Defence and Diplomacy: The British Foreign Office and Singapore, 1939-1940

Examinations of the defence of Singapore normally focus on therole the Royal Navy and antipodean cries of betrayal. In suchstudies, great attention is paid to such matters as how longit would take the Royal Navy to relieve Singapore and the degreeto which the British government misled Australia, New Zealand,and Singapore itself with regard to London's determination todefend the fortress. This study concentrates instead on Britishdiplomacy in the Far East, and contends that Britain intendedto defend its position in the region by means of creating theimpression in Tokyo that Japan faced a loose Anglo-Americancoalition opposed to any Japanese expansionist efforts. In asimilar fashion, the British attempted also to utilize Soviet–Japanesehostility to protect their interests in the Far East. By lookingat these matters, a greater understanding of the wider aspectsof British strategic defence policy can be found.     

Hygiene,health, and bodily knowledge, 1880-1940: a New Zealand case study

One of the key aims of the Dunedin Southern Suburbs project has been to examine the factors that structured opportunity in a period of rapid modernization in New Zealand, 1880-1940. This article argues that health was a key determinant of opportunity and examines how people thought about their bodies and sought to maintain health. It argues that older, humoral theories about health were maintained alongside new understandings wrought by the germ theory and that both placed a high value on regimen. Mothers were regarded as the household experts on health but lacked a vocabulary to communicate with their daughters about menstruation. While bodily health was an ideal to be striven for, there was little communication about bodily pleasure, a situation subject to change with the adoption of family limitation.     

The Symbolic Making of a Common Property Resource: History,Ecology and Locality in a Tank-irrigated Landscape in South India

Today there is a pervasive policy consensus in favour of ‘community management’ approaches to common property resources such as forests and water. This is endorsed and legitimized by theories of collective action which, this article argues, produce distinctively ahistorical and apolitical constructions of ‘locality’, and impose a narrow definition of resources and economic interest. Through an historical and ethnographic exploration of indigenous tank irrigation systems in Tamil Nadu, the article challenges the economic-institutional modelling of common property systems in terms of sets of rules and co-operative equilibrium outcomes internally sustained by a structure of incentives. The article argues for a more historically and politically grounded understanding of resources, rights and entitlements and, using Bourdieu's notion of ‘symbolic capital’, argues for a reconception of common property which recognizes symbolic as well as material interests and resources. Tamil tank systems are viewed not only as sources of irrigation water, but as forming part of a village ‘public domain’ through which social relations are articulated, reproduced and challenged. But the symbolic ‘production of locality’ to which water systems contribute is also shaped by local ecology. The paper examines the historical and cultural production of two distinctive ‘cultural ecologies’. This serves to illustrate the fusion of ecology and social identity, place and person, in local conceptions, and to challenge a currently influential thesis on the ecological-economic determinants of collective action. In short, development discourse and local actors are seen to have very different methods and purposes in the ‘production of locality’. Finally, the article points to some practical implications of this for strategies of ‘local institutional development’ in irrigation.