From the international machinery of espionage and twentieth-century warfare to personal surveillance and Cold War intelligence, this uniquely broad view of the interests of the British government, her allies and her enemies is sourced from five government departments and totals around 500 000 pages.

Twentieth-Century British Intelligence, An Intelligence Empire brings together files from the UK National Archives covering intelligence and security matters from 1905-2002. Material has been sourced from the UK Ministry of Defence, the Cabinet Office, the Colonial Office, MI5 (British Domestic Security Service) and the SOE (Special Operations Executive), reflecting an intelligence network that reached from the UK and Europe to Africa, the Middle East, Canada, Asia and Australia during a century of global conflicts, high-stakes diplomacy and political upheaval. These documents cover the development of British intelligence and its impact on policy from its earliest days, through Room 40 in the First World War and the activities of the Security Services throughout the British Empire during WWII, to the geopolitics of the Cold War and decolonisation.

Intelligence files, previously closed to scholars, represent an under-studied aspect of our recent past and provide exciting opportunities for new research. 

Declassified Documents Online: Twentieth Century British Intelligence, An Intelligence Empire brings together files from five UK government departments to provide researchers with access to detailed, previously classified information on the intelligence services of Britain and her Empire throughout the twentieth century.

The Security Service (MI5): KV 2, KV 3 & KV 4

Personal, Subject and Policy files dating from 1905-1978. MI5 handled intelligence gathering within the British Empire and the Commonwealth. The selected subseries of KV 2 holds personal files on subjects of Secret Service enquiries, whilst KV 3 contains subject files on espionage activities of groups or other intelligence organisations, including the only subject files known to have survived from the First World War period. KV 4 holds section histories and policy files.

The Ministry of Defence: Communications and Intelligence Records: DEFE 21, DEFE 26, DEFE 28, DEFE 31, DEFE 41, DEFE 44, DEFE 60, DEFE 62, DEFE 63 & DEFE 64

These series include registered files, reports and memoranda of the Directorate of Scientific Intelligence, the Defence Intelligence Staff and the Defence Signals Staff focused on the technical and scientific interests of the British government from the Second World War to the decades of the Cold War and the Atomic Age. The intelligence assessments and reports include those gathered post-war in Allied-occupied Germany, such as interviews with German scientists. With files dating from 1912-2002, these series bring the coverage up to the end of the twentieth century, and include defence records on the Falklands, the Middle East, UFO incidents and details of Soviet weapon systems.

The Special Operations Executive: HS 7 & HS 8

These are records of the Ministry of Economic Warfare and the Special Operations Executive (SOE), which functioned during WWII to promote sabotage and subversion, and assist resistance groups in enemy occupied territory, famously directed by Winston Churchill to ‘set Europe ablaze!’. Records date from 1935-1988 and include histories & war diaries in HS 7, and headquarters records in HS 8.

The Colonial Office: Intelligence and Security Departments: Registered Files (ISD Series): CO 1035
This series contains registered files of the Colonial Office relating to the security of British colonies, and intelligence on colonial matters and decolonisation, including reports by Security Intelligence Advisors throughout the British Empire, and assessments from the Joint Intelligence Committee. Running from 1954-1966, these files represent a vital piece of the intelligence picture of the global Cold War and decolonisation at the end of Empire.

The Cabinet Office: CAB 56, CAB 121, CAB 176 & CAB 301

The material in these series dates from 1936-1974 and shows how intelligence matters were considered, analysed, and processed through the Cabinet Office. Records from the Joint Intelligence Committee appear alongside Policy and Strategy files from the Special Secret Information Centre, and selected intelligence material from the Cabinet Secretary’s Miscellaneous Papers held in CAB 301.

The study of Intelligence and security casts light on international relations and politics, on social conditions and personal experiences in a time of conflict and shifting global alliances, on the running and dismantling of Empire and on the secret operations and planning of global conflicts. The politics of today are a direct result of the events of the twentieth century, and the depth and breadth of information gathered by British intelligence agencies revealed in this product, from British communists to African independence leaders and German Abwehr agents, allows scholars to follow the decisions and events that formed the world we live in. 

LORD AMHERST’S MISSION AND REVISIONIST SCHOLARSHIP

As Gale has applied the revolutionary Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) technology to the digitisation of this enormous archive, scholars around the world – especially new students and those from non-English-speaking regions – will be able to unlock the hidden value of this largely handwritten manuscript collection, allowing for new discoveries and revisionist scholarship, challenging and even subverting traditional views about some historical events like Lord Macartney’s embassy to China, the first (unsuccessful) British diplomatic attempt to open China for trade in the late 1790s.

Two decades after Lord Macartney’s failed embassy, the British government made a second attempt in February 1816 by dispatching a new mission led by Lord Amherst to “encourage and promote that [commercial] intercourse [with China].” After nearly half a year of travel, the mission arrived at Tianjin in July of the same year, where Lord Amherst and the Chinese Mandarins dispatched to receive him entered into an intense argument about the protocol to be followed for the audience with the Chinese emperor Jiaqing. To the Chinese side’s insistence that the British ambassador extraordinary should practice the ceremony of making nine prostrations, Amherst followed his predecessor Lord Macartney by firmly refusing. As a result, the Amherst mission experienced even greater failure, being refused entry into Peking, let alone having an audience with the emperor. Based on his new knowledge gained in the process of communicating with the Chinese officials, Amherst concluded that he had been misled by all the official and personal accounts of Lord Macartney’s embassy. Among Amherst's reports is one written from Batavia to Lord Canning, governor-general of British India, on February 12, 1817, on his way back to Britain, in which he questioned the authenticity of the widely believed reason behind Macartney’s embassy’s failure—refusing to kowtow to the Chinese emperor: “I have since been given to understand that on an occasion subsequent to his first audience, Lord Macartney multiplied his bow nine times in conformity to the usual number of prostrations made by the Chinese.”

WESTERN CHINESE-LANGUAGE EXPERTS: KARL GUTZLAFF AND THOMAS WADE

Western missionaries, especially protestant missionaries, formed a unique yet active group of stakeholders in the history of China–West interactions. They played many different roles: evangelists, language and cultural interpreters, educators, doctors, and even spies. Karl Gutzlaff (郭士立; 1803–1851) is a case in point. As a pioneering sinologist, he was involved in the translation of the Bible into Chinese along with John Robert Morrison, Elijah Bridgeman, and Walter Henry Medhurst. However, at the same time, he did not hesitate to offer his translation services to Western merchants and even the British army during the first Opium War. He was one of the interpreters to the British Plenipotentiary Sir Henry Pottinger in negotiations leading eventually to the signing of the landmark Treaty of Nanking in 1842. He composed a series of reports to help the British government understand the inner workings of Chinese society and government. In this page extract , he introduced the Chinese government department for dealing with foreigners, the so-called 理藩院or Office of Foreign Affairs. This is a good example of the early intelligence-gathering activities carried out by the Western powers in China. 

In the 19th century, Western Chinese-language experts or translators were made up of two groups—missionaries like Gutzlaff who picked up the Asian language to better spread the gospel among the Chinese, and diplomats who started their careers as low-ranking Chinese clerks, translators, or secretaries. Thomas Wade (威妥瑪; 1818–1895) belongs to the second group. During the second Opium War (1856–1860), he worked as the Chinese secretary for Lord Elgin, British High Commissioner and Plenipotentiary, and rendered Elgin’s letters into Chinese and Chinese officials’ letters into English, as shown by the page of  this letter from the Chinese imperial commissioner Kwei-liang (桂良) to Lord Elgin on the exchange of ratifications of the Treaty of Tientsin. Such rigorous training on the job laid the groundwork for him to become a prominent sinologist after retiring from his diplomatic career—better known as Cambridge University’s first professor of Chinese and inventor of the Wade-Giles romanization system.

CHINESE DIPLOMATS AND THE CHINESE-LANGUAGE DOCUMENTS

As diplomatic communication is always bidirectional, it is natural to find a small number of Chinese-language files contained in this archive of largely English correspondence between British ministers and consuls in China and the Foreign Office in London. These Chinese documents usually take the form of letters from Chinese government officials or diplomats and are included in the correspondence as enclosures.

China established her first overseas legation in London in 1875. Guo Songtao (郭嵩焘; Kuo Song-tao; 1818–1891) was appointed the first Chinese minister to Britain. As China’s diplomatic representative, Guo communicated with his British counterpart often to defend China’s national interests. In 1877, the British colonial government in India appointed Robert Shaw as the British Resident at Kashgar, located in the Tarim basin of Xinjiang. This came to the attention of Guo. To uphold China’s territorial integrity, he wrote a letter to the British Foreign Secretary the Earl of Derby on June 15, 1877, protesting that the appointment had violated the law of nations or international law as it implied British recognition of Kashgar’s independence from China. Elements of International Law (1836) by Henry Wheaton was translated by American missionary William A.P. Martin (丁韪良), at the suggestion of American minister to China Anson Burlingame, into Chinese as 万国公法and published in Peking in 1864. The book was widely circulated among Chinese officials and diplomats like Guo Songtao and played a part in the Chinese government’s efforts to defend its national interests in international negotiations.

In his letter of protest, Guo argued that “Kashgar was originally Chinese territory and had a dully appointed governor. At the time, when internal [Taiping] rebellion raged in China, and finances to meet war expenses fell short, the Amir took the opportunity to seize the territory, causing for more than ten years uninterrupted commotion and great suffering to the people. Of late years, however, the rebellion has been suppressed and China is about to re-establish order and control in the regions beyond the Tarim. Kashgar is one of the regions of which China ought indisputably to regain possession, and nothing has been made known to the effect that the establishment of an [independent] nation has been consented to.”

