The Sultan's Domain: British Cyprus' Role in the Redefinition of Property Regimes in the Post-Ottoman Levant

This article argues that property law is the main means through which Britain built its imperial sovereignty on Cyprus and in the post-Ottoman Levant. It charts the development of an official British expertise in Ottoman land legislation following the so-called affair of the Sultan's claims to properties in Cyprus. To settle this matter in the island which they had obtained to ‘occupy’ and ‘administer’ through a treaty with the Sublime Porte, colonial authorities were compelled to become conversant with the 1858 Ottoman Land Code. Hence, the article argues that because of its ambiguous status – a province occupied and administered by Britain but under the nominal suzerainty of the Sultan from 1878 to 1914 – Cyprus, as the first Ottoman territory to pass under direct Western rule, played a decisive role in the elaboration of a colonial knowledge in Ottoman land laws. And this, despite long-standing economic and political ties between Britain and the Ottoman Empire and exposure to other settings where layered land tenure systems prevailed. Published in treatises authored by British administrators of Cyprus, the legal expertise in Ottoman land law thus acquired was then transposed to other territories which passed under British rule, such as Palestine.     

The Trade Goes,and the Flag Follows? British State Intervention and Natural Resource Extraction in Colombia, 1989–2010

During the 1960s, agents of the Colombian state began carrying out a counterinsurgency campaign against elements of the domestic population considered ‘subversive’. Subversion, according to US counterinsurgency manuals, largely translated to involvement in social organisation. As a result, trade unionists, political activists and human rights defenders in Colombia became aggressively targeted. While violence in Colombia's past has been widely documented, recent British involvement has not. The official justification for British military and police assistance, beginning in 1989, was within the context of the drug war. By drawing on a wide range of sources including newly declassified documents from the UK National Archives in Kew, this article posits that British counter-narcotics assistance was contentious in nature and ineffective in outcome. Meanwhile, this assistance lent structural and active support to the counterinsurgency conflict. In this light, the protection of British capital interest in Colombia – specifically that of British Petroleum – is analysed as a persuasive underlying motive for British military and police assistance. Finally, British Petroleum's private security strategy in Colombia is investigated as a case study in the utilisation of counterinsurgency, with the result of the near-total elimination of social organisation within its areas of operations.     

The Tenco effect. Suicide,San Remo,and the social construction of the canzone d'autore

Abstract

Canzone d'autore is an indigenous expression that has no precise equivalent in other languages. Its social use identifies a genre of popular song that presuppose the existence of an ‘autore’ taken in its most vigorous sense, meaning a ‘creator’, an ‘artist’– but how did this claim to artistry originate? How did it insinuate itself into the world of song, a genre that by definition belongs to the realm of what is traditionally called in Italian ‘musica leggera,’ with unmistakably pejorative connotations? In this essay, I will put forward a sociological interpretation of the genesis of the canzone d'autore, using as a strategic conceptual device the idea of cultural trauma. The traumatic event that I propose to explore, making use of this concept and its analytical machinery, is the suicide of the singer-songwriter Luigi Tenco during the seventeenth San Remo ‘Festival della Canzone’ (‘song festival’) – that is the best-known, most controversial, and most influential single event in the field of Italian ‘musica leggera’, an annual event regularly attended every year – via radio, television, or audience participation – by millions of Italians. Through a reconstruction of that suicide and above all of the public and dramatic events that followed in response to it, the paper examines the social process that transformed an individual tragedy into a collective, social drama, a process that not only produced a new musical classification, but also a new cultural and aesthetic category.     

