The Importance of Cheltenham: Imperialism,Liminality and Gustav Holst

The study of liminality, pioneered by the anthropologist Arnold van Gennep, and reinvigorated by Victor Turner, considers the ambiguity that exists for individuals as they move between defined groups or identities. Reconsidering the relationship between the British composer, Gustav Holst (1874–1934), and his birthplace, the west country spa town of Cheltenham, provides not only a case study of the general liminality of the professional musician, but of a figure who is betwixt and between in almost all aspects of his life. In essence, Holst is the archetype of a liminal being. This study problematizes Holst's place in the received history of British music, arguing that his liminality has been overlooked in various attempts to make his life and music fit a mainstream narrative for English musical culture, the so-called Second English Musical Renaissance. The origins of that liminality are explored by considering Holst's relationship with Victorian Cheltenham, ranging widely from the civic to the religious, from the public to the private, and from the individual to the social. This includes his contact with prominent influences such as imperialism and evangelicalism, but also elements that are seemingly more marginal to the town but central for Holst, such as Theosophy. Doing so clarifies the origins and importance of Holst's relentlessly liminal status in Victorian and Edwardian society, demonstrating how such reconsiderations can reshape the historical narrative of Victorian influence on the twentieth century.     

Hydrology and Empire: The Nile,Water Imperialism and the Partition of Africa

Why did the British march up the Nile in the 1890s? The answers to this crucial question of imperial historiography have direct relevance for narratives and theories about imperialism, in general, and the partition of Africa in the nineteenth century, in particular. They will also influence our understanding of some of the main issues in the modern history of the whole region, including state developments and resource utilisation. This article presents an alternative to dominant interpretations of the partition of Africa and the role of British Nile policies in this context. It differs from mainstream diplomatic history, which dominates this research field, in its emphasis on how geographical factors and the hydrological characteristics of the Nile influenced and framed British thinking and actions in the region. Realising the importance of such factors and the specific character of the regional water system does not imply less attention to traditional diplomatic correspondence or to the role of individual imperial entrepreneurs. The strength of this analytical approach theoretically is that it makes it possible to locate the intentions and acts of historical subjects within specific geographical contexts. Empirically, it opens up a whole new set of source material, embedding the reconstruction of the British Nile discourse in a world of Nile plans, water works and hydrological discourses.     

The Partisan Nature of Race and Imperialism: Dadabhai Naoroji,M. M. Bhownaggree and the Late Nineteenth-Century British Politics of Indian Nationalism

This article examines Dadabhai Naoroji's and Mancherjee Merwanjee Bhownaggree's contribution to politically partisan ideologies on Indian empire as London MPs and reform advocates late in the nineteenth century. Exploring politically nuanced, cultural definitions of racial difference, this article reveals how their participation in British parliamentary and press debate on Indian nationalism adhered to distinct liberal and conservative imperial political conceptions of race and governance during this period. Beyond an analysis of Naoroji and the Indian National Congress's relationship with British liberalism, this essay explores Bhownaggree's contribution to a sustained conservative imperial tradition. This article postulates that Edmund Burke's separation from a liberal imperial rationality and a British Tory critique of liberalism informed a nineteenth-century conservative governing justification in India predicated on conciliating organic national racial difference. As Naoroji's devotion, as a Liberal MP for Central Finsbury (1892–95), to a liberal civilising mission informed an advocacy of political self-governance in Britain and India, Bhownaggree's pursuit of female and technical education reform while Conservative MP for Bethnal Green N.E. (1895–1905) represented a conservative espousal of racial difference.     

The contentious politics of nationalism and the anti‐naturalization campaign in Tunisia, 1932–1933

This article asks how, when, and why people came to mobilize en masse in the name of the Tunisian nation against French Protectorate rule. Rather than taking anti‐colonial nationalism as an inevitable response to the imposition of colonial rule, the account offered here insists that it is an outcome to be explained. Building on more recent theoretical directions that stress the processual, relational, and eventful dynamics of nationalism, the article shows that nationalism and nationalist mobilization cannot be attributed simply to the workings of nationalist intellectuals, to long‐standing grievances, or to larger macro‐level transformations. Rather, seeing nationalism as part of struggle and as a domain in which various forms of contentious politics are played out, I show how attention to a particular contentious event in the anti‐naturalization campaign can help us to understand how a certain version of the nation becomes salient as a mobilizing rubric for mass‐level mobilization and how various forms of contention coalesce to produce nationalist outcomes.     

