Fenomenet Thams [Thams,the Phenomenon]

This article examines the fish trade between Denmark and Britain, focusing on the 1933 bilateral trade agreement. Britain was the main export market for Danish fish, achieving a significant market share. Import penetration exacerbated British concerns about competitiveness that had emerged during the 1920s. While British protectionism saw the introduction of tariffs and quotas, which nominally reduced Danish imports by 10%, the Danes accommodated restrictions through exporting semi-processed fish. This article details trends in fish imports from Denmark, examines the national positions in negotiating the trade agreement, and considers how each country's fishing industry responded to its implementation. It draws two principal conclusions. First, that the significance of trade in the development of the interwar fisheries requires greater consideration in historical accounts. Second, that the Danish industry more effectively accommodated the new trade regime than the nominally protected British fishing industry.     

(Post)Colonial [1] Encounters: gendered racialisations in Australian courtrooms [2]

This article identifies how the Australian legal system has generated knowledge about ‘traditional’ gender relations in Aboriginal Australia. Using a sample of artefact cases from the Australian judicial system, constructions of Aboriginal gender relations are mapped. By tracing knowledge production in these cases, it demonstrates how the non-Aboriginal Australian legal system has fabricated its own versions of ‘Aboriginal Customary Laws’, or Aboriginal ‘traditions’ about violence committed by Aboriginal men, against Aboriginal women. (Post)colonial understandings about the Aboriginal ‘other’ have occupied spaces in legal understandings and then been enforced in law. The Australian judicial system itself is therefore guilty of perpetuating and privileging the ‘colonial’ in these encounters.     

Marsone, Pierre, The Steppe and the Empire: The Formation of the Khitan [Liao] dynasty-4th-10th Centuries [History]

Conventional treatments of Chinese history include a "Liao/Khitan dynasty" existing on the northern frontier from 907 to 1125,ruled by the ethnically distinctive Khitan (Qidan) people.As Pierre Marsone points out in the foreword to La Steppe et l'Empire,in many histories discussion of this polity is absent or perfunctory.Indeed the work to which Marsone's title alludes,the classic 1938 L'Empire des steppes by René Grousset,presented a comprehensive history of steppe empires yet spared only a few pages of its bulk for the Khitan state.Such neglect obstructs historians' understanding of long-term trends.The Chinese world had seen powerful empires with some degree of "foreignness" before,but this was a new kind of entity that proved immune to the accustomed methods of Chinese policy.Too powerful to play off against other states,with an administration too systematized to succumb to personal politics,the Liao/Khitan empire became such a fixation of Northern Song (960-1127) policymakers that the political history of the latter cannot be effectively told without frequent reference to the former,and it is no coincidence that the two Asian superpowers collapsed nearly simultaneously.In turn,the Liao/Khitan empire set the precedent for the stable hybrid bureaucratic states that were so important in later Chinese history.Marsone's work makes the valuable contribution of clarifying how this empire came into being.The resulting account is an invaluable corrective to dynastically delimited narratives in which the Liao empire appears in the tenth century as an abrupt and novel development,epitomizing the Great Man model of history in the form of its founder,Yelü Abaoji.