Category Archives: migration

by | 13 November 2026 · 5:56 am

Moriori Survivors

From Moriori: A People Rediscovered, by Michael King (Penguin, 2017), Kindle Loc. 1196ff.:

At least Moriori who were killed fell into merciful oblivion. Those who survived the first killings were separated, moved around, and forced into slavery of the most onerous kind. As the 1862 Moriori plea to George Grey records, ‘men were separated from the women, parents from children, older children from younger children, and the strings of their heart quivered’. They also faced continuous near-starvation, frequent beatings, sexual abuse by their captors if the slaves were young women, a prohibition on marriage or sexual contact with their own people, permanent removal from the territories where their tribes had lived for centuries, and enforced breaking of the ancient tapus that had formerly protected them. They faced a life in which those they had loved were not only absent, but whose remains could still be seen intermittently, defiled by Maori and dogs alike. Perhaps worst of all, they faced a world in which everything in which they had believed spiritually and culturally was shown to be leached of fertility and value: their gods did not protect them from these horrors; their gods were dead.

…

It is little wonder that, in the circumstances, Moriori continued to die: some for angering their owners by their listlessness; some from reduced immunity to disease (there were further influenza epidemics in 1839 and 1840 that killed a large number of Maori and Moriori — one authority says as many as half of the surviving Moriori); and some from ‘kongenge’ — dispiritedness and despair.

…

Others who clung to life, but stunned and stunted by their experience, were among those reviled by Maori and Pakeha as being degenerate, of low intelligence, and deficient in energy and initiative. For that was how many of them seemed. And when in later years some attempted to anaesthetise their suffering in cheap alcohol, that only added weight to the accusations that the Paraiwhara, these ‘black fellas’, were low in the scale of God’s creation.

Some few Moriori continued to resist slavery and its overbearing physical and psychological weight. One such was Koche. He was the only one of his people able to leave a direct account of his experience, thanks to his contact with the American lawyer Ewing, who wrote it down about 1850. Koche told his story as the whaling vessel on which he crewed crossed the Pacific, and he spoke chiefly at night, when his duties were at an end.

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Filed under disease, migration, nationalism, New Zealand, Polynesia, religion, slavery

by | 12 November 2026 · 5:47 am

Ancestors of the Moriori

From Moriori: A People Rediscovered, by Michael King (Penguin, 2017), Kindle Loc. 192ff., 249ff.:

THE CHATHAMS — FOUR MAIN ISLANDS AND AN OUTLYING GROUP OF rocks and reefs — constitute the ridge of a submarine mountain known to geologists as the East Chatham Rise. They break the surface of the Pacific Ocean 870 kilometres east of New Zealand, bisected by the latitude 44° South. This location and the convergence there of warm currents from the north and cold water from the south produces the islands’ climate and weather: almost incessant wind (the ‘Roaring Forties’), near-constant cloud cover, low sunshine hours, wet winters and humid summers.

The Moriori had a variety of myths to account for their presence on these islands, the largest of which they referred to as Rekohu — ‘misty sky’ or ‘misty sun’. The most common recalled an ancestor named Kahu, who sailed the first canoe there from a homeland some remembered as Aotea. Kahu found the islands in an unsettled state. He joined up disparate fragments and anchored them in what became their permanent positions. He also planted fernroot and kumara. Then, in the East Polynesian tradition of the wide-ranging traveller, he returned to his homeland to report on what he had seen. Three further canoes are said to have followed: Rangihoua and Rangimata (together), and subsequently Oropuke.

…

If there is any mystery, it revolves around the identity of the ancestors of the Moriori — and that is not impenetrable.

The ancestors of the Moriori were the same people as the ancestors of the New Zealand Maori: East Polynesians whose own ancestors had entered the Pacific from the region now called South-east Asia and the South China Sea. Having expanded throughout the Malaysian, Indonesian and Philippine archipelagoes, one group settled the coasts of the Melanesian islands, and had arrived in Fiji, Tonga and Samoa before 1000 B.C. From there, descendants moved into East Polynesia — especially the Cook, Society and Marquesas Islands — where many of the enduring features of their hierarchical and sea-based culture were further developed and refined. From East Polynesia, some of their descendants migrated north to Hawaii, others east to Easter Island, and still others south-west to New Zealand; and from New Zealand, sometime between the twelfth and the sixteenth centuries A.D., to the Chathams.

Evidence that the final migration was from New Zealand is explicit. Artifacts have been found on both Pitt and Chatham Islands — but more especially on Pitt — made from New Zealand materials (obsidian and argillite). Other Chathams artifacts — necklace units, bird spear points, quadrangular adzes — are shaped in styles known to archaeologists as New Zealand Archaic; and some of them have been found only in New Zealand and on the Chathams. Sections of Moriori vocabulary reveal inextricable links with New Zealand (kawhai [Moriori] and kahawai [Maori] for the fish caught off the Chathams and New Zealand, for example; and kopi, the Moriori name for the karaka tree is a Maori name for the tree and its fruit, and the tree is found nowhere else in Polynesia other than the Kermadecs). The Moriori language as a whole shows a far closer affinity to Maori than to any other Polynesian dialect, with shared innovations that set them apart from other Polynesian languages and reveal their common origin.

…

Precisely which part of New Zealand the first people to settle the Chathams derived from, and when, is not known, and will not be until techniques of genetic analysis and radio carbon dating are further refined. There are signposts to answers, however.

Most early canoe voyages, particularly long ones for the trading of obsidian, greenstone or food, occurred down the east coast of New Zealand, the ‘sheltered’ side of the country. Like the winds, the convergence of currents from this coast tends to gather up and push flotsam eastwards towards the Chathams. Axed totara and kauri logs appeared there regularly during the height of mainland logging, and objects such as boxes and bottles from New Zealand still fetch up on Chathams beaches. This suggests that any canoe voyage to the Chathams — planned or accidental — is likely to have come from that part of the country.

The chances are probably highest in favour of an accidental journey: a double-hulled sailing canoe holding fewer than fifty people being forced eastwards by a storm. The fact that the founding group included men and women, and that they brought sufficient tools or tool-making expertise to reproduce their artifacts in local bone and stone, suggests a substantial trading party; or evidence of a planned migration, though not necessarily to the Chathams. Some writers have claimed that a study of the migratory paths of petrels and albatross would have signalled the existence of the islands to people who had never seen them. On the slender and hypothetical nature of evidence available, the verdict on deliberate or accidental colonisation has to remain open.

