Category / Publications

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Tehila Sasson in the American Historical Review (October 2016), “Milking the Third World? Humanitarianism, Capitalism, and the Moral Economy of the Nestlé Boycott”

Tehila Sasson is a Past & Present Fellow at the Institute for Historical Research, London, and a visiting research fellow at the Centre for History and Economics at the University of Cambridge. In 2017 she will join the History Department at Emory University as an Assistant Professor. She is currently completing a book manuscript with the working title We Are the World: The End of Empire and the Rise of Global Humanitarianism, which traces how in the second half of the twentieth century, ordinary people were mobilized to join a global community of aid. She is the author of “From Empire to Humanity: The Russian Famine and the Imperial Origins of International Humanitarianism,” which appeared in the Journal for British Studies in July 2016. She is also working on an economic, legal, and environmental history of the rights to ownership of natural resources and the origins of global environmental justice in the twentieth century.

Abstract

This article traces the history of the Nestlé boycott, one of the most well-known and successful boycotts of the 1970s. As part of the campaign to end bottle-feeding in Third World societies, it called for the global regulation of controversial marketing strategies implemented by Western formula companies. The story adds a crucial yet understudied aspect of rights discourse in the 1970s, when humanitarian activists strove to reform the global market and create ethical forms of capitalism. The history of the boycott may seem like a marginal tale within this history, but it is illuminating both for what it teaches us about the role of multinational companies, ethics, and the market in the period, and for what it reveals about the global history of human rights and humanitarianism. The history of the campaign allows us to uncover how in the 1970s not only diplomats and non-governmental organizations, but also ordinary people, business experts, and even multinational corporations became part of the project of feeding the world’s hungry. By politicizing breastfeeding, the Nestlé boycott played an important role in changing how those in the Third World were conceived by aid programs, transforming them from producers to consumers in the global market. While international attempts to limit the power of these corporations have failed, the Nestlé boycott became a somewhat minimal solution that emphasized the moral responsibilities of corporations. It offered a “weak” form of utopianism that emerged after the end of empire and attempted to reform global inequalities through the market. Click here to read the full article.

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AHR Cover Illustration: In 1977, a boycott was launched against the Nestlé corporation, a well-known manufacturer of infant formula. As part of a campaign to end bottle-feeding in Third World societies, humanitarian activists called for regulation of the controversial strategies being used by Western companies to market breast milk substitutes to women in underdeveloped nations. In the increasingly global and deregulated economy, they claimed, multinationals like Nestlé exploited vulnerable consumers in order to profit from Third World female poverty. Both citizens and aid experts took part in the boycott, which led to the creation of the first international set of standards regarding global corporate responsibility. In “Milking the Third World? Humanitarianism, Capitalism, and the Moral Economy of the Nestlé Boycott,” Tehila Sasson argues that while knowledge of the dangers of bottle-feeding had been circulated long before the 1970s, it was only in this period that a movement of “global citizens” mobilized and transformed such knowledge into a new moral and political economy of “ethical capitalism.” In the process, Sasson shows, boycotters positioned residents of the underdeveloped world as global consumers, not just producers. “Boycott Nestlé,” 1978. Artist: Rachael Romero, San Francisco Poster Brigade 1978.

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Patrick Allitt in ‘The Spectator’: “The women who paved the way for Hillary’s bid for the White House”

Dr. Patrick N. Allitt, Cahoon Family Professor of American History, recently penned an article for The Spectator titled “The women who paved the way for Hillary’s bid for the White House.” With an eye to the upcoming presidential election, Allitt surveys the long history of women from the United States in electoral politics as voters and candidates. Check out the excerpt below and the full article.

“American women, in other words, have been important to women’s participation in politics on both sides of the Atlantic. The outcome in November will show whether any office remains out of reach to female candidates. “

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Dr. Carol Anderson in Politico’s 50 Thinkers, Doers and Visionaries

White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide by [Anderson Ph.D., Carol]

Historian Carol Anderson, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of African American Studies, was recently featured in Politico’s “50,” a guide to “the thinkers, doers and visionaries transforming American politics in 2016.” Anderson is featured alongside Michael Tesler, a political scientist at the University of California Irvine. Situating the 2016 election in a longer historical context, Anderson and Tesler assert that “white racism has long shaped American politics—and 2016 is no exception.” The article highlights Anderson’s recent book, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (Bloomsbury, 2016). View an excerpt below and check out the full article.

“This year, in her book White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide, Anderson argues that black Americans’ advances have always been followed by white Americans’ efforts to resist them or roll them back. After slavery was abolished, there were Jim Crow laws; after Brown v. Board of Education, whites segregated themselves in private schools and wealthier districts; after passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, Richard Nixon made an appeal to white voters with his “Southern strategy” and Ronald Reagan escalated the war on drugs, which disproportionately jailed African-Americans. Whether in legislatures, the courts or police departments, Anderson argues, white rage against black progress has worked to keep deep racial inequality entrenched in American society—and does to this day.” 

