Securing Empire

Beatrice de Graaf is Professor of History at University of Utrecht, Netherlands. A historian in the field of security and terrorism, her research focuses on security-related themes in the 19th century and on modern and contemporary cases of conflict and terrorism. She was awarded with the Stevin Prize in 2018 for her work.Ozan Ozavi is Assistant Professor of Transimperial History at Utrecht University, Netherlands, and co-convenor of the Lausanne Project and the Security History Network. His current research looks at military presence and imperial cooperation in the nineteenth-century Mediterranean. Erik de Lange is Assistant Professor of Transimperial History at Utrecht University, Netherlands, and co-convenor of the Lausanne Project and the Security History Network. His publications include Dangerous Gifts: Imperialism, Security, and Civil Wars in the Levant, 1798-1864 (2021), and Intellectual Origins of the Republic: Ahmet Agaoglu and the Genealogy of Liberalism in Turkey (2015).

We can now confidently identify a ‘Dutch’ school of international history, rich in thematic and geopolitical breadth, injecting new ideas and new perspectives into older topics. ‘Securing Empire’ is no exception. Working with their concept of a ‘trans-imperial security culture’, this Utrecht-based collaboration rewrites the long 19th century history of security, and our understanding of its importance for empires across Europe, the Americas, Africa, the Middle East and East Asia. It will be of immense value to IR and historical scholars alike, exemplary of how the historical turn in international politics is challenging our understanding of politics today.

• Introduction, Beatrice de Graaf, Ozan Ozavci & Erik de Lange (Utrecht University, The Netherlands)1 . To give to the indigenous population the same security as to the Europeans’: The Mixed Courts of Egypt and the financial-legal turn of the Eastern Question, Beatrice de Graaf (Utrecht University, The Netherlands)2. State Rebuilding and the Modernization of Police Organizations in Korea and Japan, Seo-Hyun Park (Lafayette College, USA)3. ‘Let Them Have What Name They Will’: Piracy and Imperial Cooperation from Barbary to the Americas, Erik de Lange (Utrecht University, The Netherlands)4. Protecting the Sanitary Security of the American Empire in the “Orient”: U.S. Health Measures in and Beyond its Pacific Colonies around 1900, Andrea Wiegeshoff (Philipps-University Marburg, Germany)5. Securing Japan’s Civilized Position in the World: Identity Security and Japanese Imperialism in the late-nineteenth Century, Shogo Suzuki (University of Manchester, UK)6. From the Rhine to the Congo, via the Danube: Transimperial Implantations of a European River Regime, 1815–1885, Constantin Ardeleanu & Joep Schenk (Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, Germany, and Utrecht University, The Netherlands)7. Civil War and Diplomacy: the 1860 Intervention of the Great Powers in Ottoman Syria, Ozan Ozavci (Utrecht University, The Netherlands)8. Creating Empire, Resisting Empire: The Boxer Rebellion in China, 1899-1901, David Silbey (Cornell University, USA)9. Forgetting Two Histories: European Institutional Models, Empty Spaces, and the Failure of the 1885 Congo River Commission, Joanne Yo (Queen Mary University of London, UK)Conclusion: Transimperial Security Practices, Nineteenth-Century Style, Maartje Abbenhuis (University of Auckland, New Zealand)BibliographyIndex