King George’s Generals: How the British Army Lost America, 1774-1781

William Anthony Hay, History, Mississippi State University

Research Grant, 2013

My research project examines how successive British commanders understood the problem they faced during the American Revolution, the ways in which they responded, and why they ultimately failed. The five commanders on whom I focus—Thomas Gage, William Howe, John Burgoyne, Sir Henry Clinton, and Lord Cornwallis—each brought to the task wide experience and a strong record. Their careers reflected the growth of military professionalism in the British army from the mid-18th century, and they scored important successes against the Continental Army of the United States. Far from being incompetent or hidebound aristocrats unable to overcome antiquated assumptions, British commanders demonstrated impressive skill. As Andrew O’Shaughnessy has pointed out, the war’s outcome remained uncertain to the very end. The failure by the British commanders I study lay in their inability to translate operational success into political outcomes by dismantling the revolutionary government they fought. Survival meant success for the fledgling United States.

This research gave me a deeper understanding of how British insiders saw events in America as the war continued along with the civilian side of developing policy and strategy.

Along with its substantial contribution to historical scholarship on the American Revolution and the 18th century British Atlantic world, my project has contemporary relevance. Britain’s position in the American Revolution significantly resembles that of the United States today. Its army had significant experience with irregular warfare from the Seven Years’ War and Jacobite Rebellions, along with conventional operations against comparable opponents. But a small, professional army of long-serving regular soldiers proved a very fragile instrument of war. Possessing the most powerful navy of the age, Britain struggled to turn advantages in weapons, training, and capabilities into strategic success in America. With forces operating across the Atlantic at the end of an extended logistics chain, British policymakers had to balance the American crisis with global commitments and politics at home. Despite changes in technology and differences in context, these points capture problems the United States faces with overseas expeditionary warfare. They also point to the difficulty of coordinating policy and strategy to guide military operations effectively.

Research supported by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation enabled me to work extensively with British manuscript sources unavailable in the United States. Besides letters and reports by the main figures in my study, I saw a range of material, including private letters and diaries. This research gave me a deeper understanding of how British insiders saw events in America as the war continued along with the civilian side of developing policy and strategy. It pointed me toward the role that sea power, including water transport and navigation on lakes and rivers, played for both sides. Howe’s partnership with his brother, Admiral Lord Richard Howe, who commanded naval forces, became an important part of my chapter on his tenure. Overall, the research gave me a fuller perspective of the British side that set each of my protagonists in context and showed the pressures they faced from superiors at home. Two of five chapters are drafted, along with a thematic introduction. Writing expanded the scope of my project, drawing it back into the 1760s to explain the conflict’s origins. I anticipate drafting the remaining chapters this year. Material from my research supported a chapter entitled “An End to Empire? British Strategy in the American Revolution and Making Peace” in Justifying Revolution: Law, Virtue, and Violence in the American Revolution (Oklahoma: June 2018).

Bibliography

An End to Empire? British Strategy in the American Revolution and Making Peace in Justifying Revolution: Law, Virtue, and Violence in the American Revolution (Oklahoma: June 2018).

The Chinese Must Go: The Violent Birth of American Border Control

Beth Lew-Williams, History, Princeton University

Research Grant, 2015

The American West erupted in anti-Chinese violence in 1885. Following the massacre of Chinese miners in Wyoming Territory, communities throughout California and the Pacific Northwest harassed, assaulted, and expelled thousands of Chinese immigrants. In The Chinese Must Go, I show how American immigration policies incited this violence and how the violence, in turn, provoked new exclusionary policies. Ultimately, I argue, Chinese expulsion and exclusion produced the concept of the “alien” in modern America.