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James V.H. Melton’s `Religion, Community, and Slavery on the Colonial Southern Frontier` Wins the Austrian Studies Book Prize

Religion, Community, and Slavery on the Colonial Southern Frontier

Congratulations to Dr. James V.H. Melton, Professor of History, whose most recent book was awarded the Austrian Studies Book Prize by the Center for Austrian Studies at the University of Minnesota. Melton’s work, Religion, Community, and Slavery on the Colonial Southern Frontier, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2015. The prize marks the second in as many years for an Emory historian of German-speaking Europe, following Professor Brian Vick‘s award last year for The Congress of Vienna: Power and Politics after Napoleon (Harvard University Press, 2014).

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Dr. Carol Anderson at the AJC Decatur Book Festival

Professor Carol Anderson recently spoke with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution journalist Rosalind Bentley in advance of her appearance at the AJC Decatur  Book Festival. Anderson puts recent police violence and the Black Lives Matter movement in historical context, and the interview includes commentary about her new book, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (Bloomsbury, 2016). Check out a clip below and read the full interview here.

“If you only define status as, ‘I got mine,’ and you define what this nation has to offer as a zero-sum game — meaning you can only get something at my expense — then there’s fear. Exclusivity is shortsighted and it will destroy this nation.”

 

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Joseph Crespino in The New York Times: “Why Hillary Clinton Might Win Georgia”

Dr. Joseph Crespino, Jimmy Carter Professor of History, published an op-ed in The New York Times on August 22nd. In “Why Hilary Clinton Might Win Georgia,” Crespino puts the 2016 presidential contest in the context of past Republican and Democratic campaigns to re/take the South. Crespino asserts that the shading purple of states like Georgia and South Carolina “has less to do with the future than the past, and both parties run a risk in misreading it. Mr. Trump’s racially charged hard-right campaign reveals a fault line in Republican politics that dates from the very beginning of G.O.P. ascendancy in the South.” Read an excerpt below and check out the full article.

“Whether or not Republicans hold on to Georgia and South Carolina this year, the lessons they are likely to take away are predictable. Democrats will assume that these states, like Virginia and North Carolina, are part of a long-term liberal trend and push traditional liberal ideas harder in future elections. Republicans will most likely write off Mr. Trump as a one-time phenomenon and not do anything. In doing so, both parties will ignore lessons from the history of the Southern conservative majority.

“What might be happening instead is something new in the South: true two-party politics, in which an urban liberal-moderate Democratic Party fights for votes in the increasingly multiethnic metropolitan South against an increasingly rural, nationalistic Republican Party. If that happens, it will transform not only the politics of the American South, but those of America itself.”

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Professor Tonio Andrade Wins Article Prize from the Society for Medieval Military History

Dr. Tonio Andrade was awarded the Gillingham Prize for his article “Late Medieval Divergences:  Comparative Perspectives on Early Gunpowder Warfare in Europe and China.” Andrade’s article appeared in the Journal of Medieval Military History in 2014. The Gillingham Prize is given annually by the Society for Medieval Military History to the best article by a member to appear in the preceding issue of the Journal of Medieval Military History.

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Carol Anderson’s “White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of our Racial Divide” Reviewed in “The New York Times”

Carol Anderson‘s The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (Bloomsbury, 2014) was recently reviewed by Jesse McCarthy in The New York Times. McCarthy’s review, titled “Why Are Whites So Angry,” appraised Anderson’s work as an “extraordinarily timely and urgent call to confront the legacy of structural racism bequeathed by white anger and resentment, and to show its continuing threat to the promise of American democracy.” Professor Anderson is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of African American Studies. Read the full review here.

Media of White Rage

 

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Collaboration between Professor Mark Ravina and History Major TJ Greer Featured on ‘Digital Humanities Now’

Over the last year Dr. Mark Ravina and history major TJ Greer have collaborated on a digital humanities project examining the rhetoric of student activism and university administration responses through text mining. The project was recently profiled by the editors of the website Digital Humanities Now, where the study’s findings will appear in a series of blog posts. Read an excerpt from their first post below (“Mining the Movement: Some DH perspectives on student activism”) and check out the full run here.

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This first blog reflects our first preliminary results, but even at this early stage we feel comfortable with two declarations: one empirical and one political. The empirical observation is that university administrations are largely talking past students, employing a radically different vocabulary than that of student demands. Our political observation is that universities need to address student demands seriously and directly, even if that means admitting that some problems are deeply structural and that solutions will require decades rather than months or years.

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Dr. Brian Vick’s New Book Selected for Roundtable Review on H-Diplo

Professor Brian Vick, Associate Professor of History, published The Congress of Vienna, Power and Politics after Napoleon with Harvard University Press in 2014. The internet network H-Diplo recently selected Vick’s monograph for a multi-review roundtable and a response from the author. One of the reviewers, Jonathan Sperber (University of Missouri), praises Vick’s extensive use of primary sources and original approach. Sperber asserts that The Congress of Vienna for offers “a striking reinterpretation of the Congress, the practice of diplomacy and the political culture of post-Napoleonic Europe, which substantially enhances our understanding of the era while opening new possibilities for historical investigation and provoking scholarly debate.” Read the full set of reviews and Vick’s response here.