Just ‘a Strange Polish Muslim’? Seyfeddin Thadée Gasztowtt, the 1905 Global Moment and Biography in Global Intellectual History
From Firenze University Press Journal: CROMOHS
Paulina Dominik, European University Institute
In his work La Pologne et l’Islam (‘Poland and Islam’), Seyfeddin Thadée Gasztowtt (1881–1936),the travelling activist of Polish origin,sketched an intriguing plan for the independence of the country of his ancestors:
A free Poland, with a federation of Slavic people rallied around it, will emerge from the smouldering ruins of this empire of blood and ice. Delivered by the intimate union of the Polish and Muslim armies, it [Poland] will become the most loyal ally of Turkey. We can already see this future come to life thanks to the Polish patriots’intransigence and the Japanese army’s victory!
The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth disappeared from the map of Europe in the last quarter of the eighteenth century following a series of partitions at the hands of theneighbouring states: the Russian and Austrian Empires and the Kingdom of Prussia.3For Gasztowtt and many of his compatriots, the issue of Poland’s independence was central to their political activism. During his lifetime, Gasztowtt became a roving activist for this cause.In metaphorical language, Gasztowtt puts forward a scenario in which Poland would regain sovereignty from the Russian Empire thanks to an Ottoman military intervention resulting from Polish-Muslim political cooperation. As an independent state, Poland would become the Ottoman Empire’s closest ally. The timing of this statement was not coincidental. Gasztowtt points to Japan’s victory in the 1904–1905 war against Russia. He also refers to the events of the 1905 Russian Revolution, which also encompassed the lands of Russian-controlled Poland and marked a watershed moment in the history of post-partition Poland-Lithuania.
The research agenda of the Graduate SchoolGlobal Intellectual Historyof the Freie Universität Berlin and the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin points to a simple yet crucial premise for the burgeoning field of global intellectual history: ‘No ideas without people — taking this simple insight seriously means that we will have to interrogate biographies, social backgrounds and personal interests […] to gain a differentiated understanding of intellectual exchange.’4The authors of this research agenda emphasise the role of historical actors and their agency in better understanding transregional and cross-cultural transfers of concepts and ideas.Taking these basic tenets as a starting point, the following pages discuss the opportunities offered by a biographical approach to global intellectual history. To illustrate my ideas, I concentrate on the case study of Seyfeddin Thadée Gasztowtt. Colonial and ministerial archives are full of accounts of roaming Muslims who circulated across the southern coasts of the Mediterranean and, at one time or another, aroused the interest of colonial authorities. The case of Gasztowtt, athird-generation Polish émigré born and raised in Paris,is nonetheless remarkable. In the light of European colonial expansion in the first two decades of the twentieth century, he tied the issue of Poland’s independence to the Ottoman Empire and, more broadly, to the Muslim and non-Western world. He acted as atravelling transcultural mediator in the territories of today’s Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and Turkey.In this paper, I first reflect on biography as an approach to global history. I then engage with the notion of a global moment. Finally, I focus on Gasztowtt’s case and his activism in the former provinces of the Ottoman Empire in North Africa in the wake of Japan’s victory over Russia in 1905.My chief contention is that focusing on mobile individuals who crossed national, imperial, or regional boundaries, and operated in transcultural settings helps when examiningso-called global moments. Thanks to the biographical approach, we can better grasp the key dialectic of how historical actors were shaped by such watershed events and were, at the same time, productive in them. Focusing on individual life stories can helpus understand how major turning points in internationalhistory become global moments. These moments gain global significance only by virtue of activists like Gasztowtt seizing them and employing them in the service of their respective causes.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/cromohs-14648
Read Full Text: https://oajournals.fupress.net/index.php/cromohs/article/view/14648
