Books by Natasha Wheatley
Over the last two decades, the "new international order" of 1919 has grown into an expansive new ... more Over the last two decades, the "new international order" of 1919 has grown into an expansive new area of research across multiple disciplines. With the League of Nations at its heart, the interwar settlement's innovations in international organizations, international law, and many other areas shaped the world we know today. This book presents the first study of the relationship between this new international order and the new regional order in Central and Eastern Europe after the collapse of the Habsburg empire. An analysis of the co-implication of these two orders is grounded in four key scholarly interventions: understanding the legacies of empire in international organizations; examining regionalism in the work of interwar international institutions; creating an integrated history of the interwar order in Europe; and testing recent claims of the conceptual connection between nationalism and internationalism. With chapters covering international health, international financial oversight, human trafficking, minority rights, scientific networks, technical expertise, passports, commercial treaties, borders and citizenship, and international policing, this book pioneers a regional approach to international order, and explores the origins of today's global governance in the wake of imperial collapse.
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo50700147.html
Time is the backdrop of hist... more https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo50700147.html
Time is the backdrop of historical inquiry, yet it is much more than a featureless setting for events. Different temporalities interact dynamically; sometimes they coexist tensely, sometimes they clash violently. In this innovative volume, editors Dan Edelstein, Stefanos Geroulanos, and Natasha Wheatley challenge how we interpret history by focusing on the nexus of two concepts—“power” and “time”—as they manifest in a wide variety of case studies. Analyzing history, culture, politics, technology, law, art, and science, this engaging book shows how power is constituted through the shaping of temporal regimes in historically specific ways. Power and Time includes seventeen essays on human rights; sovereignty; Islamic, European, Chinese, and Indian history; slavery; capitalism; revolution; the Supreme Court; the Anthropocene; and even the Manson Family. Power and Time will be an agenda-setting volume, highlighting the work of some of the world’s most respected and original contemporary historians and posing fundamental questions for the craft of history.
Papers by Natasha Wheatley
Internationalisms: A Twentieth Century History, ed. Glenda Sluga and Patricia Clavin, 2017
This article contends that the League’s mandate system was more than a political institution or a... more This article contends that the League’s mandate system was more than a political institution or a bureaucratic procedure: it was a culture of argumentation that engendered particular ways of reading and writing — not least for those in colonial territories conquered during the First World War who now fell under its jurisdiction. The petitions they sent to the League document how a new politics of textual interpretation and application arose in response to the League’s theoretical limitation on colonial sovereignty. As an index to mandate sovereignty compiled by its subjects, these petitions offer the resources for a history of international order from below.
A new history of the Mandate system is in the making, and sovereignty lies at its heart. In Anton... more A new history of the Mandate system is in the making, and sovereignty lies at its heart. In Antony Anghie’s analysis, the Mandate system played a crucial role in consolidating the construction of imperfect non-European sovereignty, transliterating colonial subjection into the equally pernicious logic of developmentalism.1 If Susan Pedersen’s account is similarly critical, it is also less linear than Anghie’s: the Mandate system may have aided the generation of sovereign statehood as a global norm, but it did so only indirectly, against its own design and intention.2 This chapter pursues Mandate sovereignty along a different track, probing the relationship between forms of rule and forms of address. Turning to view the Mandate system from the ground up, it contends that the Mandate system was also a style of reasoning: its theoretical precepts were adopted (often ambivalently) as resources in the claim-making of Mandate peoples themselves. I focus on the way petitioners made use of the ostensible internationalization of Mandate sovereignty when they wrote to the League about Mandate Palestine. How did the system’s declared augmentation of colonial sovereignty affect and alter the horizon of possible arguments that could be marshaled by those denied self-government? The archive of League petitions contains the materials for an alternative emplotment of Mandate sovereignty as a field of rhetorical strategies, creatively and consciously deployed.
CV by Natasha Wheatley
Conference by Natasha Wheatley
This workshop explores new avenues into the history and theory of subjectivity and subjecthood in... more This workshop explores new avenues into the history and theory of subjectivity and subjecthood in law and politics. If the jurisprudence of legal personality was long structured by a set of framing oppositions – between 'natural' and 'unnatural' persons, physical and fictional ones, individuals and collectives, states and non-states, sovereigns and non-sovereigns – then scholars are now reimagining law's persons beyond the self-evidence of these distinctions. A new sensitivity across the humanities and social sciences to the mutual dependence of orders and their subjects suggests alternative domains of inquiry: how does law construct, valorise, undermine and mutilate its persons, and, conversely, how is law itself reconstructed through different sorts of personhood? From this perspective, archetypes of incomplete or conditioned personality might reveal as much as their untroubled counterparts about the legal and political regimes in which they act. Our conversation will encompass the techniques and technical infrastructure of personality alongside its implication in broader conceptions of agency and will, autonomy and sovereignty, community and groupness, equality and sociability, humanness and its opposites.
Call for Papers by Natasha Wheatley
If the Austro-Hungarian empire gave way to a new order of nation-states at the end of the First W... more If the Austro-Hungarian empire gave way to a new order of nation-states at the end of the First World War, the birth of that order coincided with a broader new international settlement with the League of Nations at its heart. In light of new literature on the relationship between empire and international order, as well as on the relationship between regional and international orders, this workshop will examine the interaction of the League of Nations and its sister organizations, like the ILO, with the former Habsburg lands. Across a range of economic, social, political, and legal domains, international institutions shaped and guaranteed the new order in Central Europe. At the same time, statesmen, bureaucrats and experts from the successor states embarked on influential careers in the new organizations.
