state councils and monarchical organizations, and (3) the growing use of petitions by other Native peoples in the Northeast and Great Lakes regions. I test the last of these hypotheses quantitatively, showing that the requests of Algonquian-language peoples (alone and instrumented by eighteenth-century treecore data) predict Iroquois requests and complaints to the same colonial powers. A focus on petitioning (as institution and mode) permits reinterpretation of critical French sources, the Iroquois strategies in Pennsylvania that deeply impressed Benjamin Franklin, and the 1710 visit of the “Four Indian Kings” to Queen Anne.

Archipelago Capitalism, Or What the History of Tax Havens Tells Us About the Nation-State, 1870s-1980s

Vanessa Ogle, UC Berkeley

Vanessa Ogle charts the emergence of a de-territorialized and unregulated legal and economic order from the 1870s-1980s. Under this regime, islands of capitalism were formed from tax havens and offshore finance, mostly in the Caribbean; the Eurodollar market, emanating from the City of London to the offshore world; Free Trade or Special Economic Zones in Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East; and multinational corporations connecting these sites. These islands constituted a laboratory for unregulated markets in the shadow of national jurisdictions. With the end of Bretton Woods and the turn to neoliberalism in the late 1970s and 1980s, unregulated offshore finance, economic zones, and Eurodollars “abroad” became blueprints for expanding unfettered market capitalism “at home” in Europe and North America.

Making a State in 1776: Political Economy, Imperial Politics, and the Declaration of Independence

Steven Pincus, Yale University

After receiving the Declaration of Independence in July 1776, George Washington proclaimed to his troops in Manhattan that they could now see they were fighting on behalf of the privileges and rights guaranteed by the British constitution.  Why did Washington believe that fighting the British army entailed protecting the rights and privileges guaranteed by the British constitution?  To answer this question requires investigating the origins and development of a transatlantic Patriot political economy and its relationship tot eh British state.  That ideology demanded an activist state that would support immigration, oppose slavery, call for state support for socio-economic development.  By recovering the transatlantic Patriot ideas that informed the Declaration, it becomes to reinterpret America’s founding document in fundamental ways.

Dictators, Diplomats, and Dissidents: United States Human Rights Policy in the Long 1960s

Sarah Snyder, American University

Snyder’s talk will advance a new interpretation of U.S. foreign policy by showing that efforts to emphasize human rights began earlier than most accounts suggest, by highlighting the importance of nonstate and lower-level actors outside the executive branch, and by offering a more complicated picture of U.S. attention to human rights.  Focusing on activism directed at abuses in South Korea, Greece, Southern Rhodesia, the Soviet Union, and Chile, she will argue that social movements, domestic policy innovations, and changes in the international system spurred the emergence of concern for human rights from John F. Kennedy’s inauguration to Jimmy Carter’s.  Activism in this period established the networks and tactics critical to greater institutionalization of human rights in U.S. foreign policy later and thus facilitated the issue’s enduring significance.