Active History

Video: Thomas Kuehn – “Ottoman Hero or Frontier Villain? Ahmed Feyzi Pasha (1839-1915)”

April 25, 2014 No Comments

The last talk of the SFU History Department’s Heroes and Villains series featured historian Thomas Kuehn‘s reflections on Ahmed Feyzi Pasha. This high-ranking Ottoman bureaucrat and military officer was highly influential in terms of shaping Ottoman policy in strategically important borderlands of the empire in Arabia and present-day Iraq between the mid 1880s and his retirement in 1908. Arguably, he was one of the great imperial pro-consuls of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But unlike his contemporaries Sir Evelyn Baring (Great Britain), General Joseph Gallieni (France), and Konstantin Petrovich von Kaufman (Russia), Ahmed Feyzi has received little, if any, scholarly attention.

Kuehn’s lecture here sheds light on Ahmed Feyzi’s highly contradictory record as an administrator and military man by focusing on his three terms as governor-general of Ottoman Yemen, by far the most notorious trouble spot of the late Ottoman Empire, where he served longer than any other high-level Ottoman official: On one hand, his skills as a diplomat and negotiator and his talent as a military commander kept local opposition to Ottoman rule at bay for years and were instrumental in crushing two large-scale uprisings that brought Ottoman rule in Yemen to the brink of collapse. While these actions earned Ahmed Feyzi the admiration of both the Ottoman central government and foreign observers, he was widely known to run a money extortion network of relatives, Ottoman officials, and local elites that systematically overtaxed local residents on a massive scale and seriously undermined the legitimacy of Ottoman rule in southwest Arabia. His success in leading counter-insurgency operations in Yemen and his superior knowledge of local affairs allowed Ahmed Feyzi to make himself indispensable to his superiors in Istanbul and to shield his cronies from prosecution until his patron Sultan Abdulhamid II himself lost power in 1908.

Ahmed Feyzi’s career is full of dramatic episodes: for example, his power struggle with a chief investigator sent from Istanbul in 1892 or his five-day camel ride across the Arabian Desert in 1905 when he was rushed from southern Iraq to Yemen in order to assume command of Ottoman military forces at the most dire moment of the 1904-06 uprising. Looking at Ahmed Feyzi, the Ottoman “empire builder and hero,” and Ahmed Feyzi, the “frontier villain,” allows us to bring to life a little known but nevertheless crucial chapter of Middle East history in the age of high imperialism. Ahmed Feyzi in many ways embodies the dilemmas of the late Ottoman Empire that still possessed the capabilities to expand but at the same time undermined the possibilities for its continued existence.

History Slam Episode Thirty-Eight: Senate Reform with James McHugh

April 23, 2014 1 Comment

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

By Sean Graham

The ‘Red Chamber.’ Photo from www.sen.parl.gc.ca

On Friday, the Supreme Court is expected to make a ruling on whether the government can proceed with Senate reform without amending the Constitution. The decision has been a long time coming for Stephen Harper, who has expressed a strong desire to reform the Senate since he was first elected in 2006. The issue of Senate reform has been a particularly prominent issue in the past year – from the spending scandals to Justin Trudeau kicking Liberal senators out of the caucus to Conservative senators refusing to fully support the elections reform bill. The Supreme Court’s decision Friday will fundamentally shape this government’s efforts to reform the Senate moving forward. (Jonathan McQuarrie addressed the issue of Senate reform in this piece back in October)
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Bringing Labour History Alive Through Photos & Film

April 21, 2014 1 Comment

Image D-01635 courtesy of Royal BC Museum, BC Archives

By Erica Landrock

Over the past two and a half years, I’ve been working to produce a three part history series about Working People and labour history in British Columbia for BC’s non-profit broadcaster, Knowledge Network. When my team and I began the project back in 2011, it seemed like a straightforward and easily manageable task. How hard could it be to produce a series without filming anything? Choose the stories, write the scripts, select images, edit and voila! Easy. Or so it seemed. We quickly learned there was a very fine balance between making the stories accessible and engaging for an audience, while still telling a true account of history.

The origination of the series came about in a very organic fashion. Jack Munro, a well known British Columbia labour figure was watching Knowledge Network one evening when another documentary I was involved with Edge of the World: BC’s Early Years came on the air. He liked the approach and easy access to history and thought why couldn’t we have something like that but about labour and working people? At the time, Jack was the chair for the Labour Heritage Centre, an organization that helps to bring a voice to the province’s working people. Jack contacted Rudy Buttignol, CEO of Knowledge Network, to see how one would go about getting a series like this made. Not realizing this suggestion was going to spark over two years of work, the idea was a hit and a call went out for proposals to BC’s independent filmmaking community. My team was selected and by the fall of 2011 we were underway. Continue reading →

Heritage Toronto Awards: Call for Nominations

April 18, 2014 No Comments

The Heritage Toronto Awards celebrate outstanding contributions in the promotion and conservation of Toronto’s history and heritage by professionals and volunteers.