Linguistic and skeletal analysis show a closer affinity between Moriori and the Maori who lived in Murihiku (southern South Island) at the time of European contact than between Moriori and any other group (other than Taranaki Maori, whose invasion in 1835 had profound effects on Moriori language). This fact, combined with the probabilities of wind and current convergence, points to a likely voyage to the Chathams from some point south of Cook Strait.

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Filed under language, migration, New Zealand, Polynesia

by | 11 November 2026 · 6:01 am

Moriori Hospitality

From Moriori: A People Rediscovered, by Michael King (Penguin, 2017), Kindle Loc. 867ff.:

Whatever provocations the Moriori might have endured, there is no record of their ever again breaking the law of Nunuku (or, at least, not by killing Europeans. There is a story of one Chatham Islander who killed a relative in the early 1800s after a disagreement over a woman. He was subsequently ostracised by his people — social and spiritual death for a tribal person — and committed suicide by jumping down the blowhole at Mairangi. All of which serves to illustrate how highly the law of non-violence was valued). The Chathams preserved its reputation as a safe place to visit and provision. Danger from other than natural causes was more likely to come from renegade Europeans than from Moriori.

…

New Zealand Maori, too, had visited the islands during the sealing period, having joined vessels as crew in the Bay of Islands, Cook Strait, Port Nicholson, and from the South Island. Some of these became residents. There were mixed Maori-European settlements at Whangaroa and Ocean Bay prior to 1835, and several Maori (including Paki Wara of Ngati Tama and Ropata of Ngati Toa) lived at Wharekauri. It is likely that it was these latter Maori who named the small kainga on the northern coast, allegedly after a house there built from salvaged kauri timber. Subsequently Maori used this name to refer to the whole of Chatham Island, because, as Alexander Shand wrote, ‘they could pronounce [it] more easily than the Moriori one of Rekohu’.

Maori residents and visitors liked what they found at the Chathams around the mid-1830s: a small population (about 1,600) of contented and unassertive Moriori tangata whenua a handful of Europeans who were relaxed about living in association with Moriori and Maori; much unoccupied and uncultivated land; the presence of the kopi tree with its edible berries; a prolificacy of eels and waterfowl around Te Whanga lagoon and Lake Huro; ample fish and shellfish in the sea and edible birds on the outlying islands; and the growing whaling industry that was beginning to use the islands as a provisioning base. In all, it was a situation that appealed to entrepreneurial people who, for a variety of reasons, were not content in their current circumstances; and it was to lead to the most traumatic chapter in the history of the Chathams and of the Moriori.

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Filed under Europe, language, migration, New Zealand, Polynesia

by | 10 November 2026 · 6:26 am

Poland on November 11, 1918

This week’s Culture.pl newsletter includes an article by Marek Kępa from 2018 (rev. 2026) that answers the question, Why Does Poland Celebrate Independence Day on 11th November? It recounts some of the events on the ground and in the streets on 11 Listopada 1918. Here are excerpts from the text, without the many interesting photos included in the full article.

On 11th November 1918, Poland regained its independence after 123 years of partitioning by Russia, Prussia and Austria. But what actually happened on that historic day? Culture.pl chronicles the events of what is now commemorated as Independence Day – explaining why they occurred peacefully despite the obvious tension and how these events brought back Poland’s freedom.

Out of the blue

How does a large country like Interwar Poland re-appear in Central Europe? What needs to happen on a particular day to make it ‘Independence Day?’ A somewhat humorous answer to that question was provided by Marshal Józef Piłsudski, the celebrated Polish leader amongst those largely credited with winning back Poland’s freedom:

Ladies and gentlemen, in 1918 – just like in the legionary song – ‘out of the blue there was a Poland anew’.

Although slightly facetious, the quote points to two important things. Firstly, that the 11th is an arbitrary date and as such is a bit ‘out of the blue’. Of course, it was an exceptionally important day to Poland’s independence – we’ll soon get into that – but you don’t reinstate a country in a single day. It’s a process which takes plenty of time. And that’s the second thing the quote points to, by mentioning the Polish Legions: a Polish force in World War I, led by Piłsudski.

The pro-independence stance of the Legions (originally created by the Austro-Hungarians to strengthen their own ranks) prompted many a Pole to believe that a free Poland was attainable. The Legions fought for years before Poland reappeared on the 11th.

In November 1918, the Great War was nearing its end, with the partitioning powers all weakened by it. Poland was already enjoying partial sovereignty: the Regency Council, a temporary Polish governmental body, was functioning in Warsaw and laying the grounds for independence. But there were still German troops in the city – historians estimate some 30,000 of them.

On 10th November 1918, Piłsudski comes to Warsaw, freed from Magdeburg by the Germans [he had been interned there after refusing to fight for Germany]. On the 11th, he takes control of the military. On the 14th, he receives full power. The discussion as to which date to recognise as the formal regaining of independence was a long one.
From an interview with Wiesław Wysocki, chairman of the Piłsudski Institute, published in ‘Niepodległość’, 2017, trans. MK

Despite the long debate, just a year later, in 1919, 11th November was being celebrated as the day when Poland reclaimed its independence. It gained the status of a national holiday in 1937.

Let them leave

Formally, Piłsudski became commander-in-chief of the Polish Army on the 11th by decision of the Regency Council. His first move in this capacity was to gain control of Warsaw, the former and prospective capital of an independent Poland. This was achieved by taking over key strategic places like police headquarters and arms warehouses from German troops. Naturally, such an operation would be a risky one and could easily lead to a fight. To avoid unnecessary bloodshed, Piłsudski addressed a committee of German soldiers that morning in front of the Presidential Palace on Krakowskie Przedmieście Street.