Guo’s letter can be viewed here, in Chinese and also with the English translation to the British Foreign Secretary on the issue of Kashgar, Xinjiang, FO 17/768

Guo was recalled by the Chinese government in late 1878 and his replacement was Marquis Zeng Jize (曾紀澤; Tseng Chi-tse; 1839–1890) — the son of Zeng Guofan, a prominent high-ranking official of the late Qing period. While Zeng’s best-known diplomatic achievement was his success in renegotiating the infamous 1879 Treaty of Livadia with Russia and replacing it with the more favourable Treaty of Saint Petersburg, he had also been involved in numerous cases of protecting the rights of Chinese living overseas. In January 1881 there occurred an anti-Chinese riot in Lima, the capital of Peru and the Chinese community there suffered a lot. As there was no Chinese consul at the time, the Chinese merchants asked the British minister Sir Spencer St. John for help to forward a written account of their sufferings to Zeng. Upon receipt of the account forwarded by British Foreign Secretary Earl Granville on September 26, 1881, Zeng wrote a formal letter of thanks and explained why no Chinese consul was available in Peru. There is also an English translation of this letter in the archive. 

THE ANTI-CHRISTIAN TIENTSIN MASSACRE IN THE PRESS

Anti-Christian activities in China started in the 1860s after the signing of the Tientsin Treaty—which lifted all the restrictions on the movement of Western missionaries in China—and reached the first peak in the 1870s, as epitomized by the Tientsin Massacre of 1870, and eventually led to the Boxer Rebellion of 1900. In the tragic Tientsin Massacre many French Catholic priests and nuns were killed by a group of enraged Chinese misled by rumours of French missionaries kidnapping or purchasing children and “taking out their eyes for medicine.” Imperial China and the West Part I contains a clipping from the Hong Kong-based China Mail Extra, reporting on this tragedy. Such clippings form a small yet lively subset of this largely handwritten manuscript archive. 

HISTORICAL MAPS OF CHINA

In addition to the predominance of textual records, Imperial China and the West Part I contains a sizeable collection of colourful historical maps. These are all rescanned from the original source to help users fully appreciate their beauty. This example is a map of Shanghai in 1862. Here we can clearly see the American and British settlements and the French concession as well as the old Chinese walled city. After the first Opium War, China was forced to open five treaty ports for trade, including Shanghai. Given its strategic location and great potential, the Western powers flocked there to establish their consulates and enclaves. The British and American settlements were merged in 1863 into the International Settlement managed by the Shanghai Municipal Council while the French concession remained separate.

Thanks to the unmatched advantages of railways over traditional means of transportation in facilitating trade in China, Britain and other Western powers had been eyeing the rights of railway construction in the country for a long time. China’s first railway line was constructed in 1876, but Britain started its planning well before that. Here is the China Railway Sketch Map drawn by China Railways Company (Limited)—a largely British-controlled company—in 1865. The map reveals an ambitious plan to build a vast network of railway lines connecting all the major cities in China, such as Peking, Shanghai, Hankow (Wuhan), and Canton (Guangzhou). At the same time, the company wanted to extend the network to the British colonies abutting China in the south and west—Burma and India. Moreover, the company also had a long-term plan to link Asia all the way to Europe and UK, building a railway-connected global empire. This somehow reminds us of China’s belt and road initiative today, aiming to promote the connectivity of all countries concerned.

This essay has been translated from the original French  |  DOWNLOAD ENGLISH VERSION HERE

The choice of the term Enfer (‘Hell’) to refer to a part of a library’s collection is not insignificant. To begin with, it was used in 1652 at the Feuillants Convent in Paris, to set aside heterodox books, i.e. those not following Roman Catholicism.

At the French royal library, the Enfer classification was accorded in the late 1830s to books considered “contrary to public morality”. Their relegation to this classification, which is everything it sounds like, was not a decision made by the political movers and shakers of the time, i.e. the July Monarchy, but was down to the institution, at a time when the library was opening to a wider audience.

Unlike the Private Case at the British Library, Enfer is not a closed collection. It continues to grow, even if only now with the addition of a limited selection of erotic and pornographic publications, other classifications having taken over. In 2020, there were around 2000 volumes in the Enfer collection.

Before Enfer

In 1750, in the second volume of the Catalogue of books printed by the Bibliothèque du Roy (King’s Library), consisting solely of literary works, a small area was given over to licentious tomes at the end of the novels section. There were 34 of them. One-third were taken from the library of the bibliophile and collector Jean-Pierre Imbert Châtre de Cangé (1680-1746), acquired in full by the royal library in 1733. The volumes included a copy of the Histoire du prince Apprius… (Enfer 233), a satire against the Regent that could be read either as a perfectly innocuous novel about love affairs and war or as an extremely immoral text, from the point where the obscene equivalents of the characters’ names are revealed. Published in 1728, it symbolised the archetype of the licentious novel that, to thwart the censors, did not include the names of the author or printer and gave a fictitious place of publication.

Later, the French Revolution provided an opportunity for the Bibliothèque to significantly increase its collections as a result of confiscations from the libraries of the clergy, émigrés and those who fell victim to the guillotine, brought together in book depositories from 1790, access to which was given to the Bibliothèque Nationale.

The confiscated books included a copy of Boccaccio’s Decameron (Enfer 249), there because of its 12 licentious drawings, along with 116 others. The copies without these 12 engravings were not stigmatised the same way, as the text was not deemed sufficiently incendiary.

In 1836, the rare and precious books put aside from 1795 by Joseph Van Praet, curator of the Department of Prints, were all put together in the same place, joined by more licentious works. From 1844, the reference “Enfer” appeared in the margin of this section, added to the original classification. One hundred and fifty books were included.

What Enfer was like

At that point, Enfer at the Réserve of the Prints department became the Prints collection classification where obscene works were kept, those reproached by morality. Unlike in other libraries, none of the Bibliothèque Nationale’s works were considered reprehensible for solely political or religious reasons. These were mostly imaginative books, more specifically novels where sex plays a major role, which were therefore forbidden, prosecuted and proscribed.

Enfer is a relatively heterogeneous collection. Ancient and rare publications considered classics of erotic literature throughout the 17^th, 18^th, 19^th and 20^th centuries can be found alongside reprints and pamphlets of lesser interest. The Bibliothèque’s earliest books, acquired before Enfer was established, date back to the 16th and 17^th centuries: copies of Ragionamenti de l’Arétin, made up of famous conversations between a former courtesan and her female friend, one of which displays the coat of arms of king Louis XIV (Enfer 221); La Cazzaria de lo Arsiccio Intronato, published around 1530 by Antonio Vignali, under the nom de plume Arsiccio Intronato, a priapic dialogue in a comic fashion, between the author and a young law student, urging him to examine everything in the name of philosophy, even the most filthy subjects (Enfer 566); Alcibiade fanciullo a Scola (1652), attributed either to the satirist Ferrante Pallavicino or to the theologian and philosopher Antonio Rocco: a dialogue between Alcibiades and his teacher, where the latter argues any way he can to justify pederasty and convince his pupil of his reasoning (Enfer 469). The characteristics of these works are the form of the dialogue and a lack of illustrations, as the language used is explicit enough.

In France, as of the first three decades of the 18^th century, erotic literature became a genre of its own and Enfer filled up with these libertine novels, which also came to be known as “philosophical books”. Among the classics that were continuously reprinted until the 20th century were the Histoire de Dom Bougre, portier des Chartreux (1741), La Tourière des carmélites (between 1741 and 1750) and Thérèse philosophe (1748). These works, passed on by the materialist philosophy of the time, were only intended for one purpose: to celebrate desire and enjoyment by presenting circles officially devoted to public morality, such as convents, boarding schools, and palaces, to bring them closer to places of debauchery like brothels. What they have in common with their predecessors is their small size so they could easily be concealed, slipped “under the coat” (“sous le manteau”) and published anonymously. In terms of the place of publication, it was either fake: London instead of Paris (Félicia ou mes fredaines, Enfer 446-449); far-fetched:

Everywhere and nowhere (La Nuit merveilleuse, Enfer 722), or obscene, like the contents of the book: “À j’enconne, rue des Déchargeurs, aux dépens de la Gourdan” (Mémoires de Suzon, Enfer 705). In the 18^th century, illustrations made an appearance and joined forces with the text. Inspired by the iconographic tradition of the Italian Renaissance, such as the continuation of Amours des dieux, they moved further and further away to comment on the events in the story. For example, the engravings accompanying Dom B…, portier des Chartreux (Enfer 326) and those in Thérèse philosophe (Enfer 402).

In the 19^th century, illegal booksellers, who most commonly settled in Belgium, specialised in the reprinting of erotic texts from the 17^th and 18^th centuries while also publishing more modern texts. Auguste Poulet-Malassis, convicted for publishing Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal in Paris in 1857, six of the poems in which were deemed “pornographic” and given his interest in reprinting libertine texts, went into exile in Brussels in 1862. Among the texts he published clandestinely were Serrefesse: tragédie-parodie by Louis Pine-à-l’envers… with a filthy frontispiece, drawn and engraved by S.P.Q.R. (Enfer 486). The text was written by Louis Protat, a member of the Bar at the Court of Appeal of Paris, accompanied by engravings by Félicien Rops, a prodigious producer of erotic works.

In the 20^th century, authors as disparate in their worlds and in the individuality of their style as Guillaume Apollinaire, Pierre Louÿs, Georges Bataille, Jean Genet and others added their secret works to Enfer.

