The Clearwater Bequest of 1933 is a landmark in the development of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's holdings of American silver, and in the American Colonial Revival more broadly. Alphonso Trumpbour Clearwater (1848-1933) was a judge, antiquary and pillar of society in Kingston, New York. Drawing on the Clearwater papers at the Winterthur Museum in Delaware, as well as his correspondence with curators at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and other museums, this essay considers the origin in late nineteenth-century fairs of Clearwater's collecting of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century silver; his evolving taste and relations with dealers, curators and rival collectors in the decades before and after the opening of the Metropolitan's American Wing (1924); and the interaction of his views on what kind of silver 'belonged' in his collection with his views on what kind of people did and did not 'belong' in the United States.

The interwar period saw fitful attempts by British, American, French, and Russian interests to secure oil concessions for Iran’s northern provinces, in a region traditionally perceived as a Russian sphere of interest. Drawing on corporate as well as familiar state archives, this article argues that the contest over concessions in this region served political more than narrowly economic agendas. Although this contest was convoluted, repetitive, and ultimately inconclusive, it sheds light on the emergence of a world oil cartel, as well as the relations between oil-producing and oil-consuming countries before World War II. This article challenges familiar state-centered narratives of oil diplomacy and critiques the tendency to view the history of Iranian oil as one of all-out plunder by Britain and the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. It outlines the political as well as intellectual obstacles—obstacles not only to achieving a more equitable allocation of Pahlavi Iran’s oil wealth prior to Mossadegh’s 1951 nationalization, but to conceptualizing what such an equitable allocation might have looked like.

The centenary of the 1923 Lausanne Treaty has seen historians challenge the familiar view of this re-settlement of the defeated Ottoman Empire as an enduring success, drawing attention to the ways in which the treaty validated a mandatory population exchange, now viewed as a form of ethnic cleansing. This reappraisal of Lausanne's place in fashioning a new Middle East order has yet to address oil diplomacy. Competition among governments, oil companies and concession-hunters for rights to the oil of the former Ottoman Empire, in particular Mosul, inspired considerable speculation at the 1922-3 Lausanne Conference, and continues to fuel conspiracy theories surrounding Lausanne's 'secret clauses'. A tendency to tell the history of oil diplomacy in the first half of the twentieth century from the perspective of nation-states has made it difficult to explain the success with which emerging MNEs manipulated host governments, rather than being tools in the hands of statesmen pursuing energy security/energy independence. This essay argues that we need to assign oil companies greater agency if we want to understand the emergence of a global oil cartel.

Journal Article Tastemakers, Collectors, and Patrons: Collecting American art in the long nineteenth century Get access Linda S. Ferber and Margaret R. Laster (eds.), Tastemakers, Collectors, and Patrons: Collecting American art in the long nineteenth century. Frick Collection Studies in the History of Art Collecting in America 6. University Park (PA), Penn State University Press with the Frick Collection, 2024. isbn978-0-271-09524-0. 222 pp., 72 col. illus., 26 b. & w. illus. $89.95. Jonathan Conlin Jonathan Conlin UK j.conlin@soton.ac.uk https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0394-4931 Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of the History of Collections, fhae030, https://doi.org/10.1093/jhc/fhae030 Published: 05 July 2024

Journal Article Art Markets, Agents and Collectors: Collecting strategies in Europe and the United States, 1550–1950 Get access Susan Bracken and Adriana Turpin (eds.), Art Markets, Agents and Collectors: Collecting strategies in Europe and the United States, 1550–1950. London, Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2021. isbn 978-1-5013-4887-7. 386 pp., 25 col. illus., 52 b. & w. illus. £117. Jonathan Conlin Jonathan Conlin UK j.conlin@soton.ac.uk https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0394-4931 Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of the History of Collections, fhad018, https://doi.org/10.1093/jhc/fhad018 Published: 12 May 2023

Promised Lands, Britanya'nın yirminci yüzyılda sahip olduğu Ortadoğu imparatorluğunun temellerini, önceki yüzyılın ilk yarısında, Napolyon Fransa'sının Mısır yenilgisi ile Kırım Savaşı arasında nasıl inşa ettiğine dair bir anlatı sunuyor. Bu proje ile doğrudan ilgili bakanların, büyükelçi ve konsolosların anı ve mektuplarını derinlemesine nüfuz ederek kullanan Parry, İngiliz politikasının, liberal ya da Hıristiyan müdahaleciliğinden bağımsız olarak biçimlendiğini ve bu tarihte henüz olgunlaşmamış bulunduğunu ortaya koyuyor.