[He] guaranteed them safety and a peaceful evacuation. In return, he asked them to hand over control of the guarded objects, put down their arms and not to provoke the Poles. The same day the Command Centre of POW [a Polish underground, pro-independence, military organisation] issued the following order: ‘Avoid bloody fights with German soldiers. Raids on garrisons are out of the question. Let them peacefully leave for their country after they hand over their weapons and technical materials to the organisation’s units.’
From ‘Kto w Listopadzie Rozbroił Niemców’ (Who Disarmed The Germans in November), ‘Gazeta Wyborcza’, 2016, trans. MK

In the afternoon, Polish troops began taking over the city’s strategic objects. Understandably, the excitement among citizens was enormous and even ordinary civilians assisted the soldiers. Miraculously, the whole operation was carried out relatively peacefully – there were only a handful of casualties on both sides, unthinkable compared to how things had been up to that point. By the end of the day, most key places were in Polish hands, although Germans still remained in the Citadel in the Żoliborz district. That same day, Germany signed a peace treaty with the Triple Entente (Russia, France and Britain), ending World War I.

Common whippersnappers

The peaceful manner in which the Poles took control of Warsaw was to a large degree an effect of Piłsudski’s aims. He wanted to avoid a confrontation with the numerous German troops, a confrontation that could potentially lead to mass casualties.

In fact, it was precisely because of Piłsudski’s authority among Poles – and his resulting ability to contain the chaos caused in Polish territories by the partitioning powers’ wartime demise – that he was freed from Magdeburg in the first place.

But to fully understand why the Germans surrendered Warsaw so willingly on the 11th, one has to go back a day further. On the 10th, Piłsudski arrived in the city on an early morning train. After a meeting with Zdzisław Lubomirski, a member of the Regency Council, he went to 2 Moniuszki Street (which no longer exists), where he stayed for two days at a bed and breakfast operating in one of the flats. At the establishment, run by Wanda, Halina and Maria Romanówna, three sisters conspiring with POW, further meetings took place – there were plenty of pressing matters.

Among those received by Piłsudski was the young military man Józef Jęczkowiak. The marshal recounted the unrest he had witnessed in Germany, where war-weary soldiers were mutinying and creating committees advocating for a release from duty, an event historians now call the German Revolution. This was why he wanted to send Jęczkowiak on a mission to weaken the morale of the German troops in Warsaw.

Posing as a German soldier, Jęczkowiak, together with his associates, quickly visited one of the German army’s dayrooms and addressed those gathered there:

[…] I stood on the table, and in a full voice, I began to tell about the revolution in Germany and about what I had heard from Piłsudski […]. People started shouting, at first only a few, later many of them: ‘we’ll do the same thing’, ‘long live the revolution’. I didn’t hear anybody opposing […].
From ‘Był Czyn i Chwała! Wspomnienia Harcerza 1913-1918’ by Józef Jęczkowiak, 2015, trans. MK

The German soldiers stationed in Warsaw had also had enough of the war and were more than eager to go home. After Jęczkowiak’s speech, they established their own committee (the one addressed in front of the Presidential Palace), which worked with Piłsudski towards the city’s evacuation. The disarmament had actually already begun on the 10th, but most of it occurred the day after.

Since the morale of the German soldiers had been successfully undermined, Zdzisław Lubomirski’s wife Maria could write in her memoirs on the 11th:

We’re free! We get to govern ourselves! This really happened and in such an unexpected fashion at that […] The Germans are dumbfounded, they’re sporadically resisting, but they allow themselves to be disarmed not only by military men, but also by common civilian whippersnappers… Strange things in our capital!
From ‘Pamiętnik Księżnej Marii Zdzisławowej Lubomirskiej 1914-1918’, 1997, trans. MK

Unforgettable and filled with happiness

Another description by a witness to the day’s events comes from the eminent writer Maria Dąbrowska. Apart from remarking that the weather was ‘absolutely beautiful’, she also wrote the following in her Dzienniki 1914-1945 (Memoirs 1914-1945), published in 2009:

From early in the morning, German officers are being disarmed on every street corner. But not only is the militia disarming them, so is the mob […] Throughout the day, military assets and civilian authorities are being taken from the Germans. All day long, the streets are crowded. The trams are running as usual. There are cars with our soldiers everywhere […]. In the midst of all this, Poland is rising. And nobody can see how beautiful it is. Nobody notices in this commotion. (Trans. MK)

Perhaps due to all the excitement, the beauty of the weather and the newly reborn state did indeed slip the attention of some observers. Without a doubt, it was independence from occupation that most people were reacting to. The moment’s enthusiasm was well expressed in the aforementioned memoirs of Maria Lubomirska:

The present day is historic, unforgettable, filled with happiness and triumphant! (Trans. MK)

Nevertheless, Poland was definitely going to be noticed by plenty of people soon, not only in the country but also worldwide. The evacuation of Warsaw and other Polish territories was generally going smoothly – in a matter of days, all German soldiers would leave the capital.

On the 16th, Piłsudski sent a telegram to the rulers of the USA, Britain, Germany and other countries:

As the commander-in-chief of the Polish Army, I hereby notify war-faring and neutral governments and nations of the existence of an Independent Polish State, encompassing all lands of united Poland. […] The Polish State arises from the will of the entire nation and shall be based on democratic principles.
From ’11th November – National Independence Day’, published by the Central Club of Polish Soldiers, 2012

The shape of the reappearing country’s borders would still need to be determined, but after reclaiming its capital and political centre on the 11th, there was no doubt that an independent Polish state would now exist.

After 123 years of partitions, Poland was free once again.

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Filed under military, language, democracy, migration, nationalism, Germany, Poland, Austria

by | 26 October 2026 · 5:32 am

The Poles Who Built Harbin

This week’s newsletter from Culture.pl contains several articles about Poland’s connections with Asia. Here are some excerpts (minus photos) from Harbin: A Polish City in China by Anna Cymer (2021), which utilises material from Edward Kajdański’s article ‘The Role of Poles in the Construction and Organisation of the East China Railway: The Memoirs of Engineer Stefan Offenberg’ published in Gdańsk East Asian Studies in 2016. 

In the 1890s, Russia committed itself to a major investment: the construction of a rail link between the south Siberian town of Chita and the important Russian port on the Sea of Japan, Vladivostok. The shortest possible route was mapped out through Manchuria, a region that belonged to China. The two countries came to an agreement – in exchange for Russia’s military assistance, the Chinese agreed to the building of the nearly 1500-kilometre railway line through its territory.

