During the spring semester of 2007, the Center for Latin American Studies hosted an exhibit of Fernando Botero’s Abu Ghraib series of paintings and drawings which depict the abuses committed by U.S. soldiers at that notorious Iraqi prison. In addition to holding a public conversation with the artist, the Center also organized a series of lectures to elaborate on the themes evoked in the artworks. The two essays included here were originally prepared for the panel discussion “Art and Violence” held on January 31, 2007. In “Fernando Botero and the Art History of Suffering,” Thomas Lacquer, the Helen Fawcett Professor of History at UC-Berkeley, explores the “historicism” of Botero’s art; the longstanding role of suffering in his work; and what distinguishes the experience of viewing Botero’s paintings of torture from viewing photographs of the same acts. In “Art and Violence: Notes on Botero” Francine Maciello, the Sidney and Margaret Ancker Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at UC-Berkeley, contextualizes Botero’s Abu Ghraib work within his larger oeuvre, and in relation to his Latin American roots, discussing how Botero’s human figures—“”bodies that announce to the world that bodies still count”—have always responded to the urgent and venerable plea: habeas corpus.

This study examines how a new humanitarian community emerged in the late 1960s

and why it came to act in the name of “humanity.” To realize the nature of this

transformation, the study focuses on Britain and its relationship to more global forms of

humanitarianism. In post-imperial Britain a new set of actors beyond the British state

came to adopt humanitarian ethics. In a series of case studies, the study examines how

humanitarianism mobilized a range of new historical actors who came to replace the

imperial state, beginning with non-governmental activists and former military experts and

expanding to include multinational corporations and ordinary people.

Initially, post-imperial aid relied on imperial infrastructure and knowledge. In the

1960s, organizations such as Oxfam used former Imperial experts to manage and

distribute global relief in places like Nigeria. Older imperial institutions like the British

military became major respondents to disasters in the Sahel and South Asia. But the postimperial landscape also included new, more business-minded actors. In the mid-1970,

multinational corporations and private businesses began developing their own solutions

to humanitarian suffering through agribusiness projects. Through charity shops, rock

concerts, and boycotts, ordinary people, consumers, and youth groups joined such

multinationals in acting for the cause of humanity. By the 1980s, humanitarian

organizations operated as a profitable business, generating substantial revenues that were

mobilized to care for, rescue, and intervene in response to natural and man-made

disasters such as famines, civil wars, and earthquakes.

Drawing on extensive archival work in Britain, the United States, and Switzerland,

this study shows that British humanitarianism was shaped by both the legacies of the end

of empire and the tensions brought by new forces of globalization in the 1970s. The end

of empires created the globalization of markets and goods as well as the rise of

nongovernmental and commercial actors. In a period of economic globalization and mass

consumption, I argue, a new humanitarian culture came to commodify aid. As such, I

argue, British humanitarianism became part of the new, increasingly market-driven,

political economy of the 1970s. In doing so, Britons were integrated into affective and

economic communities of aid, as well as the project of global governance.

Between 1801, when the London Stock Exchange was re-constituted as new, formal entity, and 1914, when WWI brought the first age of globalization to a close, financial capitalism expanded dramatically. At the beginning of the century there were only 6 formal stock exchanges in the world. By the end of it, there were almost 90. Financial markets were linked together by global telecommunications networks that allowed capital to travel at faster speeds over greater distances. Finance assumed the commanding heights not just of the economy, but also of imperial policy, as states aggressively looked to expand their informal empires through the power of the financial sector. But rather than focusing on the subjects that typically populate the financial histories of this era—the great banking families of Baring and Rothschild who floated sovereign loans and bailed out troubled states, the stockbrokers who jostled for space and profits on trading floors throughout the world, or the ebbs and flows of capital and asset prices—this dissertation tells the story of the men, women, and things who made the actions of financiers possible. Whether it was the human infrastructures of the waiters, porters, and telegraph boys who facilitated the communications between financiers, the clerks, journalists, and statisticians who provided the information and data financiers needed to make investment decisions, or the material infrastructures of telegraphs, ticker tapes, telephones, electrical circuits, batteries, and cables through which those communications and data travelled, the act of exchange was always at the mercy of the infrastructures that underpinned it. Telling a financial history that focuses on infrastructures rather than the act of exchange, changes our understanding of financial power in two ways. First, this dissertation shows how certain, powerful institutions and firms, like the London Stock Exchange, gradually began to exercise infrastructural power over states and societies by co-opting the underlying infrastructures upon which financial exchange depended. The rise of financial capitalism depended not on a lifting out or abstraction of previously personal and traditional modes of exchange but was far more about the ways finance seized hold of mundane infrastructures—like the ostensibly public infrastructure of the telegraph—and co-opted them towards financialized logics. Second, an infrastructural history of finance also restores agency to our understanding of financial history, that all too often relies on myths of the power of great men or of efficient markets. Instead, this dissertation shows how even the smallest and seemingly least powerful actors could have outsized effects on the financial system through their control over the mechanics and operations of the infrastructures of finance.