Narratives and Bodies: Culture beyond the Cultural Turn

This article offers a fresh assessment of the current condition of ‘culturalist’ international history, exploring its achievements and limitations, taxonomising its key threads and charting an agenda for the future. It argues that at its heart lie two core concerns, one with narratives and the other with bodies. Thinking in this way allows us both to tie together work which initially appears disparate – endowing a bewilderingly diverse mass of scholarship with coherence and shape – and to better grasp the project's current trajectory. It analyses how these two issues rose to prominence, discussing not only the merits and failings of previous ‘culturalist’ work but also linkages with shifting debates in historical theory in the aftermath of the ‘postmodern’ turn. It explores the contours of the important work currently being conducted under these rubrics, drawing attention where appropriate to cognate scholarship in the discipline of International Relations with which international historians might profitably engage. Understanding the significance of these two core concepts provides vital orientation in contemporary intellectual debates within international history and enables us to push them on further.     

‘The innate yearnings of our souls’: Subjectivity,Religiosity and Outward Testimony in Mary Howitt's Autobiography (1889)

Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in women's involvement in nineteenth-century religious cultures. However, the overwhelming focus remains firmly on the role of religion in providing motivation, sustenance and justification for women's involvement in feminism and other public campaigns. Questions of faith and devotion, spirituality and Christian selfhood, and the relationship of spiritual freedom to other liberations – religious issues that are at the heart of many women's life histories – remain largely unaddressed. This article focuses on the life of Mary Howitt, the popular nineteenth-century English poet, journalist and campaigner for women's rights, whose Autobiography (1889) describes an extraordinary religious journey. Raised in a strict Quaker household, Howitt resigned from the Society of Friends in the midst of a Unitarian interlude in the 1840s, became deeply involved with Spiritualism in the 1850s and 1860s, and finally moved to Rome, both physically and spiritually, at the end of her life. The article explores Howitt's representation of the Quaker piety of her youth as stifling and oppressive in its concern with outward forms of religious observance, particularly an emphasis on a traditional style of dress and on resisting ‘worldly’ activities, including poetry and art. A reading of the autobiography alongside her earlier writing reveals how themes become ‘composed’ into a coherent, stable life story, one shaped by later nineteenth-century public discourses that allowed for a greater religious fluidity and a new reflection on childhood experiences.     

‘The Epitheatrical Cartoonist’: Matthew Somerville Morgan and the World of Theatre,Art and Journalism in Victorian London

This article examines the vibrant cultural milieu inhabited by one of Victorian Britain's most famous cartoonists, Matthew Somerville Morgan. Morgan is well-known as the cartoonist who attacked Queen Victoria's withdrawal from public life (and her associations with John Brown), and the lifestyle of Albert, Prince of Wales, in the short-lived rival to Punch: the Tomahawk. Likewise, his post-1870 career in New York as cartoonist of the ‘Caricature War’ over the 1872 Presidential elections, and involvement with ‘Buffalo’ Bill Cody have been well-studied. However, his involvement with the world of the 1860s Victorian stage – and the social circles in which he moved – have not been given close attention. This broader social, cultural, and economic context is essential to understanding Morgan's role as a cartoonist-critic of politics, class, gender and art in Victorian Britain. Special attention is given to the ways in which Morgan's work as a theatrical scene-painter informed his other pursuits, including his political cartoons for Fun, the Comic News and the Tomahawk. So central was the theatre to Morgan's life story that he may be appropriately described as an ‘epitheatrical’ figure. Indeed he is one of the most spectacular exemplars of the interconnected worlds of journalism, high art and theatre in Victorian London. The theatre provided him with the artistic and journalistic connections needed to raise himself above his lower-class origins; to move in ‘clubland’ and fashionable bohemian society; and to win an influential place in the key political and cultural debates of his age.     