The initiator and manager of this enormous project was the then-finance minister of Russia (soon to become premier) Sergei Witte. It is he who hired Polish engineers to design and build the East China Railway. Although the late 19th century was not a time of good relations between Russia and partitioned Poland, Witte nonetheless recognised the talents of Polish specialists in the field of construction; he appointed Polish engineer Stanisław Kierbedź as the de facto manager of this vital project (he was the nephew of another Stanisław Kierbedź, the famed designer of then-innovative iron truss bridges – notably the bridge over the Wisła River in Warsaw which opened in 1864 and was popularly known as the Kierbedź Bridge).

The precise laying out of the route of the railway was undertaken by railroad engineer Stefan Offenberg, who had earlier managed the construction of one of the key stretches of the Trans-Siberian Railway. Offenberg described his experiences in Manchuria in his book The Role of Poles in the Construction and Organisation of the East China Railway. Thanks to his memoirs, we know, for example, about the harsh weather and challenging landscape conditions the Polish engineers had to endure as they fought their way across the taiga laying out the railway’s route.

Construction of the East China Railway commenced in 1897. Selected as the base of the project was a small fishing village called Harbin (also known as Charbin). That is where the officials overseeing the project were to live, along with the planning engineers. Engineer Adam Szydłowski undertook the planning of the new city that was to arise and the organisation of the massive project’s entire support infrastructure.

Some sources indicate that it was Szydłowski himself who selected Harbin as the central location for the enterprise. Its convenient location on the Sungari River not only lent itself to effectively oversee the construction work, but Harbin also connected with a new branch of the southern bound railway which led to Russian bases in the Yellow Sea port of Dalian.

In the spring of 1898, Szydłowski purchased the building of the former brewery in Harbin and made it the cornerstone of his new city. Other than Szydłowski, early residents of the new settlement included his technicians Raweński, Wysocki and Pawlewski, whose given names have been lost over time. It was not long before the first new homes for construction workers were built in the fishing village. The rail line was divided into a number of segments of which Poles were responsible for roughly half, but the work was not done only by Russians and Poles. From the very start, the city of Harbin was a melting pot of nationalities: Germans, Belgians, Austrians and Englishmen lived there as well, representatives of various firms that supplied the railroad with machinery and other necessities. Even more nationalities were to be found amongst the railroad construction workers: while Poles played a significant role in the actual physical construction work (among them Polish revolutionaries who had been exiled to Siberia), the East China Railway was also built by Georgians, Armenians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Greeks, Turks, and Mongolians.

The first cars of the East China Railway rolled out in 1903. That is when the growth of the city of Harbin began in earnest – thanks to the opening of the vital rail link, it became a fast growing metropolitan area with a steadily growing population (amongst whom was a large cohort of businessmen and traders).

Not insignificant, too, was the city’s special renown as a welcoming international city. Thanks to this reputation, the city attracted political activists who had been forced to flee their own countries (such as opponents of the Soviet October Revolution). In 1917, Harbin was already a city of over 100,000 residents, including members of some 33 nationalities. The most numerous of these groups for many years were the Poles, who, at their height, numbered ten thousand. From the beginning of the 20th century, Polish schools were open in Harbin (e.g. the Henryk Sienkiewicz High School, among whose alumni was the future author Teodor Parnicki), a Polish press flourished and a neo-Gothic Polish church stood on a parcel of land acquired by Offenberg.

One of the builders of the railroad, engineer Karol Weber, established the ‘Gospoda Polska’ (Polish Inn) Association in 1907 for which he built a lavish headquarters in the city. Harbin hosted a Polish scout chapter and a chapter of the Polish Youth Union. For many years, the director of the Russo-Chinese Bank was neither Russian nor Chinese, but rather a Pole, Stanisław Gabriel; for a year, a Pole was the city’s mayor; and a number of Poles sat on the board of the East China Railway. Among the many enterprises established in Harbin by Poles was the local brewery established in 1900 by Jan Wróblewski. The brewery remains active to this day and it is probably China’s oldest beer brewery.

In 1937, Russia and China signed an agreement according to which only members of those two nations could work on the railway. This agreement forced many Poles to leave Harbin; the Polish diaspora was also shaken by the arrival of the Red Army in 1945. Harbin’s last Polish newspaper ceased to appear in 1940. In 1947, the authorities decided to deport the Poles who remained in the city; the repatriated Poles were resettled in Elbląg, Olsztyn, Opole, Wałbrzych, Szczecin and elsewhere. A Harbiners’ Club is still active in Szczecin and it lobbied successfully for a traffic circle to be named for ‘Polish Manchuria’. The Pomeranian Library in Szczecin holds a collection of archives and memorabilia recalling the Polish presence in Harbin.

Today, Harbin has a population of five milllion and is the second largest and second most important city in north-eastern China. Few traces remain of the Polish presence in Harbin’s early years: the neo-Gothic church (formerly St Stanislaus Church; since 2004, the Church of the Most Holy Heart of Jesus) still stands in the city centre; the brewery mentioned above continues to operate; and the bridge over the Sungari River was long referred to as the Kierbedź Bridge. For over a dozen years, there has been a Polish-language program offered at the Harbin Normal University (HNU).

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Filed under China, education, industry, language, migration, Poland, Russia, USSR

by | 20 October 2026 · 4:43 am

Balkan Wars Before World War

From The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, by Christopher Clark (Harper, 2013), pp. 42-45:

At the end of September 1911, only six months after the foundation of Ujedinjenje ili smrt!, Italy launched an invasion of Libya. This unprovoked attack on one of the integral provinces of the Ottoman Empire triggered a cascade of opportunist attacks on Ottoman-controlled territory in the Balkans. A loose coalition of Balkan states – Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria and Greece – mounted parallel assaults on Ottoman territory, thereby starting the First Balkan War (October 1912–May 1913). The result was a momentous victory for the Balkan allies over the Ottoman forces, who were driven out of Albania, Macedonia and Thrace. In the Second Balkan War (June–July 1913), the belligerents fought over the spoils of the first: Serbia, Greece, Montenegro and Romania fought Bulgaria for territories in Macedonia, Thrace and the Dobrudja.

