The Rhine Crisis of 1840 and German Nationalism: Chauvinism, Skepticism, and Regional Reception*
The Rhine Crisis began with French imperialism. Aiming to expand its influence to Egypt and the Levant, France lent its support in 1839 to Mehmet Ali, Egypt’s pasha, whose ambition to seek hereditary rule in Egypt and Syria challenged Ottoman suzerainty. After Egyptian-led troops pushed theOttoman army beyond Syria’s border in April 1839, Adolphe Thiers, the French president, envisioned a new sphere of influence in the Orient. He thus played with the fragile equilibrium of the Eastern Question, Western diplomacy’s contest to fill the power vacuum of a reduced Ottoman Empire. The démarche stalled, however, during the opening months of 1840, culminating in dramatic failure on July 15with the London Convention: a four-power treaty ðwithout the consultation of FranceÞ that supported the sultan’s retention of his imperial territories. Isolated and humiliated by this diplomatic loss, Thiers’s government and the Chamber of Deputies sought an honorable retreat through compensation elsewhere and therefore reasserted the claim that France’s frontier extended to the Rhine. The French state thus compounded a diplomatic setback with a political dispute over “natural borders.” In
Place and politics : local identity, civic culture, and German nationalism in North Germany during the revolutionary era
List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction 1. The Republican Ideal: Commerce and Civic Culture in Late Eighteenth-Century Hamburg 2. Print and the Public in Hamburg 3. Hamburg and the French Revolution: Republican Morality Examined and Celebrated 4. Luxus and Egoismus: The Threat to Hamburg's Civic Identity 5. Hamburg's Quest for Neutrality and the Emergence of Hanseatic Solidarity 6. Hambourg, bonne ville de l'Empire francaise: Annexation into the Napoleonic Empire 7. The Liberation of Hamburg and Changing Notions of Patriotism 8. Epilogue: Remembering the Wars of Liberation in Nineteenth-Century Hamburg Bibliography Index
The Origins of the Foundation Stories Genre in the Hebrew Bible and Ancient Eastern Mediterranean
This article examines two types of foundation narrative prevalent in the biblical literature in light of as-yet-undiscussed parallels from ancient Greek and Mediterranean texts. The first type, embodied in the Genesis narratives and Greek genealogical traditions, portrays the founders as leaving a distant land to settle peacefully in a new land. The second is exemplified by the central hexateuchal theme of the Israelites’ migration to Canaan by dispossessing the native population as well as the Dorian migration traditions. Several factors indicate that the foundation story genre also became central and foundational in other small kingdoms around the Mediterranean—as indicated, for example, by the Phoenician–Luwian inscriptions referring to bt Mpš/Mopsus and related classical sources. The popularity of the genre in the ancient Mediterranean is striking in light of the fact that, while experiencing tribal migrations and wanderings, the great Mesopotamian and Egyptian kingdoms never represented themselves as “immigrants.” It is suggested that this genre may have emerged with the rise of the new, small-scale kingdoms in the Mediterranean basin toward the end of the second millennium b.c.e. The Phoenician and Greek colonization enterprises of the first third of the first millennium b.c.e. in particular increased awareness of the newly emerging states and focused attention on ethnic identity.