This dissertation tracks the development of child psychiatry as a medical specialty as it emerged at Johns Hopkins University from 1890 to 1945. This was a fitful process that often defied the logic of specialization. Previous histories locate the beginnings of child psychiatry to the Commonwealth Fund child guidance clinics of the 1920s. Yet, by defining the emergence of child psychiatry within this specific setting, such histories emphasize the process of medical professionalization as prerogatives of elite philanthropists who sought to develop rational bureaucratic solutions to social problems. Thus, child psychiatry emerges out of a drive towards further specialization and results in the "medicalization" of social problems. Instead, this dissertation begins in the Progressive era with child welfare reformers and Adolf Meyer whose psychiatry resonated with progressive concerns of social cohesion and efficiency. Although progressive reformers lost traction in the 1920s, Meyer continued to espouse progressive ideals through his teachings and practice of psychiatry until the 1940s. Thus, psychiatry at Johns Hopkins was never fully reduced to problems within the individual, as was the tendency of psychoanalysis.

Child psychiatry developed at Johns Hopkins out of efforts to avoid further specialization in medicine. Pediatrician Edwards Park sought to train doctors who could treat the "whole child," including behavioral problems, which were becoming the purview of psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers. At the same time, Meyer sought to secure psychiatry's place within the medical community as a means to bridge the mind-body divide. Thus, Meyer and Park appointed Leo Kanner to a psychiatric clinic within the Harriet Lane Home, the pediatric hospital at Johns Hopkins, in order to teach pediatricians and medical students to manage common behavioral problems. In practice, pediatricians referred the large majority of behavioral cases to Kanner, setting the groundwork for a specialized field. With the publication of the influential textbook Child Psychiatry in 1935, Kanner gave a name and domain to the field.

This dissertation concerns the politics, aesthetics, and meanings of the British dead around the world. It argues that caring for the dead articulated views of the British Empire and Britain's standing in the world as well as how the British people understood their nation and their own identities within and outside of national communities. Broadly speaking this history tells a story of the state's increasing involvement in one of the most deeply personal, and traditionally familial, activities; but it is also an account of how the living came to define themselves through the care of the dead. Initially, in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, this took the form of establishing specifically British spaces for civilians who died away from home. Sometimes these distinct burial grounds came about as a way to deal with the problem of confessional difference and became distinctly Protestant while in other cases they reflected the desires of British merchants to fashion themselves as permanent imperial rulers. During the nineteenth century, the state took an increasingly active role in the establishment and operation of these spaces through the professionalization of the Consular Service and the cemeteries themselves became a synecdoche for British liberalism. Somewhat unexpectedly, considering the vast historiography on modern war commemoration and nationalism, the British government spent money and attention on caring for civilians who died overseas chronologically earlier than it concerned itself with dead soldiers. Nevertheless, during the period between the Napoleonic Wars and the Great War the idea that those who fell in battle deserved decent burial gained widespread resonance. The Crimean War of 1853-6 marked a turning point when for the first time most British soldiers received marked graves through the individual efforts of their comrades and manifesting a religiously inspired humanization of common soldiers. These burial grounds only became understood as "national cemeteries" and the government's responsibility after the war following widespread reports of their desecration and neglect. The British public increasingly understood providing Christian burial and marking soldiers graves, even if they died far from home, as a moral imperative for the army, the government, and civil society. During the Great War with the establishment in 1917 of a permanent commemoration bureaucracy, the Imperial War Graves Commission, caring for dead soldiers became infused with the political ideology of empire. The global network of sacred spaces created by the Commission following both world wars manifest not only a desire to care for the dead but also a way of using them to represent a united and victorious imperial polity. This commemoration style itself became untenable during decolonization as the British Empire itself disintegrated. The dead took on new meanings for the living in the late twentieth century even as those of the past as well as the spaces for them remained associated with empire and nation.