German modernity,barbarous Slavs and profit‐seeking Jews: the cultural racism of nationalist liberals

This paper examines emblematic texts by two important protagonists of post‐1848 liberalism in Germany, Gustav Freytag and Heinrich von Treitschke, focusing on their treatment of Jews and Poles. The paper analyses the social content of their statements and argues that the elements of anti‐Semitism and anti‐Slav racism that they contain were motivated by the specific kind of nationalist liberalism that frames their affirmation of the process of modernisation. This affirmation was directed against the Poles on the one hand, seen as backward Easterners who had to be pushed into civilisation by Prussian–German colonialism, and, on the other hand, the Jews, largely perceived as representing the wrong kind of modernity against which benign (supposedly German) modernity had to be protected. At the same time, the image of the Jew in Freytag and Treitschke also participates in that of the backward Easterner, permitting to see undesirable, allegedly Jewish aspects of modernity also as distortions resulting from an alien and ancient culture. This analysis has consequences for theorisations of both liberalism and nationalism: it suggests that the racism and anti‐Semitism of nationalist liberals were intrinsically related to core aspects of the liberal world‐view rather than being merely contingent opinions held by particular individuals. It also indicates that the nationalism of many German post‐1848 liberals was ethnic as well as liberal. In this way, the paper contributes to the growing body of literature discussing the illiberal aspects of liberalism as well as the shortcomings of the long‐established conceptual dichotomy of ethnic vs. liberal nationalism.     

The limits of solidarity: Europeanism,anti-colonialism and socialism at the Congress of the Peoples of Europe,Asia and Africa in Puteaux, 1948

This article examines the claims to international solidarity and plans for a new world order of the Congress of the Peoples in Puteaux in 1948. In analysing the transnational networks at play, the article argues for the connection of historiographies of European co-operation, socialism and anti-colonialism. The congress organisers united these three strands through the idea of a socialist Third Force between the United States and the Soviet Union. However, this idea also marked the limit to the integration of these ideals, since the anti-nationalism, and particularly the anti-Stalinism that it implied, was unsustainable for many colonial delegates. Puteaux then shows how transnational solidarity in the late 1940s was checked by the uneven effects of the early Cold War and marked by lingering hierarchies. The networks at play and the limits to solidarity faced suggest continuity with the conferences in Brussels (1927) and Bandung (1955).     

Nature,space and distances in an imperial boundary network: The delimitation of the Nyasa-Tanganyika plateau boundary

This article discusses an episode of boundary delimitation/demarcation conducted between British and German imperial powers on the central African Nyasa-Tanganyika plateau in the late 1890s. I situate vignettes on the boundary's delimitation in 1897-98 within broader processes of imperial territorialisation to note that the boundary eventually produced on the plateau represented a fabrication resolving tensions between its ‘natural’ and textual sources. Specifically, I argue the boundary was produced to mediate between a diplomatic nature, written in metropolitan worlds by diplomats and cartographers, and a colonial nature, a zone of phenomenal experiences, inhuman encounters and ‘sensation’ (Wark, 2016). I emphasise the experience of technical practice to suggest that this itself represented a form of imperial power, capable of challenging or ‘deferring’ (Bhabha, 2012) metropolitan circuits of governance and knowledge production, not least by revealing the liveliness of the material world undergoing imperial territorialisation. Sensation produced the form of the writings and archives of survey-exploration: often confounded by problems of their data and surroundings, commissioners made the epistemological and subjective manoeuvrings through which they appeared to rise above their inert surroundings to master them. But this does not characterise the experience of fieldwork on the plateau, which was constituted by a panoply of technical situations wherein delineations between objects, observers and their material settings were indeterminable.     