The impact of these two wars is discussed in more detail in chapter 5. For the moment, it suffices to note that their most conspicuous beneficiary was Serbia, which acquired central Vardar, including Ohrid, Bitola, Kosovo, Štip and Kočani, plus the eastern half of the Sanjak of Novi Pazar (the western half fell to Montenegro). The kingdom’s territorial extent increased from 18,650 to 33,891 square miles and its population grew by more than one and a half million. The acquisition of Kosovo, the mythscape of Serbian national poetry, was a cause for great rejoicing, and since the kingdom now shared a border with Montenegro to the west, there was the prospect that Serbia might, through a political union with its neighbour, secure a permanent access to the Adriatic coast. Moreover, Serbia’s conduct of the war appeared to show that the years of military investment financed by French loans (there was another big one from a consortium of French banks in September 1913) had not been in vain. Three hundred thousand troops had been put into the field within three weeks of the first mobilization order. The Serbian army was now, as one foreign observer noted, ‘a factor to be reckoned with’, and Serbia itself a major regional power. Dayrell Crackanthorpe, the British minister in Belgrade, reported on the mood of public elation: ‘Serbia feels that she has, so to speak, attained her majority and [. . .] can pursue a national policy of her own.’ The kingdom’s political elites were currently ‘passing through a phase of extreme self-satisfaction’; everywhere in the press and in public debate, Serbian successes in the field were contrasted with ‘the failures of Austrian diplomacy’.

For many of those in the territories newly conquered by Belgrade, the imposition of Serbian rule brought harassment and oppression. The freedom of association, assembly and the press guaranteed under the Serbian constitution of 1903 (Articles 24, 25 and 22) were not introduced into the new territories; nor was Article 13 revoking the death penalty for political crimes. The inhabitants of the new areas were denied active or passive voting rights. In other words, the conquered areas acquired, for the moment, the character of a colony. The government justified these decisions on the grounds that the cultural level of the new territories was so low that granting them freedom would endanger the country. In reality the chief concern was to keep the non-Serbs who constituted the majority in many areas out of national politics. Opposition newspapers such as Radičke Novine and Pravda were quick to point out that the ‘new Serbs’ had actually enjoyed better political rights under the Turks than they did under Serbian administration.

On the Serbian side, this was a war in two kinds, fought not only by regular army units, but also, as so often in the past, by partisan bands, comitatjis, and other freelance fighters. In the newly conquered areas, the collusion between official authorities and informal groups had appalling consequences. There was much arbitrary destruction of Turkish buildings, such as schools, baths and mosques. British consuls managed to limit the damage in some instances by persuading the local Serbian military commanders that this or that building dated back to the empire of Stepan Dušan and was thus a part of the Serbian national patrimony; this ruse succeeded, for example, in the case of the beautiful sixteenth-century Turkish bridge in Macedonian Skopje (Üsküb).

In October and November 1913, the British vice-consuls in Skopje and Monastir [now renamed Bitola] reported systematic intimidation, arbitrary detentions, beatings, rapes, village-burnings and massacres by the Serbs in the annexed areas. ‘It is already abundantly evident,’ Vice-Consul Greig of Monastir reported, ‘that Moslems under Servian rule have nothing whatsoever to expect but periodical massacre, certain exploitation and final ruin.’ Eleven days later, he filed a further report warning that the ‘Bulgarian and especially the Moslem populations in the districts of Perlepe, Krchevo and Krushevo [were] in danger of extermination by the very frequent and barbarous massacres and pillage to which they are subjected by Servian bands’. By the end of the month, ‘pillages, murder and outrages of other kinds by bands of Servian comitajis and persons in league with them’ had created conditions of near-anarchy. Albanians and other Muslims, Bulgars, Vlachs and Jews, the vice-consul reported in December, dreaded the prospect of subjection to ‘a penniless state’ that seemed bent on ‘draining every community of its means of existence to an extent unknown in the blackest days of the Turkish regime’. From Bitola in the south, near the Greek border, the British vice-consul reported that the old municipal officials had been replaced by a new cohort of corrupt ‘Servian ex-propagandists’ whose ringleaders were ‘(1) an ex-barber, spy and Serbian agent [. . .] and (2) a local Serboman of unmentionable profession called Maxim’. ‘Nothing,’ Greig concluded, ‘could be more favourable to the enemies of Servia than the reign of terror set up by this clique.’

What is interesting about these reports is not merely their disturbing content, but the scepticism with which they were received by the British minister Crackanthorpe, a man of pronounced Serbophile sentiment. Crackanthorpe, whose most important source on the events unfolding in the annexed areas was ‘a Servian officer of his acquaintance’, accepted the official denials of the Belgrade government at face value and tried to mute the impact of Greig’s dispatches from Monastir by suggesting to the Foreign Office that the vice-consul was the dupe of hysterical refugees and their tall tales. Already, one might argue, the events unfolding in the Balkans were being viewed through the geopolitical lens of the alliance system, in which Serbia figured as a friendly state locked in a gallant struggle with fearsome neighbouring Austria-Hungary. It was only the cumulative detail of the reports emerging from the annexed areas, combined with corroborating accounts from Romanian, Swiss and French officials that persuaded the British Foreign Office that the news of Macedonian atrocities should not be dismissed as Austrian propaganda.

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Filed under Austria, Balkans, Britain, France, Italy, migration, military, nationalism, Turkey, war

by | 19 October 2026 · 5:21 am

When Serbia Forsook Austria for France

From The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, by Christopher Clark (Harper, 2013), pp. 28-30:

In June 1881, Austria-Hungary and Serbia agreed a commercial treaty. Three weeks later, it was supplemented by a secret convention, negotiated and signed by Prince Milan himself, which stipulated that Austria-Hungary would not only assist Serbia in its efforts to secure elevation to the status of a kingdom but would also support Serbian claims to territorial annexations in Macedonia. Serbia, for its part, agreed not to undermine the monarchy’s position in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Article II stated that Serbia ‘would not permit any political, religious or other intrigue to be directed from her territory against the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, including Bosnia, Herzegovina and the Sanjak of Novi Pazar’. Milan reinforced these agreements with a personal engagement in writing not to enter into ‘any kind of treaty’ with a third state without first consulting Vienna.