The deadline for nominations is 4:30pm, May 16, 2014.

Check out the poster below for more details.

“And bold and adventurous amazons they were”: Colonial encounters with LGBT Indigenous people in the Pacific Northwest fur-trade

April 17, 2014 2 Comments

By Eric Wright

An earlier version of post originally appeared on the author’s blog Actually History.

In 1814, an Irish fur-trader in the employ of the Northwest Company by the name of Ross Cox was conducting business with Indigenous people near present day Spokane, Washington when he encountered, in his eyes, a remarkable individual. In his journal under the titillating heading of “A Curious Account of a Hermaphroditic Chief”, Cox described this person as,

A remarkable being. The Indians allege he belongs to the epicene gender. He wears a woman’s dress, overloaded with a profusion of beads, thimbles and small shells; add to which, the upper part of the face and the manner of wearing the hair are quite feminine; but these appearances are more than counterbalanced by a rough beard, and a masculine tone of voice.

Cox’s encounter with this “hermaphrodite chief” is just one of several known interactions between male fur-traders and people who are often referred to today as “third gendered” in the 18^th and 19^th century fur-trade in the Pacific Northwest. People of a “third gender” in North American Indigenous societies were men and women whose gendered work roles, styles of dress, and behaviours did not accord in some degree to what was expected of someone of their biological sex. Today, they might identify as a “transgendered person” or perhaps “intersexed.” In terms of sexual orientation, third gendered people could be attracted to members of the same sex, but not necessarily. Of course, it does not really make sense to speak literally of “same-sex” attraction within a non-dualistic gender/sex system.

In this short article, I shed light on a few of these moments of encounter that have not been lost to history. As we might expect, some interactions followed the standard script of colonialism – male fur-traders heaped disdain and sometimes violence upon third gender Indigenous people. These interactions resulted from an ideological context of imperialism in which Indigenous people were doubly stigmatized – once for being Indigenous and once for being third gendered. Yet there were notable exceptions to a pattern of violence, like that of Ross Cox narrated above. In these cases, European male fur-traders not only tolerated third gendered Indigenous people; they showed them a degree of respect in their writings and interactions. Accounting for the respectful nature of some interactions in this period proves a much more difficult task.

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How Does History Help Explain Bitcoins?

April 16, 2014 No Comments

By Jonathan McQuarrie

Lately, Bitcoins have received considerable attention from the media. The recent failure of the Tokyo-based Mt. Gox exchange, where users could exchange their Bitcoins for national currencies, sparked particular concern. The website managed to lose some 850,000 Bitcoins, which at the time were valued at approximately $400 million. For the last month, proponents of Bitcoins, such as Coinbase founder Fred Ehrasam, have been in damage control mode. Despite the recent bad headlines, they argue, the fundamental technological principles behind Bitcoins are sound. They are fond of noting that during the early days of the internet (back in the dimly remembered 1990s), start-ups and failures abounded. They scoff at naysayers like Warren Buffett, arguing that he does not understand the technology behind Bitcoins.

The system behind Bitcoins is indeed complex, but here is my simplified understanding. The origins go back to a 2008 article by ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’ (widely believed to be a pseudonym), where s/he outlined the development of a ‘peer-to-peer electronic cash system.’ The basic goal is to create a system of exchange where two users can spend Bitcoins with values determined and security protected by other users. When two people make an exchange using Bitcoins, their exchange generates a publicly recorded transaction, designed to ensure that a person does not try to spend the same Bitcoin twice. The public transaction has an associated hash (generated by the cryptographic hash function SHA-2), which presents a mathematical challenge. Users called miners verify the transaction by providing a proof for the mathematical challenge. The hash also provides a means for the miner to demonstrate that their computer resources solved the challenge. The miner adds the verified transaction, called a block, to a chain of blocks that extends back to the beginning of Bitcoins, and receives a portion of the fee charged to the people making the transaction in exchange for their work to create blocks. Miners are also able to create new Bitcoins as a reward for their work in extending the transaction block chains—as the chain is extended, more Bitcoins are issued, though the speed at which this occurs decreases as more Bitcoins enter the system. Decreasing speed is designed to ensure that they remain scarce, which is a fundamental element of almost any currency. Calling people who create transaction blocks ‘miners’ emphasizes the scarcity of currency – deliberately evoking connections to gold (that most recognizable of specie) and impressing that in order to get wealth, one must work.