By‐Elections and Political Change in a Local Context: The Case of the 1973 Dundee East By‐Election and the SNP

With their unpredictability and occurrence in between nationwide elections, by‐elections have attracted a degree of scholarly interest. However, this has focused almost exclusively on how the contests have affected, or failed to affect, the direction of national politics. This article seeks to, instead, explore their influence upon the locality in which they are fought. It will achieve this through an analysis of the 1973 Dundee East by‐election and its consequences for the development of the local Scottish National Party (SNP). Prior to the by‐election, the party had not been particularly strong in Dundee. Yet the contest provided a setting in which it was able to transform itself into one of the most effective Nationalist organisations in Scotland, capable of cementing an SNP MP in the constituency from 1974 until 1987, holding firm against the collapse in the party's support across the country in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The article will examine the extent to which this resistance to the national swing was facilitated by the legacies of the by‐election and the extent to which its wider footprint contributed towards the development of an enduring party tradition that has persisted for decades.     

The business relations,identities and political resources of Italian merchants in the early-modern Spanish monarchy: some introductory remarks

Abstract

This article offers a preliminary approach to the special volume entitled Business Relations, Identities, and Political Resources of the Italian Merchants in the Early-Modern Spanish Monarchy. It discusses the major issues and debates addressed in the five contributions collected here about the central role played by the Genoese, Florentine and Milanese commercial networks in the framework of a polycentric imperial structure as was the Spanish Monarchy.     

The Last of Australian Imperial Dreams for the Southwest Pacific: Paul Hasluck,the Department of Territories and a Greater Melanesia in 1960

This paper is a study of the vision held at the beginning of the 1960s by Paul Hasluck, the minister for external territories, and his department of the path to decolonisation for Melanesia. Faced by the ongoing West New Guinea crisis, Hasluck and his officials proposed to keep the western part of New Guinea out of Indonesian hands by expanding Australia’s empire, step by step, to include most of Melanesia. This greater Melanesian empire would eventually be guided to self-government. The proposal stood in a long line of ideas by Pacific-minded Australians going back for 100 years for an expanded Australian empire in the southwest Pacific. Consequently the Menzies cabinet’s rejection of Hasluck’s proposal was not just an important step towards changing its policy towards WNG; it marked the end to a century of Australian dreams and designs of a greater formal empire in the southwest Pacific.     

The Limits of Influence: Australia and the Future of New Caledonia, 1975 to 1988

From the late 1970s Australian governments (led in turn by Malcolm Fraser and Bob Hawke) expected New Caledonia to become independent. France responded with suspicion. From 1983, however, reformist governments in Australia and France took apparently converging views. But tensions rose because of unrest in New Caledonia and conflict over French nuclear testing. Australia’s limited capacity to influence developments waned further in 1986 when Jacques Chirac became French prime minister and countered the Kanak nationalist movement. Foreign Minister Bill Hayden favoured moderating Australia’s position, but the issue became moot in mid-1988 when the rival forces in New Caledonia agreed to the truce embodied in the Matignon Accords. The different approaches of the Fraser and Hawke governments reflected philosophical differences, the personal stance of key players, influences from their political movements, and the challenges of changing circumstances. Decades later, with a referendum due by November 2018, Australia’s approach is likely to be cautious.     

The secessionist spectre: the influence of authoritarianism,nativism and populism on support for Quebec independence

In recent years, Quebec has been undergoing a re‐evaluation of immigration and integration policies. The secessionist Parti Québécois had become the leader of this debate, which also coincided with a rise of right‐wing nativist, populist and sometimes authoritarian movements in other Western societies. This paper aims to evaluate the similarity or dissimilarity of Quebec's nationalism to these other nationalisms. We use the 2015 Canadian Election Study data to explore the influence of authoritarianism, nativism and populism directly on support for secession and also, indirectly, on voting intentions. We find that authoritarianism has a negative influence on support for Quebec independence and independentist parties, while the pattern is the opposite, and the effects somewhat weaker, for nativism and populism. Hence, we argue that Quebec nationalism does not seem to correlate with the right‐wing populist movement extending throughout many Western societies. Thus, Quebec nationalism was shown to be a distinct form of nationalism.     

