The golden and the brazen world: Papers in literature and history, 1650–1800

From the seventeenth century onwards, English Reformed ministers engaged in lively correspondence and publishing exchanges with men from different countries and Protestant traditions. In the eighteenth century, appreciation of their shared intellectual and cultural heritage and a desire to sustain the patterns for religious living it encouraged inflected the content and style of textual interactions among Halle Pietists, English dissenters and New England Congregationalists. Interest in the present state of religious life was also important, and therefore news about awakenings and materials for pastoral care circulated around Europe and North America through existing channels and by new means. Their encounters and the texts that they produced were mutually generative, and the language and manner of the participants' personal interactions were important features of published works. These personal associations, publishing activities and discursive styles can be understood as aspects of the literary sociology of a religious culture that valued intellectual and emotional engagements and sought to inculcate religion through education and friendship.     

The demographic impact of irrigation projects: a comparison of two case studies of the Ebro basin,Spain, 1900–2001

Water management and population issues have always been particularly important in Spain, a country historically characterized by severe environmental constraints on agricultural growth and intense rural depopulation. This paper evaluates whether irrigation projects in Spain over the course of the twentieth century have achieved one of their main objectives, which was to reduce rural population decline. This paper makes two contributions. First, we compare the evolution of population in two of the earliest and most ambitious irrigation projects in Spain, the Riegos del Alto Aragón (Upper Aragon Irrigation System) and the Canal de Aragón y Cataluña (Aragon and Catalonia Canal System), both located in the Ebro basin. Second, the time period of the study spans an entire century. This long-term approach is crucial if we accept that irrigation requires time to consolidate its effects and, therefore, its impact on population may be long delayed. We show that the evolution of population in each of the two projects has been substantially different. We also analyze the factors that have caused or prevented population growth. We argue that financial, economic and environmental limitations have been significant, but also that political and geographical factors have played a major role.     

The challenge of the spaceship: Arthur C. Clarke and the history of the future, 1930–1970

Arthur C. Clarke’s 1946 essay on ‘The Challenge of the Spaceship’ was one of the founding manifestoes of the Space Age, and helped to establish him as the West’s leading techno-prophet. Restating his ideas in subsequent factual and fictional works, Clarke successfully propagated the belief that man’s destiny lay in space and that the process was already underway. On the surface Clarke’s oeuvre offers a classic astrofuturist model of progress as technology-driven, but on closer examination it also incorporates a more pessimistic, historically based strand of philosophy, British rather than American. This essay traces the genesis of Clarke’s early work and the influence upon him of the historian Arnold J. Toynbee and the moral philosophers Olaf Stapledon and C.S. Lewis. Toynbee was essentially a Christian pessimist who believed that western civilization was on the way out; his long historical perspectives were an important source of inspiration for Clarke, leading him to a cyclical rather than a simply progressive model of history which contemplated both the beginning and the end of civilizations. The concerns of Stapledon and Lewis with grand narratives of decline and redemption were also influences on Clarke. All this needs to be understood in relation to both the European experience of World War I and to the coming of the atomic bomb, the latter a profound influence on Clarke’s generation. Such perspectives gave European astroculture a more modulated vision of the human future in space than the technologically based astrofuturism which dominated in the USA.     

The Trans-Saharan Railway and the Politics of Imperial Expansion, 1890–1900

The trans-Saharan railway scheme was the dominant, if intermittent, theme of French African expansion in the last 20?years of the nineteenth century. Behind political and economic arguments for the scheme lay a hidden agenda—the promotion of Algerian railway interests. Its revival in 1890, after a ten-year interval, was driven by a need to safeguard returns on railway investments, threatened by the growing political influence of the Radicals. Success in a campaign on its behalf was dependent on reinvigorating empire-building in tropical Africa, a function performed by the Chad plan, which also provided the required territorial configuration for a trans-Saharan railway. Subsequently, interest shifted from West Africa to the Sahara where efforts to promote railway construction through exploitation of the Tuat question stood greater chances of success. Saharan expansion was delayed for almost a decade by the obstinacy of the Algerian generals and the timidity of governments in France, before finally being resolved by a fait accompli. However, political circumstances at home, and the emergence of new railway competition in the Sahara, prevented the railway companies from reaping the full reward for their efforts. On the map, if not in any practical sense, a territorially unified French African empire had been completed by 1900, whose origins can be traced directly to the activities of the railway lobby.