How Enfer developed

During the Second Empire, Prince Louis-Napoléon restored the regime of press censorship as under Napoleon I and Enfer grew considerably. Jules Taschereau, the Director of the Bibliothèque from 1858 to 1870, scrupulously ensured that the prints and engravings seized by Customs, as well as the books and brochures discarded by the Post Office management, were regularly sent to his institution, not destroyed as may have been usual. 330 seized volumes were added to Enfer in 1865 and 1866. One of these became the talk of the town, having been taken in 1866 from the home of Alfred Bégis, trustee of bankruptcies from 1861 to 1882, but also a lawyer, historian and collector of manuscripts by the Marquis de Sade. He considered this seizure a veritable robbery and undertook a lengthy but failed lawsuit against the Bibliothèque for his property to be returned. Over 160 books and 23 engravings became part of the Bibliothèque’s collections this way. To name but a few: several editions of L’Académie des dames and La Fille de joye, 18th century editions of Dom Bougre, Thérèse philosophe, Félicia ou Mes fredaines (Enfer 446-449); the 1864 edition of Gamiani, a classic of erotic literature attributed to Alfred de Musset and published by Poulet-Malassis. This seizure was also responsible for the addition of the Marquis de Sade’s works to the Bibliothèque Nationale, including the 1795 edition of La Philosophie dans le boudoir (Enfer 535-536). Since then, Sade has become the author with the most works on these shelves.

It has also been added to by the acquisition of entire libraries, some of the works of which were added to Enfer: the library of the bibliographer Adrien-Jean-Quentin Beuchot in 1851, who specialised in books by and inspired by Voltaire; Count Henri de La Bédoyère’s in 1864, made up almost exclusively of plays on the French Revolution, the Empire and the Restoration. For example, the lampoon Fureurs utérines de Marie-Antoinette, femme de Louis XVI, Au Manège et dans tous les bordels de Paris, 1791 (Enfer 653).

In the late 19^th century, the Bibliothèque began to acquire erotic books from booksellers. Until then, in most cases, Enfer was added to gradually by seizures and donations. In a request to booksellers, the Bibliothèque noted its interest in this collection that had been relatively poorly received compared to other works held in the Réserve des livres rares. Adolphe Labitte, a specialist in publications from French- speaking countries and a bookseller approved by the Bibliothèque provided them around 50 titles from Belgian publishers such as Jules Gay, Henry Kistemaekers and Auguste Poulet-Malassis. Notable examples include an 1882 edition of the Exercices de dévotion de M. Henri Roch avec Mme la duchesse de Condor, par feu l’abbé de Voisenon…, published by Gay and Doucet (Enfer 74), to complement the 1864 edition published by Poulet-Malassis, already included in Enfer. Apart from purchases here and there, other major additions include around 100 volumes in 1944 from the Giraud-Badin bookshop, one of which was Le théâtre érotique de la rue de la Santé…, illustrated by Félicien Rops (Enfer 1312).

Prior to 1960, the Bibliothèque rarely acquired erotica at auction. Perhaps some kind of decency prevented them from doing so. Even so, in 1949 it took a first edition of Pybrac by Pierre Louÿs, published in 1927 by René Bonnel. It was not until the 1980s that this practice became commonplace.

Donations or bequests were rare in the 19th century. Worth a mention are the actions of Louis Hubaud, a Marseille collector, who bequeathed in 1866 his works that were considered obscene, in his words to save them from destruction in case they fell into the hands of the prudish. These included the Recueil de pieces choisies rassemblées par les soins du cosmopolite, À Anconne, chez Uriel Bandant, à l’enseigne de la liberté, 1735 (Enfer 924). It should be noted however that most donors preferred to remain anonymous.

Maurice Audéoud (1864-1907), a great art lover, bequeathed his library to the Bibliothèque nationale in 1909. 650 of his rare books were added to the Réserve collection and kept as the Z. Audéoud reserve. However, given their subject matter, 18 tomes were removed from this classification to be placed in Enfer. In the 1910s, authors such as Fernand Fleuret, Pascal Pia and Maurice Heine were regular donors, not only of their own works. A special mention must go to Auguste Lesouëf, a scholar and bibliophile (1829-1906). His considerable library, consisting of almost 30,000 books and over 18,000 drawings, was bequeathed by his nieces in 1913. It included a small Enfer of 34 volumes, kept on the sidelines of its ‘historical’ counterpart. One example is La Messaline française, 1789 (Smith-Lesouëf E. 33).

Between 1877 and 1909, legal deposit became a significant source of additions, increasingly serving as a replacement for seizures. Purporting them to be scholarly, the publisher Isidore Liseux did not hesitate to openly publish, if in limited numbers, most of the major classic erotic texts, such as Les Kama Sutra de Vatsyayana, 1885 (Enfer 101).

In 1947, the young publisher Jean-Jacques Pauvert started publishing all the works of the Marquis de Sade, not confidentially as before but to the general public, despite prosecutions against him and the proceedings that followed. These publicly published books joined the legal deposit collections on release and remained in Enfer until 1955. Examples: Histoire de Juliette in 1948; La Nouvelle Justine ou les Malheurs de la vertu in 1953, La Philosophie dans le boudoir and Les Infortunes de la vertu in 1954. Justine ou les Malheurs de la vertu received a preface by Georges Bataille in 1955. As an exception, in 1953 Les 120 Journées de Sodome ou l’École du libertinage was limited to 475 copies for subscribers only. The same went for texts by Georges Bataille and in 1954 for Histoire d’O by Pauline Réage. This novel, which became famous all over the world, was a response to men’s sadistic fantasies. Anne Desclos (pseudonyms Dominique Aury and Pauline Réage), the Secretary-General of the literary magazine La Nouvelle Revue Française, edited by Jean Paulhan, only publicly admitted she was its author in 1994, at the age of 86.

The handling of Enfer

In 1876, thanks to Léopold Delisle, alphabetical classification of all printed books replaced classification by topic. The Enfer holdings were then reclassified by author in alphabetical order, followed by anonymous works, taking format into account.

Before this reclassification had been completed, books that came in after 1876 were entered first as they arrived and were given the lowest numbers, 1 to 199 for smaller formats, higher for larger books. Entry in order of arrival resumed after the inclusion of books that came in before 1876. There were 620 of these (597 in octavo, 6 in folio and 17 in quarto), almost half of which came from seizures. This rather complex classification confused many, including Pascal Pia, the author of 1978’s Les Livres de l’Enfer, stating that the first book in the collection and the one that marked its establishment was Les Ruses, supercheries, artifices et machinations des filles publiques pour tromper leurs amants (1871).

The first open mentions of this collection were made by Guillaume Apollinaire, Fernand Fleuret and Louis Perceau, who published L’Enfer de la Bibliothèque Nationale, Editions du Mercure de France in 1913, undoubtedly with help from some of the institution’s staff. This publication could not be controlled by the Bibliothèque in any way. When it was released, they attempted to play it down, merely stating they had nothing to do with its publication. A handwritten catalogue of Enfer was compiled by William Viennot in the late 1880s. The first printed catalogue of the collection was published by Apollinaire, Fleuret and Perceau. It consisted of 825 numbers, the last of which was an excellent pastiche of a 17^th century text by Fernand Fleuret. On top of these 825 numbers were another 6 reserved for large formats (901 to 906) and the 31 for medium formats (910 to 930), a total of 862. Between the release of the catalogue and the closure of Enfer in 1969, another 957 numbers were added. When looking through the list of the books in Enfer, it is impossible not to note a somewhat arbitrary nature in the classification of multi-volume editions. Either each volume or book in an edition is classified separately, which applies to almost all books that came in before 1876 (Enfer 200 to 797), or the entire edition is held together, followed by sub- classifications. Of course, there is therefore a discrepancy between the numbering, the number of volumes and the number of editions (complete and sometimes incomplete), especially as several copies of some books are included.

Its communications

Essentially, very few notifications were to be made about these books. Until 1977, it was necessary to apply with a very good reason to the Director-General, who would submit these applications to an advisory committee of curators. Permission was in fact granted more and more often, as long as a scientific interest was shown. Since then, a written application to the Head Curator at the Department of Prints has no longer been required and notifications on these works have been made according to the same rules as the other books in the Rare books collections (Réserve des livres rares).

Books about flagellation: an appendix to Enfer

These volumes were somewhat in fashion between 1880 and 1930. Certain publishers specialised in this branch of erotica, where the instrument of pleasure was a whip. One example is Charles Carrington’s Les Flagellants et les flagellés de Paris, 1902 (Reserve p. Y². 1000 [211]). Put on public sale with most coming in by legal deposit, these books were not strictly differentiated from other novels kept in the Réserve des livres rares. However, from the 1900s, they were given certain special classifications, including Reserve p. Y². 1000 followed by sub-classifications (1 to 368) in 1934. This classification was closed in 1960 and replaced in the Department of Prints (now the Department of Literature and Art) by classification 8° Y². 90000, which consisted of 2302 numbers when it was closed in 1996. From 1971, classification 4° Y². 10000 was established, which held 133 numbers until its closure in 1991.

The closure of Enfer

In September 1969, a note from the Directorate of the Bibliothèque stated that Enfer was due to close. The explanation was that public morality had changed and the anger that could have been aroused by this classification as a result of the “Apollinaire” exhibition held by the Bibliothèque Nationale in late 1969. The Réserve des livres rares then used this to remove from Enfer around 15 books authored, prefaced, or published as erotica by Guillaume Apollinaire, giving them a more respectable classification. The same happened to Verlaine and his erotic works, acquired at the time by the collection, which were classified elsewhere. However, licentious or pornographic works, considered as “low pornography” were classified under 8° Y². 90000 and 4. Y². 10000. Around 40 books initially classified in Enfer in the 1960s joined these two classifications.

