Monarchy and constructing identity in ‘British’ Gibraltar,c.1800 to the present

British Gibraltar began as a fortress, and royal coronations, jubilees and visits were initially celebrated in Gibraltar primarily by the British military and the colonial government. However, a substantial civilian population developed, to service the garrison and engage in trade. Sections of this civil community, not British-by-birth, increasingly demonstrated their loyalty to the crown on such royal occasions, in order to raise their status internally, protect their interests and increase their political influence inside Gibraltar. Spanish participation in royal events in Gibraltar, especially by members of the military and political elites from across the frontier, were also once commonplace and in Gibraltar uncontested. However, the relationship with Spain deteriorated, especially from the 1950s. Gibraltar's civil community then used expressions of loyalty to the British crown on royal occasions to assert its Britishness and to emphasise the duty of the British government to resist Spanish claims.     

从八旗驻防到地方行政制度——以清代盛京八旗驻防制度的嬗变为中心

清代承平日久,驻防盛京的旗人逐渐卷入当地的社会生活,由客居变为土著。旗人社会的变化,使以军事防御为主的八旗驻防制度发生了重大变革。本文通过对清代盛京八旗驻防制度的考察,认为驻防旗官从行政、司法、经济诸领域渗入地方社会的管理,八旗驻防的地方政府不断完善,与民官一起,成为区域社会的重要管理者。盛京将军辖区的"城"已成为驻防区约定俗成的政区,拥有治所、幅员、边界、行政组织等,驻防制度逐渐演变为带有八旗制度特征的地方行政制度。     

明代太仓州的设置

太仓在元初海上漕运时代成为重镇。明初因镇设卫,卫所兼理卫事及周遭民政。明中叶,太仓卫出现军强民弱、兵丁入寇贩盐等弊端,在赋役改革艰难、沿海防卫吃紧的情势下,太仓由卫建州,相关州县也免除欠粮,缓解了困境。此后由于州卫并存共治,军民杂居,利益抵触,军政关系仍趋紧张,又因太仓州、昆山县税则龃龉,昆山县以州大县小、州不利县为理由,在正德、嘉靖海氛不平的形势下兴起"废州"案。在州、卫、县的利益博弈以及官员对决的过程中,朝廷的态度由暧昧渐趋明朗,最终存州复道。在从卫所到州县的转变中,既体现了特定的地域特质,又反映了明代国家在地方行政体制上的转变态势。     

Impersonating a Voter: Constructions of Race,and Conceptions of Subjecthood in the Franchise of Colonial New South Wales,c. 1850–1865

ABSTRACT

This article investigates the treatment of Aboriginal Australians as politically entitled subjects within New South Wales during that colony's first elections under ‘universal’ male suffrage. Using the case of Yellow Jimmy, a ‘half-caste’ resident prosecuted for impersonating a white settler at an election in 1859, it examines the uncertainties that surrounded Aboriginal Australians’ position as British subjects within the colony's first constitutions. By contrast to the early colonial franchises of New Zealand and the Cape – where questions of indigenous residents’ access to enfranchisement dominated discussions of the colonies’ early constitutions – in the rare instances in which indigenous men claimed their right to vote in New South Wales, local officials used their own discretion in determining whether they held the political entitlements of British subjects. This formed a continuity with the earlier treatment of Aboriginal Australians under settler law, where British authority and imperial jurisdiction was often advanced ‘on-the-ground’ via jurists and administrators rather than via the statutes or orders of Parliament or the Colonial Office.     

Putting geopolitics in its place: Gibraltar and the emergence of strategic locations

Gibraltar has long been understood as a strategic location. In this paper I examine the historical emergence of this seemingly common-sense fact, turning to the rise of relational geography and assemblage thinking to re-theorise the idea of ‘strategic locations.’ I argue that the ‘unchanging truth’ of geography as asserted by (neo)classical geopolitical authors is always in fact becoming-otherwise, as shifts in the compositional assemblages (e.g., military-technological systems, logistical networks, domestic politics) can ripple through the place in question, very quickly making strategic places un-strategic again, or vice-versa. People and ideas are central to this emergence, as are place-based materialities such as terrain, technologies, and even micro-climates. Empirically I examine first the emergence of Gibraltar within an English/British cartographic and visual apparatus in the 17th century. I then turn to the materiality of the Strait of Gibraltar and the specific agency of the eponymous Rock, as they both interact with various shifts in military technology and the organisation of empire. I conclude with a call for an assemblage approach to place in geopolitics, highlighting the advantages of such an approach.     

The present tense of Afghanistan: accounting for space,time and gender in processes of militarisation

Based on ethnographic research among women married to servicemen, this article explores the diffusion of militarisation across time as well as social space. The study setting is a garrison town in Germany during the deployment of women's husbands to Afghanistan. Rather than prioritising the grand narratives of linear time prevalent in IR and military history, however, this article takes into account cyclical and everyday modes of temporality that have traditionally been associated (and undervalued) as feminised ‘zones’, including reproduction, the domestic sphere and local social space. The article explores the temporal register of an operational tour and demonstrates the material, discursive and emotional labour undertaken by military wives in smoothing and converting this rupture into stability through everyday practices. Accounting for the diffusion of militarisation over time as well as space in this way provides further evidence that its causes and effects are intricately gendered.     