The historical dynamics of ethnic conflicts: confrontational nationalisms,democracy and the Basques in contemporary Spain*

ABSTRACT. All the historical moments in which the Basque debate reached political protagonism in contemporary Spain coincided with political contexts of institutional democratisation. The debate on patriotism in the Basque Country is connected with a uniform narrative regarding the Basques and their moral distance from the Spanish nation: the ‘Basque problem’. This narrative has fostered a confrontational discourse between Spanish and Basque nationalism. It has also promoted recourse to specific stereotypical images of the Basques, which bind ethnicity to collective identity. Such representations reveal that the invention of the Basque country as a uniform ethnic collective had much more to do with the internal contradictions of Spanish national identity – and later of Basque identity – than with the existence of a secular conflict between Basques and Spaniards. The Basque case shows that every ‘ethnic conflict’ requires adequate contextualisation in order to avoid simplifying its origins and past pathways to make it conform to present uses.     

Impure and Worldly Geography:1 The Africanist Discourse of the Royal Geographical Society, 1831–73

The written networks through which knowledge is produced and circulated offer a focus for a theoretically informed critique of the formation of modern geographical knowledge. Drawing on deconstruction and colonial discourse theory, this paper presents a reading of the Royal Geographical Society's (RGS) published record of nineteenth-century African exploration. This discourse posits a racially unmarked subject-position as the condition of scientific discussion. The Society's geographical knowledge is shown to have been formed through the effacement of alternative subject-positions and the appropriation of other ways of knowing. It is suggested that closer attention to the discursive structures of written networks of knowledge might inform a more nuanced understanding of the reproduction of disciplined knowledge.     

Politicians,Merchants, and Colonial Maritime War: The Political and Economic Background of the American Act of 1708

During the War of the Spanish Succession (1702–13), there were attempts to support colonial maritime war by legislation, and the American Act of 1708 can be seen as their culmination. Historians who study privateering or colonial history have referred to this act in several contexts, such as reform in prize administration, naval impressment in American colonies, and Spanish‐American trade. However, the political and economic interests behind this act have not been fully investigated. By examining the process of the enactment of the American Act together with antecedent attempts to promote colonial maritime war in parliament, this article reveals the political and vested interests involved in the act, the relations between them, and the influence they had on the content of the act. This analysis will show the complex interaction between politics, trade, and colonial maritime war in the early‐18th‐century American colonies.     

The commodity crisis of the 1970s: scarcity,vulnerability and the West German metal supply

ABSTRACT

The 1970s were a period marked by price hikes and fluctuations in the commodity markets, both of which had considerable economic and political repercussions. Although this refers to almost all kinds of raw materials, the case of oil dominates the memory. Metals, by contrast, have received little attention despite their crucial importance for both industrialized consumer states and ore-exporting developing countries. This article develops three main points. First, by highlighting the global metal markets from the late 1960s to the early 1980s it contextualizes the oil-price shock and points out the interactions between the markets for energy and other raw materials. Second, the article aims to draw attention to the sense of crisis in Western industrialized countries regarding their metal supply during this period. This is a topic which has been overshadowed by the case of oil, but which nevertheless deserves study, also because of the parallels to recent developments between 2004 and 2011. Third, the article analyses how notions of resource scarcity, vulnerability and crisis were constructed despite the fact that the commodity crisis proved to be a merely anticipated crisis with high and volatile prices, but no long-term disruptions of supply. Within this article West Germany serves as a case study for highly industrialized, import-dependent countries. The focus is on non-ferrous metals like copper, nickel and aluminium.     

