BOB2024MIOT

Colonialism tends to arouse emotional debate, often based on incomplete knowledge of the facts and context. Colonial Congo fills this gap by introducing the general reader to the latest academic thinking and research. Answering concrete questions, pre-eminent historians offer a unique insight into the history of the Congo Free State and the Belgian Congo.

How did Leopold II’s autocratic government function and what do we know about the victims of his rule? How much profit was made in the Congo and who benefitted the most? What was life like for Congolese men and women during colonial rule and how did they feel about it? Did the Congolese offer resistance, and in what ways? What was colonialism’s impact on the Congo’s natural world? How did colonial policy affect infrastructure, education, healthcare and science? Did missionaries give colonialism a more human face? Colonial Congo’s explorations of these issues and more are revealed in this eye-opening, indispensable guide.

Several studies have been devoted to the flowering of the republic of Genoa during the so-called ‘siglo de los Genoveses’, when Genoa became the hub of European trade and an important center of artistic and literary production. Yet, little attention has been granted to the political and cultural crisis that followed, starting in 1559 and culminating in 1684, when the French bombed Genoa. Addressing this chronological gap, the volume explores how the image of the Genoese Republic was shaped, exploited, or contested in the long seventeenth century. How did Genoese politicians and men of letters represent their homeland? How was Genoa represented in Spain or in the Low Countries? How was its political system conceived by Italian and foreign political writers, and how did the prevailing absolutist model influence such ideas? In order to answer these questions, the volume gathers contributions from art historians, literary scholars, political and cultural historians, thus adopting a comparative, multidisciplinary approach.

In the years after 1900 the autonomous activity of the Catholic laity in politics, culture and society was opposed by ‘integralists’ in theological circles, in the laity as well as in the clergy, and last but not least in the Roman Curia. The integralists favoured a strict confessionalism and hierarchical control over all fields of Catholic life. Pope Pius X enforced this position in Italy and in France by solemnly condemning the autonomist Christian Democracy of Romolo Murri and the ‘Sillon’ movement of Marc Sangnier. In Germany, however, compromises with the Roman authorities were possible on all fields of contention: concerning the interdenominational character of the Christian trade unions, the independence of the Centre Party from the hierarchy and also during the controversy over the ‘Catholic belles-lettres’. Finally, in the papal encyclical ‘Singulari quadam’ (1912) the interconfessional Christian trade unions were at least ‘tolerated’. The present volume analyses these struggles in a comparative perspective and, by evaluating the entire accessible archival documentation, it reconstructs for the first time the respective internal decision-making processes of the Roman Curia. The result of this entire research is a profiling of three important European Catholicisms in the controversy over integralism. This conflict had a decisive bearing on the long-term positioning of French, German and Italian Catholicism within their respective national societies.