The Chinese Must Go begins in the 1850s, before federal border control established strict divisions between citizens and aliens. Across decades of felling trees and laying tracks in the American West, Chinese workers faced escalating racial conflict and unrest. In response, Congress passed the Chinese Restriction Act of 1882 and made its first attempt to bar immigrants based on race and class. When this unprecedented experiment in federal border control failed to slow Chinese migration, vigilantes attempted to take the matter into their own hands. Fearing the spread of mob violence, U.S. policymakers redoubled their efforts to keep the Chinese out, overhauling U.S. immigration law and transforming diplomatic relations with China.

Anti-Chinese law and violence continues to have consequences for today's immigrants. The present resurgence of xenophobia builds mightily upon past fears of the "heathen Chinaman."

That violence held power over U.S. politics in the nineteenth century should not come as a surprise. Transformative moments of state violence—including the Mexican-American War, the Civil War, and the Indian Wars—clearly mediated politics through force, but so too did a host of extralegal battles. Violent racial politics swelled in popularity in the Reconstruction South and in western territories, where white citizens lacked more recognized forms of political power. This racial violence terrorized local populations, shaped local politics, and at times, advanced a national agenda. In the mid-nineteenth century, this political violence, and the rhetoric that accompanied it, challenged the federal government’s reservation of Indian lands, enfranchisement of African Americans, and toleration of Chinese migration. By the century’s end, the federal government had acquiesced to violent demands for Indian dispossession, black oppression, and Chinese exclusion.

By locating the origins of the modern American alien in this violent era, I recast the significance of Chinese exclusion in U.S. history. As The Chinese Must Go makes clear, anti-Chinese law and violence continues to have consequences for today’s immigrants. The present resurgence of xenophobia builds mightily upon past fears of the “heathen Chinaman.”

Bibliography

Beth Lew-Williams, The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).
Beth Lew-Williams, "'Chinamen' and 'Delinquent Girls': Intimacy, Exclusion, and a Search for California’s Color Line," Journal of American History (December 2017).

Homicide in North Italy: Bologna, 1600–1700

Colin Rose, History, University of Toronto

Dissertation Fellowship, 2015

The Papal State of Bologna, in North Italy, suffered high and at times increasing rates of interpersonal homicide throughout eleven sampled years of the seventeenth century. The powerful criminal court of Bologna, the Tribunale del Torrone, prosecuted homicides as capital crimes through the deployment of inquisitorial process and a public image of impartial justice, but it remained unable to overcome deep impulses to revenge and vendetta among the various populations of the city and hinterland. In sentencing homicides, judges erred on the side of exile over execution, and when judges attempted to condemn participants in vendetta to death, they found themselves made party to revenge violence. The inability of the court to effectively police interpersonal violence is indicative of a developing state whose institutions and social structures are failing.

The massive wave of mid-century violence is placed into a long history of Bologna’s failure to establish a meaningful civil society.

Socioeconomic crises of the early seventeenth century contributed to this deteriorating situation. In particular, the great plague of 1630 overturned social norms and, in the “world upside down” that followed, ordinary Bolognesi of the contado committed more homicides in pursuit of gain or in protection of fragile resources. The stresses of endemic rural poverty bore heavily on rural violence. From rural bases, republican and oligarchic factions of urban nobility launched a renewed assault on papal authority in the mid-sixteenth century. A civil war broke out in the city’s streets and homicide rates peaked at levels exceeding any thus far documented in early modern Europe. Officers of government bodies and of the criminal court were targeted for killing on multiple occasions.

This dissertation contextualizes these trends through interdisciplinary approaches to the history of violence and homicide in the west, and by deep qualitative analysis of patterns emerging from quantitative data collection. By combining these two approaches, the massive wave of mid-century violence is placed into a long history of Bologna’s failure to establish a meaningful civil society.

Collective Crimes in Times of War: Explaining Local Violence Against Civilians in Croatia

Mila Dragojevic, Department of Politics, The University of the South

Research Grant, 2014

As a recipient of the Harry Frank Guggenheim research grant, I was able to conduct my fieldwork in Croatia. My research project sought to explain under what conditions mass violence against civilians occurred by examining the sources of the local variation in the level and type of violence in the war in Croatia that lasted from 1991 to 1995. This research addressed the following questions: 1) Why did targeted violence against civilians occur to a greater extent in some communities than in others? 2) Why did such violence occur in some periods more extensively than in others? 3) How could we account for violence even in the same families or among people who used to be neighbors, friends, and colleagues?