The seizure of the newly-built Ottoman dreadnought Resadiye by First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill on 31 July 1914 is widely held to have spurred the Young Turk regime in Istanbul to contract an alliance with Germany and enter the Great War at its side. This owing to widespread belief (still held by historians today) that it and a second seized dreadnought had been fully paid for by donations to the Ottoman Navy League collected from across the Ottoman Empire and beyond. Drawing on the archives of banks and of Vickers, who constructed the Resadiye, this article demonstrates that the warships were in fact paid for by funds lent by British, French and German banks-as well as by Vickers itself. Drawing on Ottoman newspapers of the time, it explains how the Navy League myth developed, constraining Ottoman room for manoeuvre in the crucial months of summer 1914.

Promised Lands provides a narrative of how Britain laid the foundations of her twentieth-century Middle Eastern empire in the first half of the previous century, between the defeat of Napoleonic France in Egypt and the Crimean War. Deeply steeped in the memoirs and letters of the ministers, ambassadors, and consuls directly concerned, Parry presents British policy as somewhat inchoate, free of either liberal or Christian interventionism.

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Triggered by Lynn H. Nicholas’s book The Rape of Europa: The fate of Europe’s treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War (1994), the ‘rediscovery’ of the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives (mfaa) Programme, established by the American government in 1943 to administer cultural property in war-torn Europe, was a phenomenon. The several hundred ‘Monuments Men’ (the ‘Monuments Women’ fell foul of patriarchy, or perhaps alliteration) became the focus of several books, documentaries, a foundation and the 2014 film The Monuments Men. This was about something more than seeing wrongs righted. It was about ‘saving’ artefacts stolen by the Nazi regime that were now in the hands of British and American forces (who might destroy them through indifference) and those of the Soviets (who might put them on display in Russian museums, a fate considered equally undesirable). Then there is the Great Escape quality: the sense of a motley crew of underdogs pulling together in a common cause. As characters in a moral fable, therefore, the Monuments Men tap into powerful ideas of justice as common decency and the enduring value of art when human life itself is instrumentalized by conflict and genocide.

Since its foundation in 2007 the Frick Center for the History of Collecting, under the leadership of Inge Reist, has set the agenda for historians of American collecting, with a particular emphasis on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century collectors and their agents. These men and women scoured Europe for treasures, many of which were later donated or bequeathed to American public institutions. Between 2011 and 2017, Reist edited or co-edited six volumes of essays organized around types of collector or schools of art, the product of a programme of symposia and fellowships rivalled only by those of the Getty Research Institute. What’s Mine is Yours is a fitting tribute to this impressive record of achievement, as well as to Reist’s service to the Frick, which began with her appointment as assistant curator in 1980. The volume’s contributors, who include university academics (in history as well as art history), curators and independent scholars, reflect Reist’s gift for forming networks that transcend disciplinary boundaries and institutional cultures.

Oded Y. Steinberg ‘proposes a novel thesis as to how historical periodization converged with racial, national, and religious themes’ (p. 2) in the historical writing and thought of a coterie of influential British and German scholars active in the second half of the nineteenth century: a ‘Gemeinschaft of scholars’ (p. 50) that includes Edward Augustus Freeman, James Bryce, C.C.J. von Bunsen and Friedrich Max Müller. This was the period in which history sought to establish itself as a discipline through the creation of dedicated journals and that boundary-work by which a self-proclaimed ‘science of history’ sought to define itself and resist incursions by predecessors and rivals, dismissed or gently patronised as either ‘picturesque’ or ‘literary’ historical writing. Several of Steinberg’s key figures are familiar from accounts of the professionalisation of history by Leslie Howsam, Philippa Levine and Ian Hesketh. But Steinberg’s focus is more intellectual, centred on the concept of the ‘unity of history’, advanced by the Rev. Thomas Arnold, Regius professor of history at Oxford in 1841–2.

The documentary series Ways of Seeing was broadcast on BBC television in January 1972. Directed by Mike Dibb and presented by the marxist critic John Berger, the series addressed the canon of western art history as well as contemporary consumer culture. The conspicuous use of cross-cutting and music along with Berger’s emphatic ‘talking-head’ delivery were employed to dispel the aura enveloping ‘original’ artworks, and reveal the technologies by which art historians, curators and advertising agencies shored up a capitalist, western, male social order. The series and its associated book were canonical for the nascent disciplines of media and culture studies. Drawing on scripts and other materials from the BBC, Berger and Dibb archives, this essay explains how the four episodes were conceived and executed. It places the series in the context of Berger’s prior activity as artist, art critic, presenter and author, noting the influence of Frederick Antal, Walter Benjamin and others. It concludes that Berger’s charisma and the mastery of the relatively new technology of colour television displayed by the series undermined its intent: rather than encouraging viewers to use images in framing their own personal narratives, its message was consumed as an invitation to view all images in political terms.