At that time, the biggest donor of erotic books was Paul Caron, who gave around 1000 books between 1968 and his death in 1985. The 340 books listed in the 1969 register of donations would wait several years to be processed. Lacking male staff, this task was assigned for the first time to a young woman, a librarian in the Office of Donations, simply because she was married and a mother. Most of these books were classified under 8° Y². 90000, including Passions de jeunes miss by Tap Tap, 1907 (8° Y². 90000 [1156]) or under 4° Y². 10000, such as Les Confessions de Miss Coote by Jean de Villiot, 1906 (4° Y². 10000 [43]). Some very rare volumes were kept in the Réserve des livres rares under the bookshelves used for novels and plays, or as a replacement for copies that had disappeared from Enfer.

The reopening

In 1983, a decision was made to reopen Enfer, at the request of researchers and librarians, not for the sake of morality but for practical reasons. Since then, only old editions received by

donation or acquisition that had been proscribed or prosecuted in their time have been classified in Enfer. One example is an edition of Aline et Valcour, ou le Roman philosophique… by the Marquis de Sade, Paris, Veuve Girouard, 1795 (Enfer 2578 [1-4]), acquired at auction in 2008.

From its reopening in 1983 until 2020, Enfer grew by 182 works, 100 of which have been acquired. More so than older texts, various editions of 20th- and 21st-century artists’ books from France and abroad have been classified there. For example, Le Grand ordinaire by André Thirion, surrealist compositions by Oscar Dominguez, 1934 [1943] (Enfer 2540), bought from a bookshop in 2000.

In 2011, 18 books published between 1972 and 1982, previously classified under 8° Y². 90000, came into Enfer, not for their intrinsic qualities but due to the addition of a dust cover illustrated by the US artist Richard Prince. He produced these illustrations for his exhibition at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in 2011. At that time, the Réserve des livres rares decided to add to Enfer various publications from the New York counterculture of the 1960s.

Since then, Enfer has become purposefully selective. It has lost its “hellish” aspect, shifting instead to the building of a rare book collection. The singular fact that a book is considered immoral, licentious, or obscene is no longer enough of a criterion for it to be sent to Enfer. It must be distinguished by its individuality and rarity, the same way as all volumes kept in the Réserve des livres rares.

About the Author

Marie-Françoise Quignard is Honorary Curator at the Réserve des livres rares, Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

In 2001, she edited Revue de la Bibliothèque Nationale de France no. 7, (Érotisme et pornographie); in 2007/2008, she was co-curator with Raymond Josué Seckel of the L’Enfer de la Bibliothèque, Éros au secret exhibition; in 2007 she co- authored the catalogue with Raymond Josué Seckel and its new revised and supplemented edition in 2019.

She has curated exhibitions on Antoni Tàpies (2001) and Pierre Alechinsky (2005).

She was Co-curator of the 18th-century section of the 1000 m2 de deseo, arcquitectura y sexualidad exhibition, CCCB, Barcelona, 2016-2017.

CITATION

Quignard, Marie-Francoise: “L’Enfer at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.” Archives of Sexuality and Gender: L’Enfer at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Cengage Learning (EMEA) Ltd, 2021.

© Cengage Learning 2021

Many breathed a sigh of relief on 20 January 2021, when Joe Biden officially became President of the United States, after a tumultuous few weeks between his election and inauguration. While the campaign was more subdued than had been anticipated, the #StopTheSteal movement, culminating in the storming of the Capitol on 6 January, demonstrated clearly that the threat of far-right insurrection was serious. On the whole, the alt-right’s trollish activities of 2016 seemed to be replaced by right-wing conspiratorial protests.

Of course, it would be a mistake to think that Biden’s victory marks a return to ‘normal’ or even to what politics used to be before the 2016 earthquake. The election of a candidate like Donald Trump was not an unforeseen event – as we explore further – and his loss does not mean that those trends have fully receded; his support base remains considerable and his policy and political impact will take a real effort to dismantle. Addressing Trump’s legacy would only begin to address the issues of systemic racism the US has started grappling with in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests.

In this context, Trump’s chaotic exit and the Capitol insurrection may act as a diversion away from the real roots of the problem. The illiberal, even fascist turn of events in January 2021 allowed many Republicans and public actors who had supported Trump’s appeal to the far right to distance themselves. Instead of addressing the deep roots of reaction within and around the Trump project, some Republicans were able to pretend the insurrectionists were extremists and outcasts: a happenstance and an extraordinary parenthesis outside of normality and with no links to the constant emboldening from mainstream Republican figures.

Furthermore, Biden’s victory, whilst decisive both in terms of popular and electoral college vote, should not obscure the very clear and simple fact that after four years of Trump presidency, countless scandals and the centring of white supremacist discourse, the outgoing President increased his share of the popular vote by over eleven million. Of course, this pales in comparison to Biden’s tally, which topped Hillary Clinton’s 3-million popular vote lead by an extra 15 million. Yet despite borrowing significantly and consistently from far and extreme-right discourse and ideas, Trump’s support did not waver. Quite the contrary.

To illuminate this, we will focus first on the difference between the 2016 and 2020 campaigns with regard to far and extreme-right politics. We will then analyse the current state of the far and extreme right, building carefully on its origins and its role in the most recent campaign. Finally, we will discuss how Trump’s 2020 defeat has not marked the end of far-right politics in the US, but instead confirmed the radicalisation of the Republican vote and the further mainstreaming of far-right politics. What we argue is that Trump’s campaigns, presidency and ultimate defeat have acted as a vector to mainstream far-right politics in the US, through the constant shifting between illiberal and liberal articulations of racism and the blurring of boundaries between both.

2016: the rise of Trump, the alt-right and the resurgence of old demons?

As in many other countries, the extreme right in the US found itself pushed to the margins in the aftermath of the Second World War. However, this process was neither straightforward nor definitive. Not only did racism remain systemic, but the history of the Ku Klux Klan, for example, shows that the organisation remained close to the mainstream until the 1960s, when a combination of Civil Rights struggle and wider political development forced it into decline. At the time, ‘the destruction of the Klan in this way allowed it to become symbolic of the end of racism, akin to an exorcism of an evil within the nation, as identified in post-racial narratives’ (Mondon & Winter 2020, 26-27). From then on, the Klan took an even more extremist turn as did a number of other organisations and militias. However, the marginalisation of the extreme right did not mean the end of racism, and more coded discourse remained within mainstream politics, particularly under the Nixon, Reagan and Bush administrations. Racial discrimination was coded into laws, institutionalised and maintained through implicit and explicit government policies and discourses.

The 5^th era of far-right activity saw groups go ‘underground and offline’ (Winter, 2019), regarding the internet as free from government oversight or control. The far right’s online presence was mixed, with innovation ^[1] dependent on the national context: a number of sites took advantage of the affordance of the internet to spread propaganda, expand networks, and connect previously scattered individuals. The online presence of the far right evolved with the internet, moving from bulletin boards, to websites and forums, to the social media platforms that have since come to dominate. Winter has noted how key events, such as the election of Obama in 2008, gave an initial boost to the far right as it provided a clear rallying call. Social media and the internet more generally helped the diffusion of propaganda and manifestos, such as in the case of Anders Breivik, the Norwegian terrorist who murdered 77 people in a series of attacks in 2011, including 69 young left-wing activists on the island of Utøya. This was also witnessed after the terrorist attack in 2019 in Christchurch, New Zealand, when Australian Brenton Tarrant murdered 51 Muslims at a mosque. His manifesto, as well as images of the numerous symbols drawn on his weapons, quickly spread across the Internet and resonated across far-right communities.

In this context, Trump’s candidacy and campaign in 2016 allowed for the different strands of far and extreme right to converge under one banner, as he was not only the candidate of the Grand Old Party, but also closely allied with the new kid on the far-right block: the alt-right. Trump also received support from traditional extreme-right movements and actors such as David Duke, a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, and the Proud Boys.

The alt-right, a term first used in 2008 by white nationalist Richard Spencer, was initially seen as a new branding for a neo-conservative, explicitly racial reaction to traditional conservatism. For the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), this ‘new’ movement represented ‘a set of far-right ideologies, groups and individuals whose core belief is that “white identity” is under attack by multicultural forces using “political correctness” and “social justice” to undermine white people and “their” civilization’. Denying the racism of the movement, ‘members’ claimed to ‘simply’ be engaging with identity politics, victimised by ‘reverse racism’, demands for equality and political correctness. The alt-right did not represent a true movement with cohesive goals, membership or purpose. Instead, it is understood to be an amalgamation of beliefs, revolving around support for explicit white supremacist, nationalist, and fascist politics. As such, it operates more like a spectrum than a movement or party, as suggested by the term alt-lite used to define ‘less’ extreme actors.

In 2016, the alt-right gained prominence through media interest and active engagement with the Presidential Election. One of the key alt-right spaces, r/the_donald on Reddit, even hosted a Question-and-Answer session^[2] with a number of campaign staff, including Donald Trump. It became a space that reflected the President himself: a rejection of any semblance of reasonable political discussion. Anonymous swarms of alt-right trolls would swamp hashtags and dominate platforms with their messaging, attempting to drown out dissenting opinions. It is worth noting here that r/the_donald, and other similar threads, have since been shut down in an effort to counter extremism on social media platforms and head off controversy in advance of the 2020 election – what was acceptable in the lead up to Trump’s election has since become beyond the pale. This has led to more overtly far-right platforms, such as Parler, gaining the attention Reddit received in 2016.

In 2016, the alt-right was a jubilant cheerleader for Trump, a candidate considered for a number of months to be somewhat of a joke, attracting many who claimed to have joined the movement ironically or subversively. As the campaign progressed, the alt-right fuelled and was fuelled by a venomous discourse of toxic masculinity and racism, epitomised by their branding of opposition conservatives as ‘cuckservatives’. Legitimising the connection, Trump ultimately hired alt-right individuals such as Steve Bannon, then editor of Breitbart. As such, its actors gained prominence in the campaign and access to government during the Trump presidency; alt-right discourse became mainstreamed, if not altogether mainstream. For example, it became increasingly common to hear adversaries, no matter how moderate, denounced as traitors to the nation trying to institutionalise Socialism and open borders.

