Using cultural treaties to chart the international history of the culture concept

This project used cultural treaties – bi-lateral agreements among states that promote and regulate cooperation and exchange in the fields of life we call cultural or intellectual – as a historical source with which to explore the international history of the culture concept in the twentieth century.

Working in collaboration with Umeå University’s Humlab, the project’s multimethod approach makes use of methods associated with the digital humanities to examine bilateral cultural agreements from 1919, when such agreements came into frequent use, to 1972, by which time they regulated a fully global network of cultural relations. I approach these treaties through two data sets. Basic information, or “metadata” (countries, date, topic, etc.) for cultural agreements is available through the electronic World Treaty Index. We access the content of these agreements through a large sample of treaty texts from countries across the world, which we have assembled and curated. Through purpose-built digital tools, we use various forms of quantitative analysis to analyze, visualize, and explore these datasets. In parallel, the project explores the historical process by which a certain class of treaties came to be classified as “cultural” in the first place.

The central questions that this project explores can be divided into two groups. First, what is the story of the cultural treaty, as a specific tool of international relations, in the twentieth century? For example, in which political or ideological constellations do we find (the most) use of cultural agreements? Second, what is the “culture” addressed in these treaties? That is, what do the two signatories seem to mean by “culture” in these documents, and what does that tell us about the role that concept played in the international system? How can quantitative work on this dataset advance research questions about the history of concepts?

The project concluded with a special workshop, in Uppsala in June 2022, on “Cultures of Twentieth-Century Cultural Diplomacy.”

Project publications include:

• Benjamin G. Martin, “The Rise of the Cultural Treaty: Diplomatic Agreements and the International Politics of Culture in the Age of Three Worlds”, International History Review 44, 6 (2022): 1327-1346.

• Benjamin G. Martin, “The Birth of the Cultural Treaty in Europe’s Age of Crisis”, Contemporary European History 30, 2 (May 2021): 301-317

• Benjamin G. Martin and Elisabeth Piller, “Introduction: Cultural Diplomacy and Europe’s Twenty Years’ Crisis”, in Contemporary European History 30, 2 (May 2021): 149-163

• Benjamin G. Martin, “‘A New Type of Diplomatic Treaty’ for Cultural Relations: Rome, 1935,” introductory blog post, Cambridge Core Blog (March 2021)

• Benjamin G. Martin and Elisabeth Piller, “Cultural Diplomacy and Europe’s Twenty Years’ Crisis,” introductory blog post, Cambridge Core Blog (February 2021)

• Benjamin G. Martin, “Keeping it Simple: Word Trend Analysis for the Intellectual History of International Relations”, in S. Reinsone et al., eds., DHN2020: Proceedings of the Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries 5th Conference. Riga, Latvia, October 21-23, 2020 (CEUR Workshop Proceedings, v. 2612, 2020)

• Benjamin G. Martin, “Computer-Assisted Research on Cultural Treaties: A Methodological Inquiry for the History of International Ideas”. Uppsala papers in history of ideas, 17 (Uppsala: Inst. för idé- och lärdomshistoria, 2016)

This project was funded by the Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Science (Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, P16-0900:1).

Data and programming are stored on the project’s pages at GitHub. Our curated dataset of metadata on bilateral cultural agreements, adapted from the Electronic World Treaty Index, is published on Zenodo.