The First World War saw the emergence of a 'politics of oil'/politique de petrolecentred on energy security. On both sides of the Channel, ministers toyed with different ways of achieving national 'control' of oil, someetatiste, otherslaissez-faire. With the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, Mesopotamian oil awaited allocation. Considering how little it contributed to the war in the Middle East, France did well out of this allocation. British concessions constituted an oily entente, more striking as Anglo-French relations deteriorated in the early 1920s. In seeking to explain this entente, inter-oil company as well as international relations need consideration. Oil companies used lobbying, the media, and mercantilist rhetoric to shape apparently 'national' oil policies in their own interests. The oily entente served the interest of an emerging world cartel more than it did British or French energy security.

Abstract Between 1885 and 1891, the Liberal statesman William Ewart Gladstone debated the scientific status of the Book of Genesis with the natural historian Thomas Henry Huxley in a series of articles published in the Nineteenth Century. Viewed in isolation, this episode has been seen as a case of a professional scientist dismissing an amateur interloper. This article repositions this familiar dispute as one chapter in Gladstone's lifelong engagement with the concept of historical ‘development’, the unfolding or evolution of Providence to human reason over time, a concept which came to prominence in the 1840s, in both Tractarian theology and in natural history. Gladstone consistently advocated an accommodation between transmutation and natural theology based on a probabilist ontology derived from the eighteenth-century Anglican churchman Joseph Butler (1692–1752). That understanding of historical truth to which Gladstone credited his ability to discern when political issues became ripe for agitation demanded a humble, Christian moral temper that embraced doubt and salutary suffering, rather than certainty and whiggish celebration of progress.

The spectacularly controversial career of journalist and politician John (1725-1797) is viewed by historians of Britain in Long Eighteenth Century as marking emergence of a middling rank in Georgian Britain, along with a concepts of reform and a sphere. Although certainly outspoken and self-aware, was careful to address himself to a range of audiences, however, not simply middling. His claim to embody the sense of people (which was not quite same thing as opinion) in his struggle against despotism was hotly contested, in image as well as in word. The range of figures, body parts and literary/historical references exploited in this high-profile struggle ranged from most basic to most aesthetically elevated: from number 45, which Wilkites chalked on everything in sight, including soles of an Italian ambassador who refused to shout Wilkes and Liberty!, through snuff-boxes, hankerchiefs and engravings, to Johann Zoffany's 1782 portrait of and his daughter, exhibited to far more select company of a Royal Academy exhibition. Today's students are surrounded by images and are encouraged by social media to manipulate continuously constituent elements of a curated self. When it comes to technology that makes it possible for an image captured on a cell-phone to appear on a website or be printed onto a t-shirt, however, we are profoundly ignorant. As historians, therefore, it is unsurprising that we tend to lump all historical images together. We thus attribute same value and authority to, say, Zoffany's portrait painting in oils as we do to William Hogarth's portrait engraving (or, to give a third example, a reproduction of either portrait on a porcelain snuff-box). Even their dimensions are lost, as all are silently adjusted to fit whichever screen we happen to be looking at. This essay identifies different techniques employed in producing these representations of Wilkes, describing their attributes, associations and reach. It argues that unless we first perform this task, we risk misinterpreting or simply overlooking all that visual sources have to teach us about very historical issues relating to concepts of civil liberty, public opinion, party politics and ministerial responsibility, as well as notions of masculinity and celebrity.

Considering that the archive of Duveen Brothers was made accessible to scholars more than twenty years ago, it is remarkable how little our knowledge of this, the twentieth century’s most influential art dealer, has advanced. It would be superfluous to rehearse the shortcomings of Meryle Secrest’s 2004 biography of Joseph Duveen, or the suspicions of earlier, equally impressionistic memoirs of the firm by S. N. Behrman, Edward Fowles and Joseph Duveen’s father, J. H. Duveen. These have long been recognized. Notwithstanding the impressive financial and scholarly resources of the Getty Research Institute, it seems that the sheer size of the Duveen archive as well as the need for skills alien to art historians (such as forensic accounting) have inhibited scholars from tackling the firm’s history head on. In seeking to explain how a small-time Oxford Street dealership transformed itself into a transatlantic colossus in a single generation, therefore, we have...