This last weeks lecture from Professor Heather Streets-Salter was extremely interesting and made me want to know more about this topic and other related topics throughout history dealing with international networks. This specific discussion was about the Noulens Affair in Shangai and how it might have been the start of anti-communism before the Cold War. This was extremely exciting to hear about because it was a topic that I knew very little about but also dealt with topics that are relevant to my studies and interest me.
With Joseph Ducroux’s arrest his address book was exposed and it revealed a large network across multiple countries. Upon further investigation into these residences officials found information on payroll, pseudonyms, correspondents, cipher codes, and more. Streets-Salter mentioned this truly was the “jackpot” of evidence and it led to over 200 people getting arrested and hundreds of thousands of copies of communist literature being confiscated. This is incredible to hear about because its something the majority of people haven’t heard about and yet it is so incredibly important and relevant to our modern history and our contemporary society.
The Noulens Affair was not only important for its historical significance and broader reach impacting so many people from many different countries, but it also was a metaphor for thinking about empires in the 20th century. Professor Streets-Salter said that territories don’t bind empires but they are connected as territories via transitional and global forces, and therefor can be compiled with people from multiple different countries scaling the globe. I think it is interesting to consider that this is such a well-documented example of communism and empires reaching across countries in large networks of spies, and yet there is very little literature on it that I have seen and there really hasn’t been a discussion of it that I can recall until I attended this lecture.
The really fascinating part about this is it truly did change the course of history and yet isn’t well known. This in all likelihood did lead to a large uproar and commentary surrounding all of these arrests and likely heightened the fear of communism from colonial powers. This Noulen’s Affair proved that communism could cross borders and boundaries like an empire and it also proved that it had very powerful backing from influential people. This lecture also really emphasized the importance and relevance of history within this presence of the past lecture series. The Noulen’s Affair is a prime example of this because although it is very important, very little people likely know about it or would even understand the significance of this event without background knowledge about communism or Asia during this time period. It also demonstrates how history is forever expanding and there is always more to learn about our roots and our predecessors. I remember during the post-discussion question and answer section Professor Streets-Salter mentioned that the British government still has many of the original documents and I honestly wonder how many people know about this in Britain in comparison to the United States because I think that would be really interesting to see the difference.