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In this first full-length study of the Metro-Vickers show trial of 1933, Gordon Morrell uses some new and many underutilized Soviet and British sources to examine the political economic, social, legal and cultural dimensions of the only Stalinist political trial of the 1930s which directly engaged a foreign power.
This book offers an accessible and lively survey of the global history of the age of industrialization and globalization that arose in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars and collapsed in the maelstrom of the First World War. Through a combination of industrialization, technological innovation and imperial expansion, the industrializing powers of the world helped to create inter-connected global space that left few regions untouched. In ten concise chapters, this book relays the major shifts in global power, economics and society, outlining the interconnections of global industrial, imperial and economic change for local and regional experiences, identities and politics. It finishes with an expo...
“Russian politics, like opium, seems infallibly to provoke the most fantastic dreams and imaginings on the part of the people who study them.” — E.A. Walker, British Embassy, Moscow 1931 In March 1933 the economic section of the Soviet secret police arrested six British engineers employed by the Metropolitan Vickers Electrical Company. The arrests provoked a confrontation that brought Anglo-Soviet relations to the brink of disaster and resurrected the spectre of the show trials and purges of the technical intelligentsia that had shaken Soviet society from 1928 to 1931. Britain Confronts the Stalin Revolution is the first full-length study of the Metro-Vickers’ show trial of 1933. Bas...
The creation of the League of Nations Permanent Mandates Commission (PMC) at the close of World War I and its successor, the United Nations Trusteeship Council (TC), following World War II, were watersheds in the history of modern imperialism. For the first time, the international community had asserted that the well-being of colonial peoples was not merely the private concern of metropolitan states, but a shared responsibility of humankind that transcended national boundaries. Editors R.M. Douglas, Michael D. Callahan, and Elizabeth Bishop have assembled a wide array of scholars to assess the relative weight to be placed on international influence in the process of decolonization. Across a broad cross-section of geographical and political settings, Imperialism on Trial reveals the operation of the complicated and often conflicted dynamic between the national and international dimensions of colonialism in its final and most historically consequential phase. Book jacket.
This book consists of extracts from key documents, along with commentary and further reading, on the ‘Great Patriotic War’ of the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany, 1941-45. Despite the historical significance of the war, few Soviet documents have been published in English. This work provides translations of a range of extracts from Soviet documents relating to the titanic struggle on the Eastern Front during World War II, with commentary. This is the only single-volume work in English to use documentary evidence to look at the Soviet war effort from military, political, economic and diplomatic perspectives. The book should not only facilitate a deeper study of the Soviet war effort, but also allow more balanced study of what is widely known in the West as the ‘Eastern Front’. This book will be of much interest to students and scholars of military history, Soviet history, and World War II history.
Winner of the Cundill Prize in Historical Literature Shortlisted for the Lionel Gelber Prize At the end of the First World War, the Paris Peace Conference saw a battle over the future of empire. The victorious allied powers wanted to annex the Ottoman territories and German colonies they had occupied; Woodrow Wilson and a groundswell of anti-imperialist activism stood in their way. France, Belgium, Japan and the British dominions reluctantly agreed to an Anglo-American proposal to hold and administer those allied conquests under "mandate" from the new League of Nations. In the end, fourteen mandated territories were set up across the Middle East, Africa and the Pacific. Against all odds, the...
A major re-interpretation of international relations in the period from 1919 to 1939. Avoiding such simplistic explanations as appeasement and British decline, Keith Neilson demonstrates that the underlying cause of the Second World War was the intellectual failure to find an effective means of maintaining the new world order created in 1919. With secret diplomacy, alliances and the balance of power seen as having caused the First World War, the makers of British policy after 1919 were forced to rely on such instruments of liberal internationalism as arms control, the League of Nations and global public opinion to preserve peace. Using Britain's relations with Soviet Russia as a focus for a re-examination of Britain's dealings with Germany and Japan, this book shows that these tools were inadequate to deal with the physical and ideological threats posed by Bolshevism, fascism, Nazism and Japanese militarism.
Framed by the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, the formation of the League of Nations Mandates System, the 1925 Locarno Conference, and the Manchurian Crisis of the early 1930s, Revenants of the German Empire: Colonial Germans, Imperialism, and the League of Nations explores the adaptiveness of German colonists after the loss of the German colonies following the First World War.
"Now updated with new facts, and abridged for use in Soviet history courses, this gripping book assembles top-secret Soviet documents, translated into English, from the era of Stalin's purges. The dossiers, police reports, private letters, secret transcripts, and other documents expose the hidden inner workings of the Communist Party and the dark inhumanity of the purge process."[book cover].