History talk on global response to peace

Nipissing University welcomes Dr. Maartje Abenhuis from the University of Auckland, New Zealand, for a special seminar, Burning news: The Tsar, his rescript and the global response to peace, 1898 – 1899, Thursday, October 6, at 2:30 p.m. in room H106.Dr. Abenhuis is interested in the history of war, peace, neutrality and internationalism in the period after 1815 and is currently working on a book on the Hague Peace conferences, funded by a Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden grant.
Abstract: In 1898, the Russian Tsar Nicholas II issued a call to the civilised world to convene a conference to halt the ceaseless development of ‘excessive armaments’ and thereby 'seek the means of warding off the calamities which are threatening the whole world’. Few diplomatic announcements have caused as much public fervour or furore as Nicholas II’s rescript. Using sources from around the globe, this talk explains how contemporaries considered, critiqued and lauded the resulting 1899 peace conference at The Hague in the Netherlands, and its international possibilities including for disarmament, arbitration, the amelioration of warfare and conflict resolution. It argues that it was the global nature of the public engagement with, firstly, the rescript and, secondly, the conference that influenced the course of the Hague peace conference and shaped many of its most powerful legacies.
This talk is the History department Seminar Series’ inaugural talk of the academic year.