As the events that took place in Charlottesville in August 2017 demonstrated, the far and extreme-right threat was not just an online phenomenon. As neo-Nazis and other extreme-right activists took to the streets, the murder of anti-fascist Heather Heyer made clear that threats of violence were not ironic banter. Trump’s reaction to these events blurred the boundaries between the extreme and far right and the mainstream further, as he refused to outright condemn the fascist event, instead declaring that ‘you had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides’. The false equivalence between fascists and the mythologised and misunderstood ‘Antifa’ would become a cornerstone of Trump’s discourse.

2020: the fall of Trump and the alt-right?

The 2020 campaign was markedly different from 2016, with the alt-right holding a much-reduced profile. This can be laid at the feet of a number of factors. The pandemic significantly impacted  public rallies, which Trump used to such effect in his first campaign and throughout his presidency. Moreover, his two most potent arguments – that he would Drain The Swamp and Build The Wall – failed to materialise. In advance of the election, a number of online spaces were closed to the alt-right, with Reddit deplatforming the largest community, and a number of far-right figures receiving bans on Twitter and Facebook (often for Covid-19-related violations). Instead, the alt-right moved to alt-tech platforms, such as thedonald.win, Parler, and Gab. Whilst this generated numerous headlines, it did not recreate the virality of 2016. Instead, the QAnon conspiracy took centre stage, valorising Trump as a hero fighting against a shadowy cabal, but with far less coherent ideological content and clarity than the movements that had assisted his rise.

The Covid-19 pandemic was a central feature of the election. On 30 April 2020, protesters spilled onto the streets during the invasion of the Michigan State Capitol building as part of an ‘American Patriot Rally’. Mirroring the Capitol insurrection, heavily-armed protestors demanded access to the chambers. Their white supremacist ties were rendered visible during the coup attempt, #StopTheSteal, initiated by a rally the President held minutes before and supported in a later tweet of ‘LIBERATE MICHIGAN’. A plot aiming to kidnap the Michigan governor was later foiled and again linked to the galaxy of extreme right movements emboldened by Trump’s discourse. In September, when asked to condemn white supremacist groups such as the Proud Boys, Trump merely asked them to ‘stand back and stand by’.

It should not have come as a surprise that the insidious normalisation of far-right discourse and the intersection of white supremacy, the far and extreme right, and Trump, was again highlighted during the January insurrection, when Trump incited his supporters to march on the Capitol to save the election from being ‘stolen’. While this fascist coup attempt was shocking in and of itself, it was just as striking to witness the unwavering support many Republican politicians continued to lend Trump despite the gravity of the situation. His legacy was therefore not limited to a resurgent and emboldened extreme right, but to the hold he appears to retain on the Republican party and its electorate.

It would thus be a mistake to think of Trump’s 2016 election as a rupture and his 2020 defeat as a simple fix, since his 2016 victory was the result of a longer process of ‘radicalisation of the Republican electorate, with racism being increasingly normalised in American politics’ (Mondon & Winter 2019). While Trump’s electorate may have differed from John McCain’s and Mitt Romney’s, it was very similar to George W. Bush’s in 2004. Both appealed more to the working class than McCain and Romney, but the bulk of their vote remained with the wealthy, trends which appear to have accentuated in 2020:

‘Trump managed to appeal to a similar electorate than that which has underpinned the resurgence of the far right in Europe. This particular electorate feels insecure about its future, even though it remains in a relatively privileged position and is more interested about issues such as immigration and terrorism, than about the economy. Therefore, rather than a radical shift of the working class towards Trump, what we have witnessed is the development of a typical far right electorate by European standards. (Mondon & Winter 2020)’

In the context of the radicalisation of both the discourse of the Republicans and their electorate, it is telling to see that almost two thirds of House Republicans supported the lawsuit that sought to overturn the election – support increased by 20 even after the case had been rejected by the Supreme Court on 11 December. Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley acted as standard bearers of the conspiracy, defending Trump despite the latter’s attacks on Cruz in 2016. It was also striking to witness the rehabilitation of some Republicans who had previously been considered extreme themselves: in the face of Trump’s shameless extremism, even Mitt Romney and George W. Bush began to appear as the voice of moderation and reason, despite their legacy paving the way for the current context.

This right-wing radicalisation of political discourse in the US was also witnessed in the way Joe Biden was successfully portrayed as a Socialist during the campaign. While the Biden-Harris ticket has been praised for its moderation in comparison to other more radical alternatives on the Democratic side, such as Bernie Sanders, it was telling that this did not change the narrative; that no matter how hard the Democrats tried, their distance from Trump meant they were simply too far to the left.

Conclusion

To conclude, it would be simplistic and dangerous to imagine that Biden’s arrival in the White House means a return to ‘normality’, as if the Trump presidency were only a parenthesis or some freak event in an otherwise reasonable polity. The democratic institutions remained strong, but the election highlighted attempts made to undermine them, not just by extreme-right outsiders, but by or through the support of members of the polity themselves. On the more extreme side of politics, the President’s flirting with the alt, far and extreme right and the legitimisation of many of their talking points has had a real impact on normalising much of their discourse. While threats and the reality of extreme-right violence have been growing for a long time now, these have become far more common and brazen. For example, few were surprised at the blockades of Trump supporters during the campaign. The growth and emboldening of a more organised proto-fascist constituency best represented today by the Proud Boys is also all too real, as exemplified by the demonstration that took place in Washington DC on 12 December.

In his inauguration speech, Biden repeatedly called for unity and to ‘treat each other with dignity and respect’. However, there is a real risk such appeasement downplays the risks present in a political environment where far and extreme-right movements can receive support from the President. By proceeding through the 2016 and 2020 campaigns, this article has underlined how the evolving role of the alt, far and extreme right reflects the broader normalisation of far-right discourse. No longer the outrageous cheerleaders of 2016, 2020 saw the far-right discourse lose its shock factor, in the process migrating the Republicans further to the right. This migration is perhaps best highlighted by Trump’s own words to the insurrectionists: ‘We love you’, in defiance of the outrage.

ENDNOTES

CITATION

Aurelien Mondon And Antonia Vaughan, ‘White Supremacist Extremism and the Far Right in the U.S.’, Political Extremism and Radicalism: Far-Right Groups in America, Cengage Learning (EMEA) Ltd, 2021.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2012).

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism without racists: Color-blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006).

Pablo J. Boczkowski and Zizi Papacharissi (eds), Trump and the Media (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2018).  

George Hawley, The Alt-Right: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

Aurelien Mondon and Aaron Winter, Reactionary Democracy: How Racism and the Populist Far Right Became Mainstream (London: Verso, 2020).

David Neiwert, Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in The Age of Trump (London: Verso, 2017).

Southern Poverty Law Center. ‘Alt-Right’ https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist- files/ideology/alt-right

Mike Wendling, Alt-Right: From 4chan to the White House (London: Pluto Press, 2018).

Aaron Winter, ‘Online Hate: From the Far-Right to the ‘Alt-Right’, and from the Margins to the Mainstream’ in Online Othering: Exploring violence and discrimination on the Web, eds. Karen Lumsden and Emily Harmer. (London: Palgrave, 2019).

Defining the Far Right

The far right is best understood as a spectrum of groups and individuals who are often at odds with one another but hold in common some combination of four elements: exclusionary and dehumanizing beliefs, antigovernment and antidemocratic practices and ideals, existential threats and conspiracy theories, and apocalyptic fantasies.^[1] Exclusionary and dehumanizing beliefs are at the core of far-right ideologies through ideas about superiority and inferiority according to race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, religion, or sexuality.^[2] White supremacism in the United States has been the primary – although not the only – form of exclusionary ideology and is therefore especially key to understanding the American far right. But there is overlap across the spectrum of far-right groups with those whose primary focus is other issues, such as anti-government extremists, misogynistic groups, and Christian supremacy or nationalism. Far-right ideas are generally fundamentally opposed to the norms, values, and beliefs that underpin democratic practice across the globe, as evidenced through actions like promoting authoritarianism, threatening free and fair elections, challenging systems of checks and balances, or threatening the protection of individual freedom, the rule of law, or freedoms of the press, religion, speech, and assembly.^[3] Far-right ideologies, individuals, and groups espouse beliefs that are antidemocratic, antiegalitarian, white supremacist, and are embedded in solutions like authoritarianism, ethnic cleansing or ethnic migration, and the establishment of separate ethno-states or enclaves along racial and ethnic lines.

For far-right extremists, exclusionary beliefs are more than prejudicial attitudes toward an out-group. They are tied to the idea of an existential threat to the dominant group and then linked to emotional appeals to protect, defend, and take heroic action to restore sacred national space, territory, and homelands. The existential threat is often voiced in terms of a broader and orchestrated conspiracy theory, such as the ‘great replacement’, which is currently the leading far-right conspiracy theory of demographic change globally. The ‘great replacement’ argues that there is an intentional, global plan orchestrated by national and global elites – and led by Muslims or Jews – to replace white, Christian, or European populations with nonwhite, non-Christian ones.^[4] In the U.S., the ‘great replacement’ conspiracy builds on the concept of ‘white genocide’ popularized by the American neo-Nazi David Lane, who argued that white populations face an existential threat because they are dying out demographically due to immigration, abortion, and violence against whites.^[5]

At the most-extreme fringe, far-right extremists not only believe that an existential threat exists, but also that an inevitable violent apocalypse is on its way, which will be followed by a period of restoration and re-birth for white civilization. These apocalyptic fantasies motivate violent action from a fringe part of extremists called ‘accelerationists’, who believe that the best and fastest way to reach the desired phase of restorative rebirth is to hurry up the path to the apocalypse by increasing polarization, chaos, and societal fighting as a way of undermining overall social stability.^[6] Accelerationism is not unique to the far right, but violent far-right extremists’ adoption of it as a strategy is relatively recent, and reflects a major shift from the realm of apocalyptic fantasies into direct action, through a celebration of violence that will bring about an end-times collapse and subsequent restoration of a new white civilization.^[7]

History and Development of the Far Right in the U.S.