These agreements were, to be sure, a fragile foundation for good Austro-Serbian relations: they had no anchorage in the sentimental life of the Serbian public, which was deeply anti-Austrian; they symbolized a relationship of economic dependency which was increasingly unacceptable to Serbian nationalist opinion; and they depended on the cooperation of an erratic and increasingly unpopular Serbian monarch. But as long as Milan Obrenović remained on the throne, they at least ensured that Serbia would not side with Russia against Austria, and that the sharp end of Belgrade’s foreign policy would stay pointed in the direction of Macedonia and the coming contest with Bulgaria, rather than at Bosnia and Herzegovina. A new trade treaty was signed in 1892 and the Secret Convention was renewed for ten years in 1889; it was allowed to expire thereafter, though it continued to be the operative platform for Serbian policy vis-à-vis Vienna.

The change of dynasty in 1903 signalled a major realignment. Austria was quick to recognize the Karadjordjević coup, partly because Petar had assured the Austrians beforehand that it was his intention to keep Serbia on an Austrophile course. But it was soon evident that Serbia’s new leaders planned to push towards greater economic and political independence. During 1905–6, a crisis unfolded in which trade policy, armaments orders, high finance and geopolitics were closely intertwined. Vienna pursued a threefold objective: to secure a commercial treaty with Serbia, to ensure that Serbian armaments orders would continue to be placed with Austrian firms, and to contract a major loan to Belgrade.

The failure to achieve agreement on any of these questions produced a drastic cooling of relations between the two neighbours, and the outcome was an unmitigated disaster for Vienna. The Serbian armaments orders went to the French firm Schneider-Creusot instead of to the Austrian rival, Škoda of Bohemia. The Austrians reacted by closing the border to Serbian pork, triggering a customs conflict that came to be known as the ‘pig war’ (1906–9). But this was a counter-productive measure, since Serbia quickly found other export markets (especially in Germany, France and Belgium) and at last began to build slaughterhouses on a substantial scale, thus emancipating itself from its long-standing dependence on Austro-Hungarian processing facilities. Finally, Belgrade secured a major loan again not from Vienna, but from Paris (offered in return for the placement of armaments orders with French firms).

It is worth pausing for a moment to consider the larger significance of this French loan. Like all the emergent Balkan states, Serbia was an inveterate borrower, totally dependent on international credit, most of which was used to finance military expansion and infrastructural projects. Throughout the reign of King Milan, the Austrians remained willing lenders to Belgrade. But since these loans outran the debtor state’s financial resources, they had to be hypothecated against various pledges: for each loan some definite revenue was pledged, or some railway property mortgaged. It was agreed that pledged revenues from railways, stamp and liquor taxes should be paid into a special treasury controlled jointly by the representatives of the Serbian government and the bondholders. This arrangement kept the Serbian state afloat during the 1880s and 90s, but did nothing to restrain the financial profligacy of the Belgrade government, which had managed to accumulate an indebtedness of over 350 million francs by 1895. With bankruptcy looming, Belgrade negotiated a new loan through which almost all of the old debts were consolidated at a lower rate of interest. The pledged revenues were placed under a separate administration run partly by the representatives of the creditors.

In other words, fragile debtors like Serbia (the same applied to the other Balkan states and to the Ottoman Empire) could secure loans on reasonable terms only if they agreed to concessions of fiscal control that amounted to the partial hypothecation of sovereign state functions. For this reason among others, international loans were a political issue of the highest importance, inextricably wound up with diplomacy and power politics. French international lending in particular was highly politicized. Paris vetoed loans to governments whose policies were deemed unfriendly to French interests; it facilitated loans in return for economic or political concessions; on occasion it reluctantly conceded a loan to unreliable but strategically important clients in order to prevent them from seeking relief elsewhere. It pursued potential clients aggressively – in Serbia’s case the government were given to understand in the summer of 1905 that if they did not give France first refusal on the loan, the Paris money markets would be closed altogether to Serbia. Acknowledging this nexus between strategy and finance, the French foreign ministry merged its commercial and political divisions in 1907.

Seen against this background, the Serbian loan of 1906 was an important turning point. French financial relations with Belgrade became, in the words of an early American analyst of pre-war high finance, ‘more intimate and dominant’.66 The French came to own more than three quarters of all Serbian debt. These were vast commitments for the Serbian state – repayment schedules extended forwards to 1967 (in fact Belgrade defaulted on the greater part of its obligations after 1918). The lion’s share of this money went into military purchases (especially fast-firing artillery), most of which were transacted in France, much to the annoyance not just of Austrian, but also of British diplomats and armaments suppliers. The loan of 1906 also enabled Serbia to resist Vienna’s commercial pressure and to wage a protracted tariff war. ‘The undoubtedly successful issue of [Prime Minister] Mr Pašić’s resistance to [Austrian] demands,’ the British envoy in Belgrade reported in 1906, ‘marks a distinct step in the economic and political emancipation of Servia.’

These successes in the field of high finance should not distract us from the parlous condition of the Serbian economy as a whole. This had much less to do with Austrian tariff policy than with a process of economic decline that was deeply rooted in the country’s history and agrarian structure. The emergence and subsequent expansion of Serbia were accompanied by a process of drastic de-urbanization, as the mainly Muslim towns were depopulated through decades of harassment and deportations. What replaced the relatively urbanized and cosmopolitan imperial structures of the Ottoman periphery was a society and an economy entirely dominated by smallholding Christian peasants, a consequence in part of the absence of a home-grown Serbian aristocracy and in part of the ruling dynasty’s efforts to prevent the emergence of such a ruling class by blocking the consolidation of latifundial estates. While the cities shrank, the population grew at an awesome rate; hundreds of thousands of hectares of marginal land were opened up for exploitation by young families, loosening social constraints on marriage and fertility. But this rampant growth in the production of people did nothing to reverse the cycle of underperformance and decline that gripped the Serbian economy between the middle of the nineteenth century and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. Per capita output in farming fell by 27.5 per cent between the early 1870s and 1910–12, partly because the expansion of arable land led to large-scale deforestation and thus to a decline in the pasture lands needed to sustain large-scale pig-husbandry, traditionally the most profitable and efficient arm of Serbian agricultural production. By the 1880s, the beautiful forested wilderness of the Šumadija – perfect pasture land for swine – had all but disappeared.