The research entailed a subnational comparison of communities with varied levels of violence against civilians including 131 in-depth interviews with residents in selected communities. I complemented this material with documents and additional interviews from NGOs, archives, and libraries across Croatia. Over the course of the fieldwork, I realized that my findings and insights would be more valuable if placed in a cross-national comparative context. That is why I decided to pursue further research in Guatemala and Uganda, two countries with different historical trajectories than Croatia, but with similar patterns of violence against civilians.

Thus, even before mass violence begins, certain communities are transformed into amoral communities, where the definition of crime becomes altered and violence is justified as a form of self-defense by the perpetrators.

Based on the analysis of the interviews and the documents from Croatia, Uganda, and Guatemala, I argue that civilians are targeted in some communities during the war when political ethnicities, defined as new identities linking a political goal and a cultural identity, form on the local level through two complementary processes — the exclusion of moderates and the production of borders. The exclusion of moderates is carried out through violence, in-group policing, and/or social ostracism. The process of the production of borders occurs through barricades, checkpoints, and wartime dividing lines. These complementary forces limit individuals’ freedom of expressing divergent political views, work to prevent the possible defection of the members of an in-group, and facilitate identification of individuals who are represented as a threat. Thus, even before mass violence begins, certain communities are transformed into amoral communities, or communities that I conceptualize as places where the definition of crime becomes altered and violence is justified as a form of self-defense by the perpetrators. This research complements the literature on genocide and civil wars by showing how violence is used as a political strategy, as well as how state-level and micro-level cleavages become linked in local communities through the complementary mechanisms of the exclusion of moderates and the production of borders.

Bibliography

Mila Dragojevic . “Violence and the Production of Borders in Western Slavonia,” Slavic Review, Vol. 75, No. 2: 422-455, Summer 2016.

The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakstan

Sarah Cameron, Department of History, University of Maryland-College Park

Research Grant, 2015

In its staggering human toll, the Kazakh famine of 1930-33 was one of the most heinous crimes of the Stalinist regime. More than 1.5 million people perished in the Kazakh famine, a quarter of Soviet Kazakhstan’s population, and the crisis transformed a territory the size of continental Europe. Yet, the story of this famine has remained largely hidden from view, both in Kazakhstan and in the West. My book, The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan, brings this largely unknown story to light, examining two interrelated questions: What were the causes of the Kazakh famine of 1930-33? And how does this famine, an event long neglected in narratives of the Stalin era, alter our understanding of Soviet modernization and nation-making?

The nature of this state-driven modernization project was uneven. Ultimately, neither Kazakhstan nor Kazakhs themselves became integrated into the Soviet system in precisely the ways that Moscow had originally hoped.

The book begins with the famine’s roots in the last decades of the Russian empire and concludes with the republic’s slow road to economic recovery in the post-famine years of the mid-1930s. It argues that the Kazakh famine of 1930-33 was the result of Moscow’s radical attempt to transform a group of Muslim, Turkic-speaking nomads, known as “Kazakhs,” and a particular territory, Soviet Kazakhstan, into a modern, Soviet nation. It finds that, through the most violent means, the Kazakh famine created Soviet Kazakhstan, a stable territory with clearly delineated boundaries that was an integral part of the Soviet economic system, and forged a new Kazakh national identity. But the nature of this state-driven modernization project was uneven. Ultimately, neither Kazakhstan nor Kazakhs themselves became integrated into the Soviet system in precisely the ways that Moscow had originally hoped. The scars from the famine would haunt the republic throughout the remainder of the Soviet era and shape its transformation into an independent nation in 1991.

