An Age of Neutrals provides a pioneering history of neutrality in Europe and the wider world between the Congress of Vienna and the outbreak of the First World War. The 'long' nineteenth century (1815–1914) was an era of unprecedented industrialization, imperialism and globalization; one which witnessed Europe's economic and political hegemony across the world. Dr Maartje Abbenhuis explores the ways in which neutrality reinforced these interconnected developments. She argues that a passive conception of neutrality has thus far prevented historians from understanding the high regard with which neutrality, as a tool of diplomacy and statecraft and as a popular ideal with numerous applications, was held. This compelling new history exposes neutrality as a vibrant and essential part of the nineteenth-century international system; a powerful instrument used by great and small powers to solve disputes, stabilize international relations and promote a variety of interests within and outside the continent.
New Approaches to International History covers international history during the modern period and across the globe. The series incorporates new developments in the field, such as the cultural turn and transnationalism, as well as the classical high politics of state-centric policymaking and diplomatic relations.Written with upper-level undergraduate and postgraduate students in mind, texts in the series provide an accessible overview of international diplomatic and transnational issues, events and actors.
Of the many enduring images the Western Front of the First World War has left to posterity, those of soldiers wearing primitive masks to combat waves of deadly and debilitating gasses and poisons remain some of the most arresting. Such imagery has helped to define the trench experience-if not the wider war experience-as a symbol of an industrial-military complex run amok. Unsurprisingly, the news of the first large-scale gas attacks initiated by the German armies somewhat north of the Belgian town of Ypres on 22 April 1915 shocked and dismayed the newspaperreading public around the world, including in the Netherlands, a neutral country precariously positioned between the might of Germany and Great Britain and within ear shot of the fighting front in Belgium. For the Dutch, and particularly those living in the southern provinces bordering Belgium, Ypres (Ieper or Yperen) was not a faroff imagined place, but a familiar place within a day's travel-prewar cross-border relations between the Dutch and Belgians were uninhibited and dynamic-1 where people spoke the same language, lived similar lives, and if not related to them, were distant relatives. In many respects, it was the familiarity of Flanders as well as the
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