Considering the passive involvement of the monarchy with the new internationalism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, as well as the empire’s own legacies of supranational organization, we intend to explore the networks of influence that bound the successor states to the institutions of the interwar order. To what extent were those interactions inflected by imperial pasts? Were some successor states more active participants in those institutions than others? In which ways and on which occasions did the League and the successor states offer each other political opportunities?
Book Reviews by Natasha Wheatley
Review of Daniel Gorman, The Emergence of International Society in the 1920s, H-Diplo, H-Net Revi... more Review of Daniel Gorman, The Emergence of International Society in the 1920s, H-Diplo, H-Net Reviews, November 2013.
How, when, and why did crime and punishment become prerogatives of the international community? M... more How, when, and why did crime and punishment become prerogatives of the international community? Mark Lewis offers some powerful answers in his impressive, rich, and immensely useful history of the emergence of international criminal law in the period between 1919 and 1950. Given the historically close connection between criminal enforcement and the modern sovereign state, The Birth of the New Justice commands the attention not only of scholars working on international law and internationalism, but also those studying European history more broadly. Lewis's carefully researched monograph exposes the waywardness of older accounts focused on the moral progressivism of a liberal (or liberalizing) international order: he shows how key junctures in the evolution of international criminal law were shaped as much by anti-communism or even the defence of sovereign borders as they were by the imperatives of conscience or cosmopolitan justice. If criminal trials symbolically reaffirm an order after its rupture, the relevant 'order' to be reaffirmed and defended in fact differed dramatically from jurist to jurist, and from one moment to another. As such, the nascent jurisprudence of international criminal law doubled as a repository for different visions of Europe's natural 'order' amid the struggle between liberal, fascist, and communist forces. In this context, there can be no whiggish 'progress' but also no ideological coherence: international criminal law emerges as a messily multi-authored project driven by reactionary fears and defensive statism as much as moral idealism, diplomatic pragmatism, and the politics of retribution.
Conference Reports by Natasha Wheatley
Scholarly interest in the imperial origins of the new world order of 1919 has largely focused on ... more Scholarly interest in the imperial origins of the new world order of 1919 has largely focused on thinkers and political figures from the British Empire and Anglo world more broadly. Yet that new order arguably took shape on the ground most palpably in Central and Eastern Europe, where problems of financial collapse, national minorities, endemic disease, and humanitarian aid emerged as domains where the League’s institutional identity and political-legal authority were defined and tested. And in this region, international organisations and actors worked in the shadow not of the British Empire, but the Austro-Hungarian one.
Interviews by Natasha Wheatley
Journal of the History of Ideas Blog, 2021
Power and Time's seventeen chapters span disciplinary approaches ranging from history, to law, to... more Power and Time's seventeen chapters span disciplinary approaches ranging from history, to law, to anthropology, to the history of art, and each illustrates how political authority is constituted through the shaping of temporal regimes in historically-specific ways: The expansionist futurity of the Nazi "New Man" meets the apocalyptic presentism of the Manson Family "cult," meets the "deep time" of our Age of Plastic. In their introduction, the editors propose a new theoretical model of historical
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Books by Natasha Wheatley
Time is the backdrop of historical inquiry, yet it is much more than a featureless setting for events. Different temporalities interact dynamically; sometimes they coexist tensely, sometimes they clash violently. In this innovative volume, editors Dan Edelstein, Stefanos Geroulanos, and Natasha Wheatley challenge how we interpret history by focusing on the nexus of two concepts—“power” and “time”—as they manifest in a wide variety of case studies. Analyzing history, culture, politics, technology, law, art, and science, this engaging book shows how power is constituted through the shaping of temporal regimes in historically specific ways. Power and Time includes seventeen essays on human rights; sovereignty; Islamic, European, Chinese, and Indian history; slavery; capitalism; revolution; the Supreme Court; the Anthropocene; and even the Manson Family. Power and Time will be an agenda-setting volume, highlighting the work of some of the world’s most respected and original contemporary historians and posing fundamental questions for the craft of history.
Papers by Natasha Wheatley
CV by Natasha Wheatley
Conference by Natasha Wheatley
Call for Papers by Natasha Wheatley
Considering the passive involvement of the monarchy with the new internationalism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, as well as the empire’s own legacies of supranational organization, we intend to explore the networks of influence that bound the successor states to the institutions of the interwar order. To what extent were those interactions inflected by imperial pasts? Were some successor states more active participants in those institutions than others? In which ways and on which occasions did the League and the successor states offer each other political opportunities?
Book Reviews by Natasha Wheatley
Conference Reports by Natasha Wheatley
Interviews by Natasha Wheatley
Time is the backdrop of historical inquiry, yet it is much more than a featureless setting for events. Different temporalities interact dynamically; sometimes they coexist tensely, sometimes they clash violently. In this innovative volume, editors Dan Edelstein, Stefanos Geroulanos, and Natasha Wheatley challenge how we interpret history by focusing on the nexus of two concepts—“power” and “time”—as they manifest in a wide variety of case studies. Analyzing history, culture, politics, technology, law, art, and science, this engaging book shows how power is constituted through the shaping of temporal regimes in historically specific ways. Power and Time includes seventeen essays on human rights; sovereignty; Islamic, European, Chinese, and Indian history; slavery; capitalism; revolution; the Supreme Court; the Anthropocene; and even the Manson Family. Power and Time will be an agenda-setting volume, highlighting the work of some of the world’s most respected and original contemporary historians and posing fundamental questions for the craft of history.
Considering the passive involvement of the monarchy with the new internationalism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, as well as the empire’s own legacies of supranational organization, we intend to explore the networks of influence that bound the successor states to the institutions of the interwar order. To what extent were those interactions inflected by imperial pasts? Were some successor states more active participants in those institutions than others? In which ways and on which occasions did the League and the successor states offer each other political opportunities?