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by | 16 October 2026 · 6:36 am

Japan’s Homeland Disasters in 1944-45

From Japan, 1941: Countdown to Infamy, by Eri Hotta (Vintage, 2013), pp. 394-397:

BY THE MIDDLE OF 1944, the anticipation of worse things to come on the home front led to a new policy. The government, still under Tojo’s leadership, announced an evacuation program for primary schoolers from thirteen metropolitan cities. The children, ranging in age from eight to twelve, were moved to the countryside, where they lived in large groups; for many, it was the first time away from their parents. They were usually put up in extremely rudimentary and overcrowded rooms of Buddhist temples or traditional inns. In all, about eight hundred thousand city children experienced this collective evacuation, characterized by perpetual hunger, homesickness, and spartan living. It would form a major part of their generational memory.

Newspapers and magazines saw the evacuation program through rose-colored glasses; they reported that the children were enjoying fresh country air and featured photos of their smiling—though clearly undernourished—faces. One photo showed a group of small boys squatting on the bathroom floor in a big circle, each scrubbing the back of the boy in front of him. They look to be having fun, but their astonishingly skinny naked bodies make one wonder how they had any energy left for smiling, let alone back scrubbing.

Without access to food other than whatever little was given them, the evacuated children suffered from hunger first and foremost. The greatest pastime for them was to draw food. “Sponge cakes, dumplings, pastries, shortcakes, caramels, rice crackers … we drew them all—absolutely every snack in this world one could remember,” one woman recalled. “Then we showed them to one another and enjoyed discussing how wonderful they would taste if we really were to eat them.” Complaining, unhappy letters home were systematically discouraged, and their teachers checked all mail before it was sent out. State censorship and confiscation of correspondence, legalized in October 1941, were exercised even at this level voluntarily.

This haphazard evacuation program was a direct response to the threat of a U.S. landing on the Japanese mainland, which seemed especially likely after the United States captured Saipan, fifteen hundred miles south. The island fell on July 7, 1944, and more than 55,000 Japanese, including civilians, died there. (Made a Japanese mandate by the League of Nations in 1920, Saipan had a Japanese population, including colonial Taiwanese and Koreans classified as Japanese, of 29,348 in 1943.) Vice Admiral Nagumo and other navy commanders ordered their soldiers to “die a hero’s death” and to become the “Pacific seawall” against the United States. Nagumo set a precedent by committing suicide on July 6, before the island’s conquest. The same “ultimate sacrifice” was also expected of civilians in the absence of any protection offered by the military. Too many chose death over surrender, sometimes coaxed by the remaining Japanese soldiers, who made sure that nobody was to suffer the shame of being taken captive.

The haunting proof of patriotic allegiance was captured on film by the U.S. Marines. Civilians, many of them women and some with babies and children, stumbled toward the edge of volcanic cliffs to make their final leaps. One can feel their slight hesitation and momentary fear as they looked down into the abyss of black seawater. But by sheer force of determination, they overcame their fear and jumped. “Banzai!” (“Live forever!”—or, more accurately in this case, “Long live the emperor!”) was often the last word of those loyal subjects of the empire. More civilians would commit suicide on the islands of Tinian, Guam, and Okinawa in the face of the U.S. advance. Japanese losses in the Pacific were so great that they could not be kept a secret any longer. The Saipan calamity was reported to the Japanese nation on July 18, 1944, along with the resignation of the Tojo cabinet. Two days after Tojo’s fall, on July 20, Operation Valkyrie, the most nearly successful of all the assassination attempts on Hitler, was carried out. With renewed fanaticism, the Führer would continue to lead Germany until his suicide.

…

Meanwhile, life had to carry on, and children continued to be evacuated. On August 22, 1944, about seven hundred children, in transit from Okinawa to Kagoshima, perished at sea. The U.S. submarines were already that close. The ill-orchestrated evacuation program ended in March 1945, and city families were urged to make individual arrangements to ensure the safety of their children. Family reunions were often brutally short-lived. Many children from Tokyo were sent back home just in time to experience the worst (but not the last) air raid unleashed on the city: the one in the early-morning hours of March 10, …

With the destruction of almost every Japanese city and the constant announcements of soldiers’ deaths, Japanese morale could not have been lower. Surviving death—from disease, hunger, or the incendiary bombs that grilled alive newborns and old people alike—had become the utmost national priority. A distraught mother who embraced her baby to the point of suffocation while seeking shelter during a bombing raid, a schoolgirl trying to float her way to safety down a river filled with dying people clinging to her, people navigating heaps of charred bodies as they looked for their missing family members—stories like these were becoming all too common. The Meiji Palace, where the imperial conferences had taken place, was burned down in May 1945, forcing the leaders to hold the final two imperial conferences before Japan’s unconditional surrender in an air-raid shelter.

Life in the countryside was less pressed, though things were scarce. Toddlers innocently competed with one another to collect plant roots, a substitute staple for rice, and grasshoppers, an invaluable available source of protein and calcium for growing children. Students were sent into the forests for pine sap to make gasoline (which never quite worked), and all households were ordered to turn in their metal, including buckets and ladles, to make airplanes. “We must be losing the war,” said one farm boy at the time, deducing that the government wouldn’t otherwise sink so low as to take utensils from poor people’s kitchens. But uncomplaining, and with a degree of fatalism, the nation endured the horrid times as if it were dealing with a series of relentless natural disasters rather than man-made ones.

In the midst of all this, a very select group of Japanese, mainly military officers but also some filmmakers, university students, and other civilians, had a rare chance to see films that the British had left behind in Southeast Asia. One of them was Gone with the Wind. The Japanese were amazed by the quality, technical superiority, and glamour of the nearly four-hour-long saga. They wondered how they could possibly defeat a country that had managed to produce such an astonishing film. (Another film left behind was Walt Disney’s 1937 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, whose quality far surpassed that of Japanese animation technology.)

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by | 15 October 2026 · 5:00 am

Japan-U.S. Prisoner Exchange, 1942

From Japan, 1941: Countdown to Infamy, by Eri Hotta (Vintage, 2013), pp. 385-387:

On the night of June 18, 1942, the Gripsholm of the Swedish American Line set sail from New York with a group of Japanese nationals aboard who had been detained in various makeshift camps, including one on Ellis Island. The Japanese government, in return, had dispatched the Asama Maru from the port of Yokohama, and later the Italian ship Conte Verde from Shanghai, carrying North and South American nationals home. Some of the notable faces among the Japanese group were Nomura and Kurusu. On the day of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, the two men endured the most unnerving public humiliation imaginable for any diplomat. To ensure the success of the military operations in Hawaii and Malaya, the Japanese government kept the two ambassadors completely in the dark about its decision to go to war. They were notified of Tokyo’s intention to terminate diplomatic relations only hours before the attack.