Along the way, the book uses the case study of the Kazakh famine to overturn several conventional ideas about nation-making, modernization, and ethnic violence under Stalin. Seen from the angle of the Soviet east, a region that, to date, has not received as much scholarly attention as the Soviet Union’s west, the regime and the devastating consequences of its policies appear in a different light. The book should be of interest to scholars interested in the global transformation of food systems, genocide studies, and environmental history.

“There is Still No Justice Here!”: Theorizing Women’s Movements’ Influence on Postwar African States Enforcement of Gender-Based Violence Laws

Peace Medie, Legon Centre for International Affairs and Diplomacy, University of Ghana

Research Grant, 2014

African countries have begun to create specialized criminal justice sector mechanisms, such as specialized courts and specialized police units to address violence against women. Proponents of this international norm, including women’s nongovernmental organizations, argue that these specialized mechanisms will improve how victims of gendered violence are treated by the criminal justice system and will ensure that perpetrators are held accountable by the law. My book project is a comparative study of the implementation of this international norm in post-war states in Africa. I draw on over 300 interviews conducted in Liberia and Cote d’Ivoire to study variation in the establishment of specialized units in the police force and gendarmerie. While both countries have created specialized units, Liberia has made more progress in institutionalizing its unit. I also study how the establishment of these specialized units have affected the performance of street-level officers in cases of intimate partner violence and non-partner perpetrated rape.

These findings are also relevant for policymakers as they identify the conditions under which specialized units are more likely to be institutionalized and to improve law enforcement and advance women’s rights.

I argue that while pressure from the United Nations, including the peacekeeping mission in both countries, was sufficient for the creation of the specialized units, it was not sufficient for their institutionalization. Instead, strong pressure from domestic actors, particularly women’s organizations, and favorable political and institutional conditions were needed for rapid institutionalization. Furthermore, in both countries, officers in specialized units were less likely to adopt practices that re-victimized girls and women and were more likely to refer rape cases for prosecution. However, street-level performance was hampered by infrastructural and logistical constraints. These findings provide insight into the domestic implementation of international norms and demonstrate the roles of international and domestic actors in addressing violence against women and in building institutions in war-affected states. These findings are also relevant for policymakers as they identify the conditions under which specialized units are more likely to be institutionalized and to improve law enforcement and advance women’s rights.

Bibliography

Medie, Peace. “Rape Reporting in Post-conflict Cote D’Ivoire: Accessing Justice and Ending Impunity,”African Affairs, 116/464, 414-434

Aggression and Morality: Links in Early Childhood

Judith G. Smetana, Clinical and Social Psychology, University of Rochester

Research Grant, 2015

Differences in aggressive behavior emerge in early childhood, become more stable with age, and can lead to significant psychological problems, including violence in adulthood. It is, therefore, imperative to understand the factors that contribute to the development of aggressive tendencies early in life. Although aggression involves intentional harm to others, surprisingly little research has examined whether deficits in children’s moral judgments of issues involving harm and unfairness toward others are implicated in children’s aggressive behavior. Our research investigated this issue, taking advantage of recent advances in how researchers define and measure moral judgments and aggression.

Moral development research has shown the importance of distinguishing children’s judgments of moral transgressions, which entail negative consequences for others, from judgments of transgressions involving more arbitrary, agreed-on social-conventional norms (like those pertaining to manners).

Additionally, aggression research has shown that it is not sufficient to consider only whether a child is aggressive but that we must also question why. Some children have difficulty controlling feelings of anger and frustration, leading to a reactive form of aggression that is impulsive, “hot-blooded,” and aimed at responding to perceived threats from others.

Considering callous-unemotional tendencies may prove essential for understanding the role of moral judgments in the development and maintenance of young children's deliberate, calculated aggression.

In contrast, other children exhibit callous-unemotional tendencies, which reflect a lack of empathy, remorse, or concern for others, and use aggression in a proactive, “cold-blooded” manner to obtain rewards and accomplish goals. We tested whether deficits in children’s ability to distinguish between moral and conventional norms was associated with increases in aggression over time and whether this link was stronger for children showing greater callous-unemotional tendencies.