The origins of lithic projectile point technology: evidence from Africa,the Levant,and Europe

Projectile weaponry is a human cultural universal, but its origins and antiquity remain poorly understood. Stone- and bone-tipped projectile weapons have long been treated as emergent features of the "Upper Paleolithic" behavioral revolution. Recently it has been proposed that projectile technology was in widespread use among Homo sapiens populations in Africa during Middle Stone Age (MSA) times. One obstacle to researching the origins of projectile point technology is that the criteria archaeologists employ for recognizing plausible and implausible stone projectile points are largely subjective (overall tool shape, microwear traces). Tip cross-sectional area (TCSA) is a ballistically significant dimension that works well at discriminating North American stone projectile points (spearthrower dart tips and arrowheads) from spear points. This paper compares the TCSA values of ethnographic North American stone projectile points to hypothetical Middle and Upper Paleolithic stone projectile points from Africa, the Levant, and Europe. The results of this comparison do not support the hypothesis of widespread use of stone-tipped projectiles in Africa, the Levant, or Europe prior to 40 Ka. In the New World and in Australia, where we have the richest ethnographic record of stone projectile point use, these implements are largely employed in big-game hunting and in warfare. One or both of these factors may have played a role in the widespread adoption of stone projectile point technology after 40 Ka.     

The Internationalism of German Castle Research: Bodo Ebhardt,His European Network,and the Construction of 'Castle Knowledge'

Abstract

Recent monographs and articles emphasize the strong impact of nationalism and racist thinking on archaeology. In contrast to the treatments which focus on single nation states and on archaeology as a politically legitimate science, this paper explores the tension between internationalism and racist premises in German castle research, and how it manifests itself in the construction of knowledge about medieval castles across national borders. I will focus on Bodo Ebhardt, Germany's most famous and influential castle researcher of the first half of the 20th century. The analysis of his scientific work, and of his personal contact with other European researchers as well as with German politicians and patrons, will shed light on the changes and continuities in his network, and in particular on his construction of the past that was influenced by the formation of this network, which, in turn, affected his assessment of medieval castles.     

Locality,Mobility and Governmentality in Colonial/Postcolonial New Caledonia: The case of the Kouare tribe (xûâ Xârâgwii), Thio (Cöö)

The colonial history of New Caledonia has been one of dispossession, alienation, and racial segregation. Indigenous people did not experience a life of all‐embracing confinement and immobility. Instead, Kanak localities were historically shaped by the interplay of colonial projects, ideas, tensions, power relations, practices, representations, values, norms, and emotions. Based on the example of Thio, located on the south‐east coast of New Caledonia, this article explores these transformations, focusing on processes of localization and mobility in the colonial and postcolonial eras. The first section focuses on the encounter with and the interplay between different organisations in Thio: the missionary, mining, pastoral, and administrative frontiers. The second section explores the multilayered history of the landscape and settlement patterns in Xârâgwii/Kouare (a tribe located in the mountainous part of Thio), and the third section analyses the interplay of locality and mobility since World War II. The final section examines the ‘invention’ of the tribe as part of colonial governmental projects. The article concludes with a brief discussion of the meaning of this evolving dialectic in the current context of decolonization.     

The Cold War Politics of Cultural Minorities: Jews and Sorbs in the German Democratic Republic, 1976-1989

This article compares cultural identity politics relating toJews and Sorbs in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) from1976 to the collapse of communism in 1989. Drawing on stateand party sources, oral histories, literature and documentsfrom the Ministry for State Security (Stasi), it juxtaposesstate constructions of minority identities with the views andactions of Jewish and Sorbian students, writers and intellectuals.In its first three decades, the East German Communist party(SED) generally treated Jewish culture with suspicion or indifferenceand often conflated Jewishness with the capitalist West. Incontrast, the party celebrated a folkloric vision of Sorbianculture that linked Germany with the Slavic East. By the mid-1980s,the SED altered its posture towards Jews and Sorbs. In the GDR'sfinal decade, SED officials attempted to cultivate Jewish culturewhile viewing Sorbs with increased suspicion. The main reasonfor this shift was that SED officials placed Cold War foreignpolicy concerns over Marxist–Leninist ideological consistency.Treatment of Sorbs worsened as Sorbs forged ties with dissidentsin other Eastern Bloc nations. Meanwhile, celebrations of Jewishculture aimed to improve the GDR's ties with Western Europeby embracing Western Holocaust memory. The article also showsthat SED efforts to cultivate minority cultural identities oftenbackfired at the grassroots level. The minority cultural imagespromoted by the state often had little resonance outside leadershipcircles. Average GDR citizens frequently grew disenchanted withSED cultural minority policies, ultimately helping by the 1980sto destabilize the regime.