White supremacism has been foundational in the United States, from the earliest arrival of Europeans and the eventual genocide of Native Americans to the reliance on institutionalized slavery to build the nation’s economy. An ideology based on racist ideas came together in the U.S. in the mid-1800s, initially oriented around the defense of slavery but eventually fixated on opposition to equality for African Americans.^[8] The Ku Klux Klan (KKK), likely the best-known historical U.S. white supremacist extremist group, was founded at the end of slavery. The KKK was made up of violent vigilante groups who enacted a reign of brutal terror against freed Black people through the use of rape, lynching, torture and mutilation.^[9] A resurgence of Klan activity in the 1920s led to the KKK having several million members across the U.S.^[10] Uniquely American variations on white supremacy emerged over time, including Christian-identity groups who believe whites are God’s chosen people, white-supremacist prison gangs like the Aryan Brotherhood, and groups inspired by overseas ideologies, including neo-Nazis and racist skinheads.^[11] Like the KKK, other far-right groups and ideas in the U.S. have often emerged in reaction to civil rights movements or progress toward racial equity.^[12] In 2020, for example, some U.S. antigovernment extremist groups mobilized in reaction to Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests, harassing protesters in multiple cities and calling on ‘patriots’ to protect business owners’ property.^[13]

What we think of today as the modern white supremacist movement in the U.S. began in the 1970s, fueled in part by the return of disgruntled Vietnam veterans, who the white supremacist Louis Beam mobilized to participate in paramilitary training facilities and boot camps that were intended to create a white-separatist army to assume control of national and regional space and expel nonwhites, creating a white homeland.^[14] These were typically separate camps in remote areas, which helped ensure they had relatively limited reach.^[15] Later, the breadth and reach of far-right groups would expand dramatically as the internet facilitated engagement in ways no longer limited by geography.  

After the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing by an anti-government extremist with white supremacist sympathies, the far right went underground in the U.S. for a few years. When the 9/11 attacks took place, the government and the public’s attention shifted to Islamist and international forms of extremism and terrorism, and white supremacist extremism and the far right received far less attention. Growth across the spectrum began in earnest after the first election of an African American U.S. President in 2008. In the years that followed that election, the country saw record-breaking numbers of hate groups emerge, as well as the founding of new militia groups and anti-government movements like the Oathkeepers and the three-percenters.^[16] By the time Donald Trump was elected to the U.S. presidency in 2016 on a wave of populist nationalist and nativist rhetoric that was seen by many white supremacist extremists as a legitimation of their beliefs, the so-called ‘alt right’ and ‘alt lite’ was already emerging as the new face of the far right in the U.S., using youth culture to fuel the mainstreaming and growth of the far right and white supremacist extremist ideas.^[17]

Mainstreaming, Normalization, and Mobilization to Violence in the U.S. Far Right

In the U.S., the most visible moment related to the mainstreaming of white supremacist extremism came in the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, where dozens of young men clad in pressed khakis and white polo shirts marched across the University of Virginia campus carrying flaming tiki torches and chanting ‘Jews will not replace us’. That rally made it clear to the American – and global – public that extremist ideas had seeped into everyday kinds of spaces and discourses in the U.S. Just over a year later, a Pennsylvania man allegedly killed eleven people in a Pittsburgh synagogue. Six months after that attack, 51 Muslim worshippers were killed in Christchurch, New Zealand by a white supremacist extremist, who livestreamed his attack and inspired copycat attacks in several places globally, including in El Paso, Texas, where 23 people died in a mass shooting targeting Latinos in a Walmart store. In the wake of these terrorist attacks, the U.S. government finally mobilized to take more significant action. Congress called multiple hearings in 2019 and 2020, where expert witnesses testified about a range of issues related to white supremacist extremism and terrorism. In October 2020, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security issued a threat assessment report declaring white supremacist extremists (WSEs) the ‘most persistent and lethal threat in the Homeland’, noting that 2019 was ‘the most lethal year for domestic violent extremism in the United States since the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995’.^[18]

Within weeks of that report, however, millions of Americans would come to believe mass disinformation about a fraudulent election. Fueled by rapid growth in 2020 in QAnon conspiracy theories, anti-government militia movements, and the self-described ‘Western chauvinist’ Proud Boys, large numbers of American citizens began to mobilize in response to President Trump’s call to ‘Stop the Steal’. On January 6, 2021, as the U.S. Congress was gathering to certify the electoral college votes authenticating the election of Joe Biden, thousands of individuals comprising a toxic mix of militant far-right extremists and mobilized Trump voters stormed the U.S. Capitol in a violent insurrection, ultimately resulting in the deaths of five individuals that day, and two suicides of police officers in the days that followed.^[19]

At the time of this writing, the U.S. policy reaction to the U.S. Capitol attack is still emerging. Among other developments, revelations that a disproportionate percentage of veterans were among those arrested has helped bring renewed attention in the U.S. to the role of law enforcement, military, and veteran communities in far-right extremism. ^[20] This is not a new phenomenon, of course.^[21] There have also been repeated examples of active armed forces or law enforcement engagement in the white supremacist fringe in the U.S. over the past several decades. In the 1990s, a white supremacist gang formed among soldiers stationed at Fort Bragg, and two members murdered a local Black couple.^[22] A 2006 FBI bulletin described the ‘threat of white nationalists’ who might deliberately infiltrate the police, disrupt investigations, and try to recruit.^[23] And of course, army veteran and white supremacist Timothy McVeigh was responsible for the worst domestic terrorism attack in U.S. history, taking the lives of 168 people in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.^[24]

But in the wake of the U.S. Capitol attack, calls for more data collection, accountability, and transparency from the U.S. Department of Defense and U.S. Department of Justice about the potential role of law enforcement and active-duty military in extremist groups began to gain steam. To protect the 2021 inauguration of President Joe Biden from potential ‘insider’ threats, the U.S. Department of Defense individually vetted all 25,000 National Guard troops assigned to secure the city and the inauguration ceremony, resulting in the removal of a dozen members of the National Guard – two for possible links to extremism.^[25] In early February, the Pentagon announced plans for stand-downs, or pauses in regular activity, over a two-month period in order to address the issue of racism and extremism in the military.^[26] The coming years in the U.S. are likely to bring new developments in these areas.

The Current and Future Threat Landscape

The fall 2020 U.S. Department of Homeland Security report declaring white supremacist extremism the most lethal and dangerous threat facing the nation was in many ways a turning point in the U.S. government’s acknowledgement of the problem of violent domestic extremism. The 2019 death numbers cited in that report had come on the heels of 50 deaths at the hands of domestic extremists in 2018, with the majority linked to white supremacy specifically, making 2018 the fourth-deadliest year since 1970 in terms of domestic extremist deaths.^[27] The lethality of extremism dropped significantly in 2020, with only 17 domestic extremist murders – all but one linked to right-wing extremism and over half linked to white supremacist extremism (one death was attributed to a left-wing extremist, and five deaths were attributed to anti-government extremists). But even as deadly outcomes declined during the COVID-19 pandemic, extremists remained highly engaged in other ways. At least 16 far right terrorist plots or attacks were documented in 2020,^[28] some of which received wide media attention, such as the kidnapping plot against the Michigan and Virginia governors. Hate crimes against Asian Americans also increased significantly during the pandemic, due to COVID-19 related hate directed at people of Asian descent, with a UN report documenting more than 1,800 hate incidents against Asian Americans in the U.S. just between March and May 2020.^[29]

The circulation of extremist propaganda and the numbers of hate groups also remain very high. White supremacist extremist propaganda nearly doubled in 2020, (from 2,724 incidents in 2019 to over 4,500 incidents).^[30] Importantly, this type of propaganda is not limited to any single group. The hundreds of instances of far-right propaganda documented in 2018, for example came from at least ten separate national ‘alt-right’, white-supremacist, and neo-Nazi groups.^[31] The numbers of hate groups in the U.S. remains at a historic high. These numbers had more than doubled to over 1,000 after the presidential election of Barack Obama before declining by 2014 to 784. Hate group numbers then rose to a record high of 1,020 in 2018 and remain historically high at 838 in 2020. White-nationalist groups alone increased by nearly 50 percent in 2018, from 100 to 148.^[32]

It is hard to predict what the future of far-right extremism looks like in the U.S. The January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol was a wake-up call for much of the public and the policymaking community about the impact of mass disinformation and the potential for large numbers of people to become radicalized and mobilize to violence. The Biden administration will certainly take on the issue of domestic violent extremism in ways that will be important to watch in the months and years to come.

ENDNOTES

CITATION

Cynthia Miller-Idriss, ‘White Supremacist Extremism and the Far Right in the U.S.’, Political Extremism and Radicalism: Far-Right Groups in America, Cengage Learning (EMEA) Ltd, 2021.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Belew, Kathleen. Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018.

Berger, J. M. Extremism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018.

Blee, Kathleen. Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. 

Davey, Jacob and Julia Ebner. “The Great Replacement”: The Violent Consequences of Mainstreamed Extremism. London: Institute for Strategic Dialogue, 2019. https://www.isdglobal.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/The-Great-Replacement-The-Violent-Consequences-of-Mainstreamed-Extremism-by-ISD.pdf.