Churchill's ‘Iron Curtain’ Speech in Context: The Attempt to Achieve a ‘Good Understanding on All Points’ with Stalin's Soviet Union

More than 70 years ago, on 5 March 1946, former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill delivered his ‘iron curtain’ speech at Westminster College in Fulton. The speech immediately attracted worldwide attention and proved to be highly controversial. Most contemporaries in East and West and the vast majority of subsequent historians interpreted the speech as Churchill's call for western resistance to Stalin's expansionist policies and the continuation of the wartime ‘special relationship’ between Washington and London. This article argues, however, that Churchill's speech has been misunderstood. When set in the context of Churchill's other pronouncements on world affairs during his time as leader of the opposition between 1945 and 1951 and in view of his vigorously pursued ‘Big Three’ ‘summit diplomacy’ with Moscow and Washington after he returned as Prime Minister in 1951, the ‘iron curtain’ speech must be seen in a different light. It becomes clear that this famous speech was not Churchill's sabre-rattling call for commencing or energizing the East--West conflict with the Soviet Union. Quite to the contrary, his speech was meant to prevent the escalation of this conflict and avoid the dangerous clash between the world's greatest powers that soon became known as the Cold War.     

‘Fare di ogni famiglia italiana un fortilizio’: The League of Nations' economic sanctions and everyday life in Venice 1

Abstract

The imposition of punitive sanctions against Italy by the League of Nations in November 1935 in response to the invasion of Ethiopia, a fellow league member, provided the fascist regime with an opportunity to mobilize the civilian population into ‘resistance’ against the ‘economic siege’ and to promote its ideals of nationalism, imperialist expansion and autarchy. This article examines the way in which the fascist authorities in Venice, aided by a supportive local press, sought to use the sanctions and ‘sanctions resistance’ to engage Venetians – especially women – in the fascist project and explores the effect of the anti-sanctions resistance measures on Venetians' daily lives. Placing importance both upon the regime's intentions as well as Venetians' reception of the anti-sanctions rhetoric, and drawing upon Michel de Certeau's observations on The Practice of Everyday Life, the article argues that Venetians' reception of such propaganda was characterized above all by confusion and by a multiplicity of personal choices and reactions, spanning a range of possible responses from unequivocal support through passive acceptance or indifference to outright rejection or subversion of the sanctions resistance measures that sought to elicit consent for the fascist project.     

‘Chilling’ and ‘hopping’ in the ‘teenage space network’: explorations in teenagers’ geographies in the city of Mechelen

Within the field of children's geographies several calls have been made to develop ‘teenagers’ geographies’ as a complementary field of research and practice. It has been stated that teenagers remain ‘invisible’ or ‘marginalised’ in public debates as well as in research and practice, even within childhood studies and children's geographies. Further explorations in teenagers’ geographies could contribute to the research on ‘diverse childhoods’. This article explores the spatial worlds of teenagers (approximately 12–16 years) in Flanders (Belgium), a region characterised by a dense network of smaller cities and ‘urban sprawl’. Based on street interviews and observations in a small city several mental maps and patterns of teenagers’ use of public space were identified. Starting from a case study in the city of Mechelen, this article suggests how these perspectives can be integrated into urban planning by identifying and tying together relevant planning layers, thus creating a more closely knit ‘teenage space network’. Wouter Vanderstede is an urban planner, anthropologist and historian. He is a researcher and staff member at Childhood & Society Research Centre–Onderzoekscentrum Kind & Samenleving vzw. Child friendly and teenager friendly planning and design of public space is one of the main research themes of the institute. View all notes     

The Natural Contract: From Lévi‐Strauss to the Ecuadorian Constitutional Court

In 2008, the Ecuadorian Constituent Assembly became the first juridical body in the world to legalize what Michel Serres might have called a ‘natural contract.’ With the assistance of the U.S.‐based Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, representatives at the Assembly in July of 2008 re‐wrote their 1998 constitution to include a landmark series of articles delineating the rights of nature — a notion long familiar to Indigenous communities in the Andean region, actively propagated by anthropologists like Claude Lévi‐Strauss at the French National Assembly as early as the 1970s, and often mocked by mainstream Western jurists for its conceptual confusion about the sorts of entities that can properly be said to have rights. Drawing on the experiences of activists currently engaged in the first national‐level lawsuit to make use of these rights as well as a range of both activists and non‐activists involved in alternative implementations of them, the article explores the possibilities, limitations, and paradoxes of this extension of rights‐based discourse. At a time when the natural world is increasingly being talked about at the United Nations and elsewhere not as a ‘rights‐holder,’ but as an ‘ecosystem services provider,’ I suggest that while the discourse of ‘rights' signals promising shifts in how Andean governments are conceptualizing agency and responsibility in ways that productively break with the trend toward marketization, it also runs the risk of providing the administration with symbolic cover for its intensifying commitment to what Eduardo Gudynas has called, a ‘new extractivism.'     

