Dr. Michael Gunther The Sultanate of Oman occupies an important strategic position in the world as the state responsible for the southern portion of the Straits of Hormuz. For nearly fifty years, Sultan Qaboos bin Said steered Oman’s national strategy as its chief of state, senior diplomat, and commander of the armed forces. He followed… Read More Sultan Qaboos of Oman’s Policy of Strategic Neutrality
Editorial Note: On 22-23 June 2017, the Second World War Research Group held its annual conference on the theme of ‘When East meets West: The Second World War in Global Perspective’. Defence in Depth has been crossposting some of the proceedings of the conference, of which you can find more here. PASCA LOTTAZ Pascal Lottaz… Read More The Role of Neutrality in the Pacific Theatre of the Second World War
This post is part of a week of cross-posting between Defence-in-Depth and Imperial Entanglements, the blog of an AHRC funded funded project in the Hispanic Studies Department of Warwick University. DR ANNA BRINKMAN Alliances between maritime Empires in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were rarely harmonious; but only a few hold the distinction, of… Read More THE RELUCTANT ALLY: ANGLO-SPANISH SLAVE TRADE NEGOTIATIONS 1820-1821
LOUIS HALEWOOD Louis is a current DPhil student at the University of Oxford. He holds an MA in History from the University of Calgary. Louis is co-organiser of the upcoming ‘Economic Warfare and the Sea’ Conference, to be held at All SoulS College in July 2017. A recording of the talk this post is drawn from is… Read More Sea Power, Alliances, and Diplomacy: British Naval Supremacy in the Great War Era
Defence-in-Depth is pleased to welcome Prof Joe Maiolo – Director of the Sir Michael Howard Centre for the History of War, and Professor of International History – to the blog. If you would be interested to contribute a guest post please contact the editors: Dr Amir Kamel and Dr David Morgan-Owen. PROFESSOR JOE MAIOLO International history is not in vogue.… Read More Do we need international history?
This is the fourth in a series of posts connected to the King’s College Second World War Research Group’s ‘1940-1942: Fulcrum of the Twentieth Century Conference’, held at the JSCSC on June 1st. DR KEVIN MATTHEWS Sifting through the voluminous histories of Britain’s 1940 stand against Nazi Germany, it is remarkable that, with a few notable exceptions, one… Read More 1940-1942: THE FULCRUM OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY? Missing in History: Britain’s offer of Irish unity in 1940
DR DAVID ROBERTS On 1 November 2015, the UK Foreign Secretary Phillip Hammond inaugurated the beginning of works constructing the UK’s first permanent military base in Bahrain in the Persian Gulf since 1971 when the UK withdrew from the region. Using language that almost seemed to deliberately hark back to Britain’s colonial days in the… Read More UK in the Gulf: to Engage or not to engage?
This is the second in a series of posts from a recent research symposium organised by Dr Ellen Hallams on ‘The Reconfiguration of American Primacy in World Politics: Domestic and International Challenges.’ In this piece, Dr Hugo Meijer explores the US ‘pivot’ to Asia. DR HUGO MEIJER The Obama administration has launched a series of diplomatic,… Read More US Primacy in World Politics and the Strategic ‘Pivot’ to Asia
DR DAVID P HOUGHTON One of the most troubling concepts to appear on the scene in recent years is Joseph Nye’s much-popularized notion of ‘soft power’. Without a doubt, there is something rather vague that one can conveniently label soft power, defined as ‘the power to attract’. All nations have an appeal to someone, and… Read More The Worrying Talk About ‘Soft Power’
ANNA BRINKMAN There are few moments more satisfying, or tantalizing, for an historian than looking through the catalogue of an archive and discovering that it holds vast repositories of material relevant to one’s research. . Though catalogues give an idea of the material contained in a collection, with varying degrees of accuracy, it is always… Read More From the Archives: Versions of History in Two Collections: Assessing the Purpose and Conclusions of Compilers
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