The dissertation that follows offers the first historical examination of the nineteenth-century origins of the "refugee" as a modern humanitarian and legal category. To date, scholars have tended to focus on a single refugee group or have overlooked this period entirely, acknowledging the linguistic origins of the term "refugee" with the seventeenth-century French Huguenots before skipping directly to the post-WWI period. I find that it is only through the imperial and global history of British refuge in the nineteenth century that we can understand the sources of our contemporary moral commitment to refugees. Through most of the eighteenth century, "refugees" were understood to be Protestants fleeing persecution on the Continent. The refugee category expanded during the French Revolution and the decades that followed, as British philanthropists, officials and civil servants defined their nation in contrast to oppressive governance across the globe. By the mid-nineteenth century, "the refugee," although nowhere defined in British law, was recognized from the political fringes to the heights of the imperial government as a foreigner who had been persecuted overseas and hence required special philanthropic attention. The British media and a broad contingent of supporters from all social classes celebrated refuge as a national moral imperative. They applied the category to any foreigner who fit the now standardized refugee characteristics regardless of his or her religion, race, or politics. This high moral aspiration encountered two distinct difficulties in the years after 1870, however. First, while the British routinely assumed that they were more liberal than other powers, imperial rule bred pockets of resistance and created its own political refugees. This raised troubling questions of ethical consistency, as British politicians and philanthropists themselves recognized. Second, Britain's ability to harbor foreign refugees depended on its imperial reach. The increasingly obvious limits to Britain's international power after 1870 made it more difficult to resettle refugees throughout the Empire or to persuade foreign powers to protect refugees at Britain's behest. Ironically, these limitations also drove British philanthropists and officials to pursue refugee relief on an increasingly international basis, the legacies of which remain with us today.

This dissertation examines the links between education and political culture by analyzing government-employed educators during the formative period of nation-state creation in the Middle East. It argues that a dearth of qualified personnel, coupled with local support of education, allowed educators in the government schools of Iraq, Palestine and Transjordan, to act as privileged intermediaries, backed by both the states that employed them, and by their societies. Educators’ status as popular and scarce civil servants encouraged them to participate in anti-government protests while remaining government employees. The aggregate consequences of educators’ ability to protest without losing their posts included ideological flexibility, the sidelining of educated groups from armed rebellions and the maintenance of non-representative regimes. Their stories articulate how local civil servants, frequently at the lowest levels of colonial bureaucracies, shape administration and governance.

During the late Ottoman period, educated individuals participated in a culture of petitions and negotiation, which connected civil servants and the Ottoman state. The British military and Mandate administrations incorporated Ottoman laws regarding education, as well as Ottoman-founded institutions and Ottoman-trained personnel into the educational systems of the Mandates. This continuity between British and Ottoman policies, institutions and personnel perpetuated Ottoman-era modes of interaction between educators and the governments that employed them.

British policy makers feared anti-colonial rebellions on the part of an educated unemployed, like uprisings that had taken place in both India and Egypt during periods of British control. Therefore, British officials in Iraq, Palestine and Transjordan restricted government schooling, particularly at upper levels, to a select few. Meanwhile, the inhabitants of the region, and the League of Nations’ requirements to prepare the Mandates for eventual independence, resulted in local and international demand for government-sponsored education. This situation of scarcity and need granted educators a privileged position vis-à-vis their employers. Educators used their rare status to manipulate and petition their governments, while rising through the ranks of the civil service. In so doing, they evinced a broader notion of agency than simple resistance to colonial domination.

Educators also theorized and articulated a variety of political ideologies, particularly during the interwar period. Educators’ experiences as students and their relationships to their governments as well as their birthplaces and families shaped their concepts of political affiliation. The American University of Beirut (AUB) in particular functioned as a hub of pan-Arabism for educators; students from throughout the region met, studied, and learned to protest while at AUB. Their academic credentials permitted AUB graduates to put their philosophies into practice, as teachers, authors, administrators and later ministers throughout the Mandates. However, self-avowedly nationalist educators, even at their most extreme, overwhelmingly remained employed by their governments in some capacity despite their rebellious reputations. Educators’ need to work within the government, to keep their present jobs, and the desire of local communities to preserve education and to safeguard their children’s futures reinforced teachers and administrators’ incorporation into government service.

In the late 1950s, three factors threatened educators’ intermediary role. These factors denigrated teachers’ social and economic status, and pushed them towards collective rather than individual action. Mass education reduced the scarcity of teachers; their formerly rare educational qualifications became more common, and less valuable. Standardization, through rigid modes of inspection and national examinations that dictated children’s future careers, reduced educators’ ability to teach beyond the prescribed curriculum. Repressive measures on the part of each government also limited the intermediary position teachers had previously enjoyed. The concurrent hardening of national borders reduced the fluidity of political affiliations once open to the Mandates’ inhabitants.