‘Unparalleled Opportunities’: The Indian Y.M.C.A.'s Army Work Schemes for Imperial Troops During the Great War (1914–1920)

The present article aims to contribute to the global history of the First World War and the history of ‘imperial humanitarianism’ by taking stock of the Indian Young Men's Christian Association's Army Work schemes in South Asia, Europe and the Middle East. The outbreak of the war was hailed by some American secretaries of the Y.M.C.A. working in India as presenting overwhelming opportunities for their proselytising agenda. Indeed, the global conflict massively enlarged the organisation's range of activities among European soldiers stationed in South Asia and for the first time extended it to the ‘Sepoys’, i.e. Indian and Nepalese soldiers serving in the imperial army. Financially supported by the Indian public as well as by the governments of Britain and British India, the US-dominated Indian Y.M.C.A. embarked on large-scale ‘army work’ programmes in the Indian subcontinent as well as in several theatres of war almost from the outset, a fact that clearly boosted its general popularity. This article addresses the question of the effects the Y.M.C.A.'s army work schemes had for the imperial war effort and tries to assess their deeper societal and political impact as a means of educating better citizens, both British and Indian. In doing so, the article places particular emphasis on the activities of American Y-workers, scrutinising to what extent pre-existing imperial racial and cultural stereotypes influenced their perception of and engagement with the European and South Asian soldiers they wanted to transform into ‘better civilians’.     

A Shield Loaded with History: Encounters,Objects and Exhibitions

This article discusses an Aboriginal shield in the British Museum which is widely believed to have been used in the first encounter between Lieutenant James Cook's expedition and the Gweagal people at Botany Bay in late April 1770. It traces the ways in which the shield became ‘Cook-related’, and increasingly represented and exhibited in that way. In the wake of its exhibition at the National Museum of Australia in late 2015 and early 2016, the shield gained further public prominence and has become enmeshed within a wider politics of reconciliation. A recent request from the La Perouse Local Aboriginal Land Council to the British Museum to review knowledge about the shield has contributed to a reappraisal of claims about its connection to Cook's 1770 expedition. Preliminary findings of this review are presented. In the process, the article addresses larger questions concerning the politics surrounding the interpretation of the shield as a historically ‘loaded’ object.     

Making Headway: The Introduction of Western Civilization in Colonial Northern Nigeria

This article scrutinises attempts by the British Foreign and Colonial Office to control information in its colonies between 1946 and 1950. Several factors combined to alter the ground on which colonial officials operated in this period: an emerging ‘Cold War’ between Britain and its wartime Soviet ally, international debates about creating an enforceable catalogue of ‘human rights' and a heightened emphasis on public relations within British colonies as a strategy for imperial governance. These factors converged in the response of colonial officials to the writing of one of the most notorious anti-colonial activists in Britain at the time, George Padmore. By analysing British Colonial Office reports of Soviet propaganda in their colonies, the article suggests new analysis about some of the ways in which the rhetoric of the Cold War impacted on Britain's approach to empire after the Second World War.     

A ‘New’ Commonwealth for Britain? Negotiating Ghana's Pan-African and Asian Connections at the End of Empire (1951–8)

This article examines to what extent Nkrumah's Pan-African ambitions and Asian connections altered the meaning of the ‘new’ Commonwealth for British policy-makers. It discusses India's influence on British political options in the Gold Coast during the negotiations for independence and Commonwealth membership and assesses the impact of Ghana's Pan-Africanism on two major facets of Commonwealth politics: Britain's ability to balance its relations with the Commonwealth and France, the other main European actor in Africa; and Britain's capacity to maintain the idea of a common heritage, which Pan-African projects like the Ghana–Guinea Union threatened to disrupt.     