A socioeconomically and ethnically diverse sample of 135 4- to 7-year-olds, 128 of their parents, and 49 teachers participated in the study. Children were told stories about hypothetical, everyday moral and conventional transgressions using an iPad and were asked to make several types of judgments for each story. At the beginning of the study and then nine-months later, parents and teachers rated children’s aggressive behavior, and teachers rated children’s callous-unemotional tendencies. We found that, controlling for gender and age, children who had difficulty differentiating between moral and conventional norms were more aggressive at the beginning of the study and showed greater increases (relative to their peers) in aggression over time, but only if they also possessed callous-unemotional tendencies.

The ability to make distinctively moral judgments did not predict aggression among children who were capable of empathy and concern for others. Our findings suggest that considering callous-unemotional tendencies may prove essential for understanding the role of moral judgments in the development and maintenance of young children’s deliberate, calculated aggression. Further research needs to be directed toward studying the emergence (and amelioration) of these tendencies in early childhood. This developmental period is particularly critical to target, as the opportunities for successful intervention are greater than in later childhood or adolescence, when destructive patterns are more established.

Bibliography

Jambon, M., & Smetana, J. G. (under review). Callous-unemotional traits moderate the association between children's early moral understanding and aggression: A short-term longitudinal study.

Private Gun Ownership in Modern China, 1912–1949

Lei Duan, History, Syracuse University

Dissertation Fellowship, 2015

This dissertation examines private gun ownership and its sociocultural and political implications in modern China from 1860 to 1949, a period characterized by foreign invasion, constant military conflicts, and political decentralization. During this period, foreign guns, along with their Chinese imitations, flooded society. In response to the social disorder, many Chinese civilians turned to this new class of weaponry for self-defense. While historians have understood the gun in China in terms of military modernization, this dissertation sets the privately owned gun in its social and political context, and studies why Chinese civilians chose to arm themselves with guns and how governments of different periods responded to their armed civilians.

This study argues that growing social violence and the state’s inability to respond to it led Chinese men and women to seek to obtain their own weapons. This demand was fueled by the gun’s powerful symbolism in public culture and social life, and by beliefs that guns were a source of social status and self-empowerment. Civilian ownership of guns contributed to persistent social violence, and also transformed power structures in local society and accelerated local militarization, impacting the balance between state and society. Both late Qing and Republican governments’ regulation and control over armed civilians was a dynamic and contingent process, hovering between two practices: the state’s resolute maintenance of its monopoly on the uses of guns, and its reliance on armed civilians in local defense.

This study chronicles both the state efforts to deal with armed civilians and the reactions from the bottom.

This study argues that the state’s dilemma over whether to control private guns or rely on them prevented the formation of an effective and consistent gun policy. In contrast, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) adopted a different policy towards private gun ownership, by making the mobilization of an armed populace part of its mass line policy. The CCP’s private gun policy played an important role in strengthening the CCP’s presence and authority in wartime China.

Drawing from a variety of sources such as government documents, legal cases, social survey reports, and popular writings, this study chronicles both the state efforts to deal with armed civilians and the reactions from the bottom. This dissertation engages with and complements wider research on modern Chinese history in examining violence, social life, and the dynamic state-society relationship.

When Comrades Go to War: Post-Liberation Movements, Elite Politics and the Internal Dynamics of Africa’s Great War

Harry Verhoeven, Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford

Philip Roessler, Government, College of William & Mary

Research Grant, 2013

Funding by the HFG enabled vital fieldwork in six African countries (Angola, Congo, Eritrea, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda), which helped detail the day-by-day, week-by-week chronicle of Africa’s Great War, a conflict that had its roots in the Rwandan Genocide of 1994 and erupted in two phases (1996 and 1998), claiming the lives of more than four million Africans. These findings were written up in a monograph, Why Comrades Go To War. Liberation Politics and the Outbreak of Africa’s Deadliest Conflict.