From the late 1890s through the late 1950s, educators and former educators leveraged their scarcity. As both teachers and government ministers, they influenced the young minds of the region within and beyond the classroom. Their favored status lasted until colonial restrictions on education lessened, and mass education eroded their capacity for bargaining with their governments. The stories of these teachers and administrators underscore the importance of local civil servants to the functioning of imperial, colonial and independent governments. Their rebellions from within the government bureaucracy demonstrate how government education as an institution can simultaneously shore up and impair the authority of its state.

This dissertation examines friendly societies and the role they played in the development of social trust and cooperation in nineteenth century Britain. In doing so my work fundamentally repositions friendly societies within the social history of modern Britain. Previous histories have relied on the functional similarities between nineteenth century friendly societies and early modern craft guilds, producing narratives that situate friendly societies in the history of working-class formation. My work looks instead to the early seventeenth century cultural roots of the concept of friendly society. Examining the ways in which the concept of friendly society was adapted to provide justifications for new kinds of social relationships from the late eighteenth century to the late nineteenth, I demonstrate that friendly societies gave the reformers thinking through--and the laborers working through--the great changes of their day a new basis or model for social cooperation.

Specifically, friendly societies facilitated two types of relationships that had become especially problematic in a modernizing society: relationships between new kinds of social classes and relationships between strangers. In the context of the late eighteenth century debates on the poor laws, friendly societies helped reformers to imagine a new system of welfare where reciprocity would be based on the shared social risks posed by poverty. Configuring friendly societies such that each contributed according to ability and received according to liability, reformers found a socially meaningful way of integrating the poor into British society. Beginning in the early nineteenth century, national friendly societies, like the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, worked to adapt their friendly society practices so that members who were strangers to each other could nevertheless trust each other. Faced with the dilemma of providing mutual aid to migrating members from across Britain, the Odd Fellows overcame problems of distrust by ritualistically transforming their members into brothers, and the Order into a brotherhood. In the 1850s, the Odd Fellows reinforced those relationships with a combination of benevolence and actuarial science--and in the process taught members how to trust in numbers as well.

By focusing on the cooperative possibilities inherent in the concept of friendly society and the ways in which contemporaries adapted the concept to meet new contingencies, this dissertation brings a new perspective to the history of friendly societies, and with it, a new perspective on the emergence of modern forms of social trust more broadly.

This is the story of how German writers, scholars, bureaucrats and custodians of art at all levels witnessed and participated in the French despoliations of European art collections over the course of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, and how in the aftermath of these events they developed new ideas about the place and purpose of art in modern cultural and political life at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In this period German scholars were forming new theories about the autonomy of art and its ability to remake the social and political order. At the same time they were gaining unprecedented experience of art’s material fragility and its dependence on the contingencies of the environment and good will of human actors. This dissertation argues that the tension between the twin discoveries of art’s powers and its limitations defined the cultural politics of the Prussian state during this revolutionary era.

This dissertation begins with the looting of Italian and German art collections by French officials from 1794-1807, and investigates Germans’ confrontation with the vulnerability of the objects thought to be the source of ideal beauty in the world to material displacement in the tumult of military conflict and occupation. The second chapter turns to the German reaction to the museum founded in 1793 in the Palace of the Louvre in which the collections won through battle were exhibited to a broad and international public. In the face of the brilliance and innovativeness of this museum, German visitors rethought their repulsion to the despoliations and articulated new visions for the methods and contexts under which art could be known and appreciated. The silence of art and the difficulty of getting it off its pedestal is the subject of the third chapter, which takes up the challenges for Prussian delegates of identifying, reclaiming, and returning looted artworks to German cities and towns after the fall of the Napoleonic regime. The last two chapters are about the promise, forwarded by aesthetic theorists and cultural administrators, that once back in German custody, looted art objects would achieve new vitality, becoming vibrant participants in the cultural life of the state. In Prussia this achievement was to be secured by the establishment of a centralized public museum of art, an institution that hoped to abandon the chaotic, limited, dangerous, and frustratingly silent material basis of art in favor of a realm of pure ideal aesthetic experience. “To the Vandals they are stone!” Schiller wrote of the antiquities in Paris, expressing the desire not only to transcend the object but to cordon off art’s materiality as the domain of those unable to experience its true spiritual charge. The assessment, however, both enlightens and deceives. Indeed, to the Vandals they were stone—the various transgressions against art objects which we will encounter in the following could not be conceived as such without the bottom line of art's materiality. To be an object in this period was a deeply vulnerable proposition. At the same time, however, the object was not only the purview of the victor, but also the ultimate concern of the vanquished. The problem and, I will argue, fundamental impossibility of escaping from this truth—of making stone transform into something beyond itself—became in this moment the defining paradox of the museum of art in the nineteenth century. The inheritance of this history continues to inform and challenge museum practices today.