Sailors and Slaves: The ‘Poor Enslaved Tar’ in Naval Reform and Nautical Melodrama

This article explores the rhetorical comparison of naval sailors' exploitation to that of African slaves in pre- and early-Victorian discourses on naval reform. It is structured around an analysis of J.T. Haines's nautical melodrama My Poll and My Partner Joe (first performed 1835), in which the hero, having been press-ganged by the navy, risks his life freeing enslaved Africans on the Middle Passage even though he considers himself a slave to his nation. This plot was both timely and provocative: first performed in the immediate aftermath of the illegalization of slavery in Britain's colonies, it dramatizes an analogy between slaves and sailors that was contested by campaigners for naval reform and their opponents. Ultimately, My Poll and My Partner Joe palliates radical commentary on sailors' rights, in its second and third acts, as the sailor patriotically celebrates his freedom in antithesis to African slavery. Rather than read its denouement simply as romantic escapism, I argue that it proposes resolutions to conflicts that had arisen in British understandings of slavery and freedom, and racial and national identity, as a result of the debate on naval reform. To researchers of imperial, humanitarian, and working-class cultures and identities of the nineteenth century, this article reveals the underlying importance of ‘race’ and slavery to debates on maritime labour. It further highlights the complex, dialectical character of pre- and early-Victorian representations of sailors – on the stage and beyond it.     

Neo-Colonialism Reconsidered: A Case Study of East Africa in the 1960s and 1970s

A former major base of British colonialism, East Africa, has served as one of the testing grounds for what has been referred to as neo-colonialism. According to Kwame Nkrumah, neo-colonialism indicates that although ‘in theory’, a colony attains independence, ‘[i]n reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside’ (Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. London: Panaf Books, 2004 [1965]). This article challenges this image of neo-colonialism. Based on British documents of the late 1960s and early 1970s, most of which have become available to the public only in the last decade, and sources in East African libraries, it casts new light on British external relations with East Africa in the heady days of independence. These documents demonstrate that the new states of East Africa enjoyed a substantial degree of autonomy, that Britain's development aid was inconsistent and that Britain's involvement in the affairs of its former colonies was reluctant. These accounts reveal that the impact of British policy on newly independent states was actually limited, and thus the nature of Britain's relationship with its ex-colonies and the discourse of neo-colonialism are debatable.     

Du Rutabaga et Encore du Rutabaga: Daily Life in Vichy France

‘Amerindians’ represent only a small proportion—currently estimated at 3–4%—of the sparse but rapidly growing population of France's South American département d'outre-mer. Yet the existence of ‘autochthonous’ communities in Guyane presents legal, political, cultural and environmental challenges to the concepts of republican universalism ostensibly established in 1946 alongside its status as an overseas department of France. Using an Amerindian cultural centre as a case study, this article seeks to explain how representations of ‘Amerindian’ identities in Guyane are constructed both alongside and against a traditional framework of opposition between universal commonality and cultural particularism. Through engagement with museum ethnography and analysis of personal narrative and collective action, the article traces conflicts and compromises surrounding ‘indigeneity’ and citizenship in the face of state non-recognition of ethnicity. It argues that the politics of Amerindian identity, from citizenship rights to ecotourism, has increasingly been characterised by an emphasis on ‘ecological’ relationships.