As the ‘mining’ metaphor suggests, historical analogies have been used for explaining Bitcoin’s potentials and shortcomings. Continue reading →

Old Conflicts in a New Century: The Problems of Prairie Grain Transportation

April 15, 2014 2 Comments

From Wikipedia

By Laura Larsen

Few Canadians missed the news stories of grain piling up on the prairies and denunciations of the system’s failures. The Federal government’s recent announcement of financial penalties for the railways is the latest act in a long running problem facing western Canadian grain farmers: how to economically get their grain to market when long stretches of prairie and three mountain ranges stand between them and the ocean ports that export about seventy per cent of western Canada’s grain.

Economically exporting prairie grain is a complicated relationship between farmers, elevator companies, railways, and port terminals all of whom have conflicting interests which have been a wellspring of conflict since Confederation. Canada consistently produces around twenty per cent of the world’s tradable grain. While many other countries grow grain, only Argentina, Australia, the United States, and Ukraine regularly produce domestic surpluses which can be exported. Competition among these nations for their place in the international grain market is fierce. Like all bulk commodities, grain’s cost rises with transportation distance. All of western Canada’s competitors are much closer to deep water ports for their grain exports. When grain is not moving off the prairies it means unhappy customers, lost sales, and Canadian farmers who are not getting paid. Continue reading →

Memory and the Built Landscape: Edmonton’s Architectural Heritage Website

April 14, 2014 No Comments

By Tim O’Grady

When you think of important events in your life, chances are you associate them with physical places. Whether it is your childhood home, a former school, or a family cottage or favourite vacation spot, the connection between memory and place is intangible, though very real. People are connected to the buildings in their city. They have lived their lives in and around them, and many of these structures hold a special place in their personal narratives.

Memory and Landscape

Defining memory can be difficult. For the purposes of this post, I will follow the definition provided by John Bodnar, who states that public (or collective) memory is not simply a time dimension between past and present, but is the interpretation of reality. Peter Burke describes five ways in which memory is transmitted: oral traditions, written documents, still or moving pictures, actions (dance, craft etc.), and space. Randall Mason in his article “Fixing Historic Preservation” argues historic preservation is the cultivation of society’s collective memory, and believes historic fabric, such as buildings, is essential to sustaining memory. To support this, he quotes sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, who said “it is the spatial image alone that, by reason of its stability, gives us an illusion of not having changed through time and of retrieving the past in the present.” Continue reading →

Faster Than a Speeding Canoe: ‘The Superheroes’ of the Fur Trade

April 11, 2014 No Comments

By Eve Dutton

There’s a certain image that the term “voyageur” conjures up in the Canadian consciousness: bearded, burly, and boastful rascals who prized their independence above all else, accomplished feats of superhuman strength and endurance, and braved the uncharted wilds with a song in their heart. This portrait of the voyageur has a long pedigree — it comes to us directly from post journals and other contemporary writings, which are often taken as the final word on the subject. It was embellished over the years by soulful idylls and popular histories such as Peter C. Newman’s Company of Adventurers.

In Making the Voyageur World: Travelers and Traders in the North American Fur Trade, Carolyn Podruchny rightly calls these mythical stereotypes the “comic-book superheroes” of Canadian history (2). However, as she notes in her introduction, there is a dearth of scholarship on voyageurs. Podruchny proposes that because voyageurs lived in a state of liminality, or transition, and because this informed their entire world order, the best approach to a cultural history of voyageur identity is a metaphorical “voyage” through the physical landscape and their social geography. Continue reading →

The Ethics of Active History

April 10, 2014 No Comments

By Andrew Nurse

One of the great innovations of the now aging “New Social History” (NSH) was its commitment to uncovering a past about which people knew little. The NSH focused on what we might, in a non-pejorative way, call the broad mass of people: workers, slaves, peasants, First Nations, women, among others whose names appeared at best briefly in the historical record, if at all. The new social historians were guided by a broad range of heuristics (far broader than their critics at the time made it seem) and deployed new investigative strategies. They combed and compiled census records, hunted through archives for any sign of ordinary people, made use of “folklore” and oral traditions, and read official records (court proceedings, marriage and baptismal records, newspaper accounts, chronicles) in different ways.

I “grew up” with the NHS and its work was breathtaking and inspiring. In uncovering the lived experiences of ordinary people, social history brought history to life. For me, the lived experience of past times –with all of its grinding poverty, charismatic religions, popular traditions, and struggles — gave history a purpose that was something more than the “names and dates” one-damn-thing-after-another approach that has been so caricatured by educators, commentators, and historians. I was also struck, and continue to be so, by social history’s profound ethical imperative: everyone deserved to have their history written. It was deeply problematic and politically disturbing to reserve history only for “great men.” There was something powerfully democratic in social history and the fact that “old white men” seemed not to like it only confirmed, to me, its democratic character.

That was then. Time goes by and I find that I have become one of those “old white men” (well … middle aged) whose work I used to find so misplaced. Continue reading →

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