The commonwealth as history

The Imperial Dream: The British Commonwealth and Empire 1775–1969 by Edward Grierson. London: Collins, 1972. Pp. 320. £2.50. It is a pity that no one has troubled to read the proofs; the bibliography is peppered with spelling mistakes.

Commonwealth: A History of the British Commonwealth of Nations by H. Duncan Hall, with an introduction by Sir Robert Menzies. London, New York, Cincinnati, Toronto, Melbourne: Van Nostrand Reinhold Co., 1971. Pp. xxxvi+1015, maps, illustrations. £10.00.     

The appropriation of the Phoenicians in British imperial ideology

The Phoenicians played ambivalent roles in Western historical imagination. One such role was as a valued predecessor and prototype for the industrial and maritime enterprise of nineteenth‐century imperial Britain. Explicit parallels were drawn in historical representations and more popular culture. It was widely believed that the Phoenicians had been present in Britain, especially in Cornwall, despite a lack of convincing historical evidence, and much importance was placed on supposed archaeological evidence. Ideological tensions arose from the need to reconcile ancient and modern Britain, and from the Semitic origin of the Phoenicians. This example shows the power of archaeological objects to provide material support for national and imperial constructions of the past.     

The slow death and strange rebirths of imperial history

The Oxford History of the British Empire, Volume V, Historiography edited by Robin W. Winks. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp.xxxiv + 731. £35.00 (hardback). ISBN 0–19–820566‐X.     

关于中华帝国晚期心态史的探索

Some elements of Puritanism in Chinese tradition are obviously different from the well-known intellectual phenomenon in the West; in the Neo-Confucian ambit the key question concerns “order-disorder,” “harmony-disharmony” in society and inside one’s personality, rather than “sin” and “purity” in personal morality. Yet we also find that chastity is involved in the contrast between the two concepts of purity and pollution and the idea of “obscene” (meaning “inauspicious,” “ill-omened,” “profane”) allows us to uncover a darker side to sexual representation. Death seems another source of active or passive pollution: this effect occurs after contaminational contact with human or animal remains. Thus death is the source of “desecration,” or of “contamination,” especially when it is the consequence of violence. This means that in Chinese culture, a sense of impurity seems to be driven by the horror of death and the fear of being overwhelmed by the passion of love; respectively, thanatos and eros. Other topics may also be associated, such as mental insanity referring to what is different, abnormal, strange, and socially subversive. The clean-unclean distinction originally responded to a basic visceral feeling—horror and repulsion/disgust—that is typically associated with hygienic worries and matter that is perceived as repugnant and inedible. But these basic ideas seem to have been symbolically extended to cope with the subconscious and metaphysical spheres: the horror of death and the fear of being overwhelmed by passion, the mysteries which lie behind these emotions, and the attempt to sublimate such fears into an impulse to transcend the red dust of our limited existence.     

Claiming the high ground: theories of imperial authority and the British hill stations in India

By the 1880s, imperial government's practice of ‘retreating’ to the Indian hill stations for much of the year was well established. Despite the strength of this new tradition, such a relocation of colonial administration never lacked its critics. This paper examines the expanding administrative use of the hill stations from the early nineteenth century through the 1880s. As the nineteenth century ‘scientific’ framework for British control of India was formed, conflicting strategies and practices for maintaining imperial control required mediation and contrasting frameworks for defining duty and loyalty between government and subject vied for dominance. The significance of Utilitarian thought, changing appraisals of climate and constructions of race are evaluated in an analysis of the imperial hill stations.