Jackson, Sam. Oathkeepers. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020.

Rory McVeigh. The Rise of the Ku Klux Klan: Right-Wing Movements and National Politics. University of Minnesota Press, 2009.

Michael, George. “David Lane and the Fourteen Words.” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 10, no. 1 (2009). https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14690760903067986.

Miller-Idriss, Cynthia. Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020.

Mudde, Cas. The Far Right Today. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2019.

Mudde, Cas. The Far Right in America. Routledge, 2018.

Pitcavage, Mark. Surveying the Landscape of the American Far Right. George Washington University Program on Extremism, August 2019. https://extremism.gwu.edu/sites/g/files/zaxdzs2191/f/Surveying%20The%20Landscape%20of%20the%20American%20Far%20Right_0.pdf.

Plattner, Marc F. “Illiberal Democracy and the Struggle on the Right.” Journal of Democracy 30, no. 1 (2019): 5–19.

Smith, David Livingstone. Less than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others. New York: St. Martin’s, 2011.

Ware, Jacob. Siege: The Atomwaffen Division and Rising Far-Right Terrorism in the United States. International Centre for Counter-Terrorism (ICCT) Policy Brief, July 2019. The Hague: ICCT, 2019.

Eighteenth Century Collections Online brings learning to life and new dimension to history at Leeds University.

John Chartres, Professor of Social and Economic History, Leeds University, and former Oxford Scholar, tells us about the significant difference this primary digital resource has made to the quality and depth of work produced by lecturers and students in the history, history of art, history and philosophy of science and English departments.

IMPACT ON TEACHING AND LEARNING

“Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) is a true feast of delights. It’s like being Hansel and Gretel from the Brothers Grim fairy tale walking into a delicious gingerbread house, but without a witch to stop you”, Professor John Chartres exclaimed.

Accessible anytime anywhere by Leeds University’s 35,000 students, ECCO has had a significant impact on teaching and learning across departments, in particular lecturers, undergraduates, postgraduates and PhD students in his history department.

“It’s extremely interesting how this resource has enriched the educational experience for my students. In year one when students study A tour thro' the whole island of Great Britain (Daniel Defoe’s matter-of-fact account of his visits to various places within Britain) and access primary resource material from ECCO, it’s fascinating for them to discover for themselves the extent of Defoe’s plagiarism. Students can readily track the intertextuality or unacknowledged quotation from one primary resource to another.

“In their third year when students are preparing their research dissertations they make extensive use of ECCO and are able to conduct global library searches that would have been inconceivable before its arrival. MA and PhD students are taken to another level – the depth and range of materials to which they have instant access is astonishing. They, like the teaching staff at Leeds, can follow their own inclinations, provide evidence for their arguments and view secondary resources with a critical eye. This simply wasn’t possible before. They can achieve a much more sophisticated appreciation of what history actually means.

“Today’s generation of students are more inclined to sit online than look in the library, so it makes this resource all the more valuable.”

OVERCOMING LIMITATIONS

“Before the arrival of ECCO, students keen to perform even a simple primary resource task would have the daunting job of gaining access to a special part of our library – one of the top 10 research libraries in the country – searching through reams of microfiche which can be technically problematic, and still only gain access to approximately 20 percent of the original primary source material. When studying at Oxford I had to travel the breadth of the country to gain access to the material I wished to examine and pay for expensive photocopies of primary resource documentation held in universities abroad. I then spent days and days reading through extensive collections of magazines, catalogues and trade cards, often finding just a nugget of information that would lead me to my next discovery. It was hugely time consuming.”

NEW AVENUES

“The arrival of ECCO and its powerful search facilities opens up new avenues for students and lecturers to explore subjects that before would not have been possible.

“For example, one student recently presented a study on the sexual mores of eighteenth century society by interrogating pamphlet accounts of particularly elite women and their love affairs and volumes of criminal conversation cases. Interestingly, she was able to see that if a married woman committed adultery, the husband could sue the adulterer for invasion of property rights.

“Another student presented a study on the history of perfume. By reading trade cards (small cards, similar to the visiting cards exchanged in social circles, that businesses would distribute to clients and potential customers) they were able to track its evolution from the original nosegay, used to mask the unpleasant smells of the time, to the arrival of perfume applied directly to the body. Students searching manually for this information would have had to visit several different libraries. It would have been like searching for a needle in a haystack.”

IMPROVING RESULTS

“Every year I see at least 10 percent of my students moving up to a top First Degree performance in their dissertations through the application of ECCO.”

SEARCHABILITY

“Powerful search capabilities, a key feature of ECCO, mean that for the first time students have access to material that can radically change their understanding of a topic. It’s an extraordinarily exciting resource”, he concluded.

British Foreign Office correspondence from China on commercial, political, diplomatic, military and legal matters in nineteenth century Anglo-Chinese relations.

In this, the first of two parts of British Foreign Office correspondence from China, scholars will find material relating to the internal politics of China and Britain, their relationship, and the relationships between other Western powers keen to benefit from the growing trading ports of the Far East. 

From Lord Amherst’s mission at the start of the nineteenth century, through the trading monopoly of the Canton System, and the Opium Wars of 1839-42 and 1856-60, Britain and other foreign powers gradually gained commercial, legal and territorial rights in China. These files provide correspondence from the Factories of Canton (modern Guangzhou) and from the missionaries and interpreters who entered China in the early nineteenth century, as well as from the later Consulates and Legation and from the envoys and missions sent to China from Britain.

After 1842 when the Treaty of Nanking was signed, the precedence of Canton declined as the treaty ports of Shanghai, Ningpo (Ningbo), Foochow (Fuzhou) and Amoy (Xiamen) were established. These were later joined by more trading posts, with British merchants and Consuls established at Swatow (Shantou), Chefoo (Yantai), Formosa (Taiwan) and more.

As well as matters of trade and commerce, the correspondence in this archive covers local uprisings including anti-foreign riots and the Tientsin Massacre of 1870, piracy, judicial and legal matters, and the activities of Russia, the US, France and other Western powers in the region. It also covers British interests and ambition in Japan, Thailand, Burma (Myanmar), Malaya (Malaysia) and Korea (particularly Seoul).

These hand-written documents have been opened up to scholars with the use of Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) technology, as well as item-level information drawn from the Foreign Office Indexes in series FO 605.

SUBJECTS COVERED

• Asian Studies
• Chinese Studies
• Colonialism
• History
• Political Science & Diplomatic Studies

ADVISORS:

STEPHEN R. PLATT, Professor of History, University of Massachusetts at Amherst

DAVID FAURE, Professor of History and Director of Center for China Studies, Chinese University of Hong Kong

EIICHI MOTONO, Professor of Economic History, Waseda University

EI MURAKAMI, Associate Professor of Economic History, Kyoto University

HANS VAN DE VEN, Professor of Modern Chinese History, Cambridge University

HUANG KO-WU, Distinguished Research Professor, Institute of Modern History, Academic Sinica, Republic of China (Taiwan)

ISABELLA JACKSON, Assistant Professor in Chinese History, Trinity College Dublin

From the international machinery of espionage and twentieth-century warfare to personal surveillance and Cold War intelligence, this uniquely broad view of the interests of the British government, her allies and her enemies is sourced from five government departments and totals around 500 000 pages.

Twentieth-Century British Intelligence, An Intelligence Empire brings together files from the UK National Archives covering intelligence and security matters from 1905-2002. Material has been sourced from the UK Ministry of Defence, the Cabinet Office, the Colonial Office, MI5 (British Domestic Security Service) and the SOE (Special Operations Executive), reflecting an intelligence network that reached from the UK and Europe to Africa, the Middle East, Canada, Asia and Australia during a century of global conflicts, high-stakes diplomacy and political upheaval. These documents cover the development of British intelligence and its impact on policy from its earliest days, through Room 40 in the First World War and the activities of the Security Services throughout the British Empire during WWII, to the geopolitics of the Cold War and decolonisation.

Intelligence files, previously closed to scholars, represent an under-studied aspect of our recent past and provide exciting opportunities for new research. 

Declassified Documents Online: Twentieth Century British Intelligence, An Intelligence Empire brings together files from five UK government departments to provide researchers with access to detailed, previously classified information on the intelligence services of Britain and her Empire throughout the twentieth century.

The Security Service (MI5): KV 2, KV 3 & KV 4

Personal, Subject and Policy files dating from 1905-1978. MI5 handled intelligence gathering within the British Empire and the Commonwealth. The selected subseries of KV 2 holds personal files on subjects of Secret Service enquiries, whilst KV 3 contains subject files on espionage activities of groups or other intelligence organisations, including the only subject files known to have survived from the First World War period. KV 4 holds section histories and policy files.

The Ministry of Defence: Communications and Intelligence Records: DEFE 21, DEFE 26, DEFE 28, DEFE 31, DEFE 41, DEFE 44, DEFE 60, DEFE 62, DEFE 63 & DEFE 64

These series include registered files, reports and memoranda of the Directorate of Scientific Intelligence, the Defence Intelligence Staff and the Defence Signals Staff focused on the technical and scientific interests of the British government from the Second World War to the decades of the Cold War and the Atomic Age. The intelligence assessments and reports include those gathered post-war in Allied-occupied Germany, such as interviews with German scientists. With files dating from 1912-2002, these series bring the coverage up to the end of the twentieth century, and include defence records on the Falklands, the Middle East, UFO incidents and details of Soviet weapon systems.

The Special Operations Executive: HS 7 & HS 8

These are records of the Ministry of Economic Warfare and the Special Operations Executive (SOE), which functioned during WWII to promote sabotage and subversion, and assist resistance groups in enemy occupied territory, famously directed by Winston Churchill to ‘set Europe ablaze!’. Records date from 1935-1988 and include histories & war diaries in HS 7, and headquarters records in HS 8.