We found in our research and argue in the book that Africa’s Great War was not a conflict between old enemies or distant strangers but rather between ideological fellow travelers and revolutionaries who had long waged the same struggle for a new, leftist Africa. Ironically, but not coincidentally, it was this very intimacy that would be the undoing of what initially seemed like a triumph (the ouster of Mobutu, arch-symbol of authoritarianism and decadence in Africa) but quickly turned into a fratricidal nightmare between leftist liberation movements from across the continent.

The initial revolutionary euphoria of liberating Africa's third-biggest country rapidly gave way to distrust between the comrades, now turned ministers and generals.

The seeds of Africa’s Great War were sown in the revolutionary struggle against Mobutu—the way the revolution came together, the way it was organized, and, paradoxically, the very way it succeeded. The overthrow of the ancien regime proved a Pyrrhic victory because the protagonists ignored the philosophy of Julius Nyerere, the godfather of Africa’s liberation movements: they put the gun before the unglamorous but essential task of building the domestic and regional political institutions and organizational structures necessary to consolidate peace after revolution. Thus, the initial revolutionary euphoria of liberating Africa’s third-biggest country rapidly gave way to distrust between the comrades, now turned ministers and generals.

In the absence of robust institutions to settle disputes, divide the spoils of victory, and balance competing visions for the revolution, political disagreements and misperceptions became sources of great tension and later catastrophic physical violence. A mere 15 months after what should have been a “second independence,” the outcome was Africa’s Great War.

Grassroots Peace: Postconflict Reconstruction in Rural Colombia

Casey Ehrlich, Political Science, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Dissertation Fellowship, 2014

This project focuses on grassroots peacebuilding efforts across 182 rural villages in Eastern Antioquia, Colombia. For nearly a decade, these villages were caught on the frontlines of the civil conflict between the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the National Liberation Army (ELN), paramilitary groups, and Colombian state forces. Despite their proximity, villages experienced different types of armed occupation and levels of violence wielded against civilians. Since the conflict subsided in this region, villages have also revealed variation in their community reconstruction patterns. In some villages, residents worked together to demine public spaces, rebuild basic infrastructure, and exhume the bodies of the disappeared. Meanwhile, other neighboring villages did not organize their communities to rebuild infrastructure and guarantee common security. This juxtaposition sparks an important research question that has not been examined by peacebuilding scholars or social scientists: What accounts for variation in grassroots peacebuilding efforts in the postconflict landscape? This dissertation examines this question by tracing the relationship between local conflict dynamics and subsequent village-level peacebuilding efforts.

Numerous international peacebuilding missions have failed to establish sustainable peace precisely because they have ignored local dynamics, both in transitions from war and in postwar environments.

Despite a rich body of academic literature on civil wars, social scientific studies have seldom focused on postconflict settings. Existing research on postconflict settings has focused on top-down peace programming and failed to consider the theoretical link between conflict dynamics and postconflict outcomes. By studying local reconstruction activities across villages in Colombia, and implementing a comparative, theoretically driven study of the relationship between these outcomes and local conflict dynamics, this dissertations argues for a more explicit link between a conflict setting and its postconflict landscape. Further, this dissertation delineates how conflict dynamics affect reconstruction efforts through the trust, informal institutions and social networks of villages.

Finally, I offer a conceptualization of grassroots peacebuilding and a theoretical framework to help scholars, policymakers, and practitioners understand and identify informal or small-scale reconstruction processes led by ordinary people. Numerous international peacebuilding missions have failed to establish sustainable peace precisely because they have ignored local dynamics, both in transitions from war and in postwar environments. Although international policy circles have advocated for greater attention to micro-level causes of conflict and bottom-up reconstruction processes, systematic research has yet to be conducted on this topic and scholars continue to focus on elite-led peace operations. My dissertation fills these gaps, while providing generalizable insights relevant to the international community and countries transitioning from war to peace.

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