Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis - Volume 126, Issue 1, 2013

This article examines the role of religion in the society of Hatra, a desert city in the eastern Jezirah (north Iraq). The city suddenly rose to power in the second century CE, but its flourishing was short-lived. In 240 CE the Persians conquered Hatra, and the formerly invincible city soon fell into ruins. Hatra owed its short period of prosperity to its strategic location between the two superpowers of the day: Rome and Parthia. It was by means of the rulers of Hatra that the Parthian King of Kings controlled the large desert area around Hatra, which functioned as a buffer between these two hostile empires. In their turn, Hatra’s rulers had power over the people of the desert because they succeeded in making Hatra the political, economic, and social centre of the surrounding tribes. It is argued that religion played a vital role in this process, for it was via the gods that the leaders of Hatra sanctified their rule and united the warring tribes.

Early modern literary sources depict converts to Islam, commonly known as renegades, as godless, despicable, treacherous, and wicked. By converting to Islam they had not only renounced their Christian faith, but also forsaken their family and fatherland. This article argues that the relations between Dutch renegades and the Dutch Republic were much more complex than these stereotypes indicate. Even when renegades operated as privateers from North African ports, such as Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, and Salé, they maintained friendly relations with Christian compatriots and even returned to their fatherland unhindered. Perhaps most surprisingly these converts used their knowledge of the situation on both sides of the religious, political, and ethnolinguistic frontiers to operate as diplomatic intermediaries in the service of the States General, at a time when Dutch official envoys had little or no experience in North African diplomacy.

After the French had evacuated the northern Netherlands, the new Dutch sovereign, William Frederick, Prince of Orange, began to raise a national army, for which he had to commission general officers. In selecting them, during the eighteen months before the battle of Waterloo, three stages can be distinguished. In the first, the sovereign prince could employ only former officers who had remained faithful to his House, but who for that reason had not worn a uniform for two decades, and Batavian-French general officers who had rallied to the prince, but were already retired or were mostly military administrators. In the second stage, the military organisation was established, first in the northern Netherlands and subsequently in the southern Netherlands. By allotting the sedentary posts to the aforesaid Orangist and Batavian-French generals the Sovereign Prince once again opted for security. Admittedly, the experienced and skilled commanding officers who had left French service to return home were given the appropriate ranks in the Dutch army, but they were not entrusted with any vital commands. When during the third stage, after Napoleon’s return to power, King William I was forced to commission general officers on a large scale, he no longer hesitated to give preference to skills and experience previously acquired in French service, without altogether abandoning long-standing loyalist officers. Accordingly, in view of the forthcoming campaign, the King assigned the sedentary posts to the most trustworthy generals, but conferred all field commands on the most experienced and competent generals. Professionalism thus prevailed over ideology.

From 1 May until the end of October 1883 there took place in Amsterdam the first world exhibition, of which the keynote was colonial power. Living Surinamers were to be seen as well as ‘authentic’ Indonesians. The public came with great curiosity to look at the exhibited Surinamers, and scientists had the opportunity for anthropological research. For example, prince Roland Bonaparte ordered the taking of anthropological photographs of the Surinamers. There were also so-called cabinet cards, which were sold as souvenirs. These photographs depicted the Surinamers arranged by ethnic group: maroons, indians, and creoles: they were intended to illustrate, as anonymous types of their specific group, the different stages of human civilization. Newspaper articles, reports, and photographs endorsed this view. Creoles in particular showed that the mission civilicatrice was not a mission impossible. This was highlighted by a letter that was claimed to be written by the young Creole woman Jacqueline Ricket. This fictitious letter, together with the photographs and the exhibition itself, offered an interpretative framework for Suriname: Surinamers illustrated the ‘white man’s burden’, an idea with which the Dutch could legitimize their colonial rule.

During the 1970s Belgian academic historians added recent history to the academic history course. Recent history, referring to the period from the First World War to the present day, was recognized as a subdiscipline of contemporary history. Belgian research institutes of twentieth-century history emerged. It is little known that it was the protagonists of Belgian history education, and not academic historians, who from the 1940s promoted the integration of recent history. In history education, academic historians’ common objections to the study of the supposedly ‘too close’ and ‘subjective’ recent history were outweighed by ethical and societal imperatives. Democratic citizenship education demanded closer examination of the world wars and was stimulated by UNESCO’s and the Council of Europe’s peace education projects. Official encouragement to research recent history was also lacking, due to troubled Belgian war memories. Yet Belgian proponents of history education founded international commissions to stimulate study of the Second World War. The impact of these educational initiatives was felt in the inclusion of recent history in Belgian history textbooks and the academic institutionalization of recent history. Yet the promotion of a conciliatory approach to the Second World War clashed with internal community conflicts resulting from a regionalization of war memories.

In 1997 John Lewis Gaddis presented four hypotheses on the New Cold War History. First, Gaddis believed Stalin was almost the only one responsible for the Cold War. This hypothesis has subsequently been rejected by many historians who stress American responsibility as well. Second, Gaddis maintained that the Cold War was not only a struggle between the superpowers, but that smaller nations could also sometimes play a major role. This hypothesis has met with much support. Cuba, for example, supported revolutionaries in Angola in the 1970s without any prior consultation with Moscow. It was the beginning of the end of detente. Gaddis’s third hypothesis was that ideas matter in the history of the Cold War. Indeed much recent research concerns the loss of legitimacy of regimes in the Soviet empire and on the decisive role played by Gorbachev, who introduced the so-called new thinking into Soviet foreign policy. Fourth, according to Gaddis, ‘democracy proved superior to autocracy in maintaining coalitions’. This hypothesis has been largely ignored in the past fifteen years. The rise and survival of a grand alliance among the US, Japan, and the major Western European powers is often noted, but hardly analysed.