The Japanese embassy’s inability to cope with the last-minute nature of Tokyo’s instructions did not help Nomura and Kurusu in their final mission of communicating to the White House the end of diplomacy, either. Tokyo had ordered Nomura and Kurusu to see Hull at 1:00 p.m., shortly before the first bomb was to be dropped on Pearl Harbor. Because the diplomatic communication, consisting of fourteen parts, was late in being typed up for delivery, the two Japanese diplomats were shown into Hull’s office at 2:20 p.m., utterly unaware that their country had already attacked the United States.

…

IN THE MONTHS that followed the opening of the war in the Pacific, Nomura, Kurusu, and other Japanese nationals awaited deportation in cramped resort hotels that had been turned into temporary detention camps (luxurious lodgings compared with the internment camps that many Japanese immigrants and Americans of Japanese descent were forced to live in). In Hot Springs, Virginia, and then in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, Kurusu had ample time to reflect on what had gone wrong in his last-minute quest to secure peace between the two countries.

…

It was not until the summer of 1942 that Kurusu learned what had really been going on during those last ten days before Japan’s attack. In Japanese-occupied Singapore, where the Gripsholm made a brief stop, Kurusu heard army officers recount how difficult it was for them to prepare for attacks in the run-up to the war since the military leaders in Tokyo had not decided to go to war until November 26.

ON JULY 20, 1942, the Gripsholm, having picked up and crammed aboard even more detained Japanese in Rio de Janeiro, entered the port of Lourenço Marques (Maputo) in Portuguese Mozambique. Two days later, the Asama Maru and the Conte Verde, flying Japan’s Rising Sun flag, anchored at the same port in the Indian Ocean. It was there that the actual citizen exchange between the warring parties took place. The Japanese from North and South America quietly organized themselves and resettled on the two ships coming from Japan. There was no direct contact between the people from the Allied and Axis camps. But while waiting at the port, Nomura and Kurusu both spotted the tall figure of Ambassador Grew in the other group. He recognized them, too. Kurusu immediately recalled his interview with Grew the night before his departure for Washington in early November of the previous year. The uneasy physical distance between them was ample proof of the peace that had eluded them. The three men took their hats off in silent acknowledgment of one another.

The ships carrying the Japanese nationals reached Yokohama, Kurusu’s hometown, on August 20, 1942. By then, Japan’s preponderance at sea was declining precipitously. The balance of power had been tipped. From June 4 to 7, the Imperial Japanese Navy fought one of the most devastating naval battles in modern history, the Battle of Midway. The same men who planned the Pearl Harbor attack conceived of the Midway strategy, hoping to eliminate the United States from the Pacific once and for all. The operation ended in disaster for Japan. By this time, the Japanese military code had been broken by the United States (whereas at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, only the diplomatic code had been broken). The Japanese navy was dragged down from its glorious pinnacle only six months after it had reached it.

All this was unknown to most Japanese.

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by | 14 October 2026 · 5:59 am

Ambassador Kurusu Profile

From Japan, 1941: Countdown to Infamy, by Eri Hotta (Vintage, 2013), pp. 337-340:

DESPITE HIS UNQUESTIONED INTELLECT and experience, Kurusu was an unfortunate choice in a public relations sense. To the outside world, Kurusu was known only as the man who signed the Tripartite Pact, having been photographed next to Hitler at the height of German-Japanese friendship. He was actually strongly opposed to the pact but was obliged to sign it as Japan’s ambassador to Germany in the autumn of 1940. Kurusu never wanted the Berlin job and had turned it down several times. He was ready to retire after his tenure in Belgium, where he was posted from 1936 to 1939. His time in Brussels coincided with the outbreak and intensification of the China War under the first Konoe government. He tried in his capacity as ambassador to initiate a settlement of the China conflict through the mediation of the Belgian and French governments. He knew that Japan lacked any coherent plans for that war and, more damningly, an effective leader. The escalation, in his words, came about because “the government always allowed itself to be dragged along by the faits accomplis in the field without any prospects of long-term solution.” Worse, there was “no coordination within and between the army and the navy” and everyone was “preoccupied with saving face and evading responsibilities.”

Kurusu could not have envisioned that things would get so bad so fast when he and his family, along with a crowd of enthused spectators, welcomed the record-setting Kamikaze aviators at the Brussels airport in April 1937. Kurusu accepted the ambassadorship to Berlin in 1939 only in the hope that he might prevent Japan’s diplomatic course from going further astray. Once in Berlin, he continued to seek ways to settle the China War through the third-party intervention of Germany. But just as things seemed to be moving in the right direction, Konoe, in his second premiership, recognized Wang Jingwei’s China, thereby alienating Chiang Kai-shek forever.

Kurusu was soon left out of all key communications between German and Japanese officials. Hitler’s government judged that Japan could not be wooed sufficiently through Kurusu, and the agreement on the Tripartite Pact was hastily reached between Matsuoka and a German envoy visiting Tokyo. Nonetheless, because Kurusu was photographed standing side by side with Hitler, his reputation became forever tainted.

Kurusu was so disgusted by that and other experiences in Germany that he requested to be relieved of his post and was allowed to leave Berlin in February 1941. Back in Japan, he led the life of a recluse, turning down government appointments, including a position in Tojo’s cabinet. Kurusu, however, could not reject the emergency call to Washington. A peaceful settlement of U.S.-Japanese differences was something he truly desired. He was pro-Anglo-American at heart. Perhaps as the son of the successful industrialist who had developed the cosmopolitan port of Yokohama, he had the appreciation of mercantile liberalism in his blood. The port town served as the window to the world during Japan’s rapid modernization and was known for its unsentimental, practical people like Kurusu.

Kurusu also had a personal stake in the future of the United States and Japan. He was married to an American from New York City born to British parents (her father was an Anglican clergyman). Kurusu wanted to do everything in his power to avoid a war between the two countries that meant the most to his family. It was to be a perilous mission. There were some on the Army General Staff who openly said they wished Kurusu’s plane would crash. With such ill wishes behind him, he departed for Taiwan in the early morning of November 7.

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