Les « Amérindiens » ne constituent que 3 à 4 % de la population de la Guyane – seul département d'outre-mer de France en Amérique du Sud – une population relativement faible et dispersée mais qui connaît une croissance rapide. Cependant, l'existence de communautés « autochtones » dans ce département présente des défis juridiques, politiques, culturels et environnementaux face à l’universalisme républicain établi au moment où la Guyane est devenue département, en 1946. Cet article s'appuie sur le cas d'un centre culturel amérindien pour exposer comment les représentations de l'identité « amérindienne » en Guyane se construisent à la fois avec et contre l'opposition traditionnelle entre les communalités universellement partagées et le particularisme culturel. S'appuyant sur l'ethnographie muséologique et sur l'analyse des récits individuels et de l'action collective, l'article reconstitue les conflits et les compromis autour de « l'autochtonie » et de la citoyenneté face à l'aveuglement officiel de l'État par rapport à l'idée de l'ethnicité. L'article suggère que, des droits citoyens à l'écotourisme, la politique identitaire « amérindienne » se caractérise de plus en plus par une emphase sur les relations sociales « écologiques »; c'est-à-dire entre hommes, femmes et environnement.     

Does the Internet Encourage Small Parties? A Case Study of the Minutiae of BC Politics, 1996–2009

Researchers remain divided on what Small describes as ‘a key debate in the cyber-campaigning literature’ – whether or not the emergence of the Internet enhanced the prospects of small parties on the periphery of mainstream politics that speak for those whose voices might otherwise go unheard. Often researchers have approached this question by seeking to establish if small parties are indeed able to maintain an on-line presence that matches that of larger, better resourced parties. The ultimate test of this ‘equalisation thesis’, however, is whether the Internet ushered in a period in which small parties could flourish. With its propensity to produce small parties and its rapid take-up of Internet technology from the mid-1990s onward, the Canadian province of British Columbia (BC) is an ideal case study. The number of small BC parties increased in the decade beginning 1995, but a close scrutiny of the minutiae of BC politics in this period finds no evidence to support a claim that the Internet favoured small parties and enlarged the opportunity for marginalised citizens to participate in politics. ‘Cyber-optimists’ will have to look to unconventional forms of political activity for evidence that the Internet can draw new constituencies into politics.     

The man who never was? The Italian transition and 2008 election

Abstract

The implications for the co-called Italian transition of the 2008 election initially seemed significant – but have since become increasingly uncertain as Berlusconi's conflict of interests has risen higher up the political agenda. This underscores the pertinence of asking about the sense in which the notion of ‘transition’ is actually applicable to the Italian case at all – bearing in mind that it describes a process now supposedly underway for some 17 years; and bearing in mind that its end point can seemingly not be identified (though by definition ‘transition’ implies movement between two points). Discovering if the term applies to the Italian case and if so whether 2008 has brought its conclusion nearer requires exploring if the political protagonists that have emerged from the election as the most significant players – the Popolo della Libertà and the Partito Democratico – have sufficient commonality of view, sufficient desire and sufficient power to complete a process of constitutional overhaul. The evidence suggests that while they have the view and the desire, there are significant limitations on their power. The election might potentially have been a watershed in the so-called Italian transition in the broader sense of system performance, aside from formal constitutional change. Here too, however, the evidence points away from the idea that 2008 represents a real sea change – though the chances seem good that it will come to be perceived as such.     

Mauna Kea: Two Cultures and the 'Imiloa Astronomy Center

When Snow wrote delivered his lecture on ‘The Two Cultures’ in 1959, he considered this to be a phenomenon that had British, Western and global significance. This article looks at how Snow's ideas play out in the setting of Hawai'i from the early contact with Western navigators through to current disputes over the building of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) atop Mauna Kea. ‘Mutual incomprehension’, identified by Snow as the chief characteristics of his two cultures are clearly seen to be at play in Western-Hawai'ian encounters.

This article places the TMT disputes in the setting of the Hawai'ian Renaissance, a movement that has gathered pace since the 1960s. It looks Gieryn's notions of ‘boundary work’ and that of Star and Griesemer on ‘boundary objects’ as ways of framing the discussion. The final focus of the article is the 'Imiloa Astronomy Center in Hilo as a ‘place of safe disagreement’.