The Colonial Office: Intelligence and Security Departments: Registered Files (ISD Series): CO 1035
This series contains registered files of the Colonial Office relating to the security of British colonies, and intelligence on colonial matters and decolonisation, including reports by Security Intelligence Advisors throughout the British Empire, and assessments from the Joint Intelligence Committee. Running from 1954-1966, these files represent a vital piece of the intelligence picture of the global Cold War and decolonisation at the end of Empire.

The Cabinet Office: CAB 56, CAB 121, CAB 176 & CAB 301

The material in these series dates from 1936-1974 and shows how intelligence matters were considered, analysed, and processed through the Cabinet Office. Records from the Joint Intelligence Committee appear alongside Policy and Strategy files from the Special Secret Information Centre, and selected intelligence material from the Cabinet Secretary’s Miscellaneous Papers held in CAB 301.

The study of Intelligence and security casts light on international relations and politics, on social conditions and personal experiences in a time of conflict and shifting global alliances, on the running and dismantling of Empire and on the secret operations and planning of global conflicts. The politics of today are a direct result of the events of the twentieth century, and the depth and breadth of information gathered by British intelligence agencies revealed in this product, from British communists to African independence leaders and German Abwehr agents, allows scholars to follow the decisions and events that formed the world we live in. 

This archive explores the role and development of a variety of conservative political movements and groups by showcasing unique materials that examine right-wing ideology. Building on the successful platform created by Part I, this next installment gives researchers access to more essential materials that support the study of extreme political viewpoints throughout history. Sourced from eminent libraries, including the University of California, Santa Barbara; the University of California, Davis; the University of Iowa, Idaho State University; and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Far-Right Groups in America provides scholars with a better understanding of American conservative political movement from multiple angles.

DATE RANGE:
1850–2010

DOCUMENT TYPES:
monographs, manuscripts,  periodicals, pamphlets, and ephemera

SOURCE LIBRARIES:
University of California, Santa Barbara; University of California, Davis; University of Iowa; Idaho State University; and The Federal Bureau of Investigation

SUBJECTS SUPPORTED:
history, politics, American history, sociology, anthropology, social history, social sciences, and government

The latest content update to U.S. Declassified Documents Online provides 5,000 documents from a variety of U.S. Government sources, including the Central Intelligence Agency, Department of Homeland Security, Environmental Protection Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the White House.  Declassified materials include Department of Defense Cables on military conflicts, White House memoranda on foreign relations, security reports from the Central Intelligence Agency, and letters from Senators concerning domestic policy initiatives.  These documents reveal how the U.S. Government operates on many different levels, and allows researchers to better understand relationships between the various agencies.

Document highlights:

• U.S. House Resolution (H. Res.) on articles of impeachment against Donald John Trump, President of the U.S., for high crimes and misdemeanors: Article I: Abuse of Power; Article 2: Obstruction of Congress - 12/10/2019
• U.S. Air Force Fact Sheet no. 87-34 on the history of the Air Force's investigations into unidentified flying objects (UFOs) starting in 1948 under a program entitled "Project Sign." - 10/1/1987
• U.S. Air Force report entitled: "The Roswell Report - Case Closed." The focus of this probe has been to access if the U.S. Air Force, or any other government agency, possessed informed on the alleged crash and recovery of an extraterrestrial vehicle and its alien occupants near Roswell, New Mexico, in July 1947. It has been determined that the crashed object was a nuclear test surveillance balloon from Project Mogul - 4/25/1996
• National Security Council (NSC) staff member Fritz Ermarth provides Deputy National Security Adviser Colin Powell with talking points in preparation for a 2:00 p.m. Domestic Policy Council (DPC) meeting on acid rain. The NSC strongly endorses full federal research funding in an attempt to ease Canadian concerns over environmental problems associated with acid rain from American industrial plants. - March 9, 1987
• In a letter to President Barack Obama, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-California) provides information on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's study of the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) Detention and Interrogation Program - 12/30/2014
• Deputy Director for Central Intelligence (DDCI) Richard Kerr provides Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) William Casey with an assessment about the catastrophic nuclear accident that occurred on 4/26/1986 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Ukraine - 7/31/1986
• National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski provides President Jimmy Carter with an attached cable from General Robert Huyser, Deputy Commander in Chief, U.S. European Command (DCINCEUR), concerning his appraisal of the attitude of the Iranian military community toward the U.S. - 1/13/1979
• Commander William Anderson congratulates Rear Admiral Hyman Rickover for his vision on the importance of nuclear power and his vision's fulfillment in the completion of the first transpolar voyage from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean by the nuclear submarine, the USS NAUTILUS - August 8, 1958

ABOUT U.S. DECLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS ONLINE

U.S. Declassified Documents Online's greatest value lies in the wealth of facts and insights that it provides in connection with the political, economic, and social conditions of the United States and other countries. Materials as diverse as State Department political analyses, White House confidential file materials, National Security Council policy statements, CIA intelligence memoranda, and much more offer unique insights into the inner workings of the US government and world events in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. A significant resource for researchers in almost every discipline, this collection makes it possible for researchers to easily and quickly access and review selected previously classified government documents online.

Daily Mail Historical Archive, 2005-2016

Customers who purchase this archive after December 2020 will have the full archive from 1898-2016. Customers who previously purchased the original archive covering 1898-2004 can purchase the years 2005-2016 to extend their existing archive. Please note that the 1898-2016 module is only available as an add-on to institutions that have the original archive, and is not available as a standalone purchase. Find out more about our Gale Historical Newspaper add-on modules here.

View some sample articles

(Click on the image to see the full page)

British Foreign Office correspondence from China on commercial, political, diplomatic, military and legal matters in nineteenth century Anglo-Chinese relations.

In this, the first of two parts of British Foreign Office correspondence from China, scholars will find material relating to the internal politics of China and Britain, their relationship, and the relationships between other Western powers keen to benefit from the growing trading ports of the Far East. 

From Lord Amherst’s mission at the start of the nineteenth century, through the trading monopoly of the Canton System, and the Opium Wars of 1839-42 and 1856-60, Britain and other foreign powers gradually gained commercial, legal and territorial rights in China. These files provide correspondence from the Factories of Canton (modern Guangzhou) and from the missionaries and interpreters who entered China in the early nineteenth century, as well as from the later Consulates and Legation and from the envoys and missions sent to China from Britain.

After 1842 when the Treaty of Nanking was signed, the precedence of Canton declined as the treaty ports of Shanghai, Ningpo (Ningbo), Foochow (Fuzhou) and Amoy (Xiamen) were established. These were later joined by more trading posts, with British merchants and Consuls established at Swatow (Shantou), Chefoo (Yantai), Formosa (Taiwan) and more.

As well as matters of trade and commerce, the correspondence in this archive covers local uprisings including anti-foreign riots and the Tientsin Massacre of 1870, piracy, judicial and legal matters, and the activities of Russia, the US, France and other Western powers in the region. It also covers British interests and ambition in Japan, Thailand, Burma (Myanmar), Malaya (Malaysia) and Korea (particularly Seoul).

These hand-written documents have been opened up to scholars with the use of Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) technology, as well as item-level information drawn from the Foreign Office Indexes in series FO 605.

SUBJECTS COVERED

• Asian Studies
• Chinese Studies
• Colonialism
• History
• Political Science & Diplomatic Studies

ADVISORS:

STEPHEN R. PLATT, Professor of History, University of Massachusetts at Amherst

DAVID FAURE, Professor of History and Director of Center for China Studies, Chinese University of Hong Kong

EIICHI MOTONO, Professor of Economic History, Waseda University

EI MURAKAMI, Associate Professor of Economic History, Kyoto University

HANS VAN DE VEN, Professor of Modern Chinese History, Cambridge University

HUANG KO-WU, Distinguished Research Professor, Institute of Modern History, Academic Sinica, Republic of China (Taiwan)

ISABELLA JACKSON, Assistant Professor in Chinese History, Trinity College Dublin

On Friday, December 18, 2020, the current ECCO interface was retired and existing ECCO links have been automatically redirected to a new interface, making ECCO look and feel like the other Gale Primary Sources archives.

The new ECCO experience is the culmination of extensive user research, including a widely distributed survey and an extensive series of usability tests and Zoom interviews. In response to observations during testing, as well as direct feedback provided by power users, we are making several impactful changes and enhancements, with more to come in subsequent software releases.

Will the migration affect usage data?
Yes. Because ECCO is comprised of monograph content, usage will be calculated according to stricter criteria and may decline as a result.

Will customers’ existing links redirect?
Yes. All A-Z list links, MARC records, and bookmarks will automatically redirect to the new experience. While you are not required to update your links, we encourage you to do so, if possible. This applies to MARC records which, while intended to redirect, do not always anticipate every possible redirect scenario. So we encourage you to obtain new MARC for their catalogues if they are open to it.

Which legacy features will be retained in the new experience?

• Most legacy functionality will carry over. However, due to low usage, “Browse Works” will not be carried over
• The Library of Congress Subject Headings that are currently available in legacy ECCO will not be carried over for the December release, but will be added as part of a subsequent release

Citations adhering to the Harvard style have been a top customer request, and we’re pleased to add this enhancement to our citation service. The introduction of Harvard citations adheres to the “Cite Them Right” format which provides users with a starting point for their references. Many universities use their own adaption of Harvard requirements, so we encourage users to consider their institution’s preferences when compiling reference lists.

Citation options are accessible by selecting the Cite button in the toolbar:

Gale is committed to streamlining user workflows. Users can easily export MLA, APA, Chicago, or Harvard citations for use in their favorite citation services, including:
 

- EasyBib

- EndNote

- NoodleTools

- ProCite

- Reference Manager

- RefWorks

- Zotero