Foreign banks in the pacific: a note

The lives of Pacific Islanders during World War II can be described through a combination of documentary and oral history. This article reviews the experiences of the people of Chuuk (formerly ‘Truk’) in the Central Caroline Islands during the Pacific War. Chuuk served as headquarters for the Japanese Imperial Navy's Fourth Fleet and, later, rear area headquarters for the Combined Fleet. When the Japanese military shifted to defence in mid-1943, troops fortified the island, resulting in the confiscation of land and relocation of the Chuukese. From late 1943 to August 1945, Chuukese experience was shaped by Allied bombing, intensive labour demands from the Japanese garrison, and severe food shortages. After surrender, Chuuk was occupied by a minimal US Navy presence. The war and its aftermath shaped modern Chuuk through permanent changes in its resources, economy and political role.     

Embodying the garrison state? Everyday geographies of militarization in American society

This study evaluates the garrison state hypothesis (Lasswell, 1941, Lasswell, 1962), which posited that the United States and other democratic states were becoming militarized societies, dominated by military culture, values, and goals. Building on the work of various scholars who have more recently identified the militarization of U.S. policies and other actions emanating from the formal state apparatus, we have explored the everyday geographies of the nation-state, with particular emphasis upon the experiences and activities of people in local settings. Considering the contingency of how everyday geographies of the state are constituted, two towns (Hopkinsville, Kentucky and Clarksville, Tennessee) neighboring Fort Campbell, Kentucky are analyzed using interviews, participant observations, and documentary evidence to examine manifestations of militarism and ongoing processes of militarization. Despite their common adjacency to Fort Campbell, the agency of actors in Hopkinsville and Clarksville has at times resulted in different bases for resistance to, and acceptance of, militarizing processes. We conclude that the construction of a ‘friendly’ or democratic ‘garrison state’ does not emerge in a simple, top-down manner, but rather is possible only with the people and practices who constitute the everyday geographies of the state, though this process is negotiated differently in different settings due to the complex central–local relations occurring within them.     

‘Safe spaces’ and ‘bad’ girls: ‘child marriage victims’’ experiences from a shelter in Eastern India

This article interrogates the politics of safety that underpin rehabilitative practices in a state-funded shelter run by an anti-trafficking NGO in Eastern India. It focuses on the experiences of a group of female adolescents, categorised as ‘child marriage victims’, residing at the shelter. The analysis of in-depth life history interviews collected over a two-week period in October 2014 reveals that the adolescents contest the legislative victimhood imposed on them. For them, their marriages and pre-marital relationships are an expression of romantic and sexual agency, in contravention of familial norms. In this context, the adolescents perceive the shelter as a punitive space and interpret their enforced stay for ‘protection’ and ‘rehabilitation’ as an extension of familial control and regulation of their lives. The protectionism-as-safety discourse rewrites their agency as victimhood and transforms the shelter into a site where everyday forms of gendered power inequalities within social relations in the household are authorised and reproduced by the state and NGO. The adolescents perceive themselves as ‘bad girls’ and adopt various strategies to insist on their rehabilitation into ‘good girls’ to secure release from the shelter often by enacting the ‘victimhood’ expected of them. This allows for unique expressions of agency in an otherwise constrained context but hinders relationships of solidarity with other residents. Overall, the article highlights the need to challenge the ways in which patriarchal norms continue to spatially govern and discipline the expression of female sexuality and agency through 'safe spaces' in India.     

Rural Agricultural Economies and Military Provisioning at Roman Gordion (Central Turkey)

Roman Gordion, on the Anatolian plateau, is the only excavated rural military settlement in a pacified territory in the Roman East, providing a unique opportunity to investigate the agricultural economy of a permanent Roman garrison. We present combined results of archaeobotanical and zooarchaeological analyses, assessing several hypotheses regarding Roman military provisioning. The garrison adapted its dietary preferences to local agricultural systems, but maintained its traditional meat supply of pork, beef, and chickens as well. There is evidence for economic interdependence with local farmers and cattle herders, self-sufficiency in pork and chicken production, and complex relationships with autonomous sheep and goat herders who pursued their own economic goals. If the Roman military in Gordion exercised a command economy, they were able to implement that control only on specific components of the agricultural sector, especially cereal farming. The sheep and goat herding system remained unaltered, targeting secondary products for a market economy and/or broader provincial taxation authorities. The garrison introduced new elements to the animal economy of the Gordion region, including a new pig husbandry system. Comparison with contemporary non-military settlements suggests both similarities and differences with urban meat economies of Roman Anatolia.     

A Good Soldier,but a Maligned Governor: General Sir Archibald Hunter,Governor of Gibraltar 1910–13

This article examines the governorship in Gibraltar of General Sir Archibald Hunter in the years from 1910 and to 1913. It highlights the difficulties that governors of strategically important British outposts, such as the imperial fortresses of Gibraltar, Malta and Bermuda, faced in discharging the dual roles of civil governor and military governor. Drawing upon evidence from Hunter's biographers, the National Archives in London and repositories in Gibraltar, this article examines the effect on the careful balance of interests between the Colonial Office, the War Office and the local civilian community when such a balance was tested almost to destruction by a governor more used to front-line military action than to colonial government. This article also sheds light on why Hunter's subsequent career was stifled—something that his biographers have hitherto failed to explain.     

‘… For it was founded upon a Rock’: Gibraltar and the Purposes of Empire in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

In 1853–54, cholera in Britain forced the leadership at the tiny British fortress colony of Gibraltar to make a choice. Should the colony quarantine ships from Britain or leave the maritime frontier open to ships from the metropolitan centre of empire? The first choice secured imperial communication between London and the Rock, but it also jeopardised Gibraltar's land access to Southern Spain, as the failure to quarantine British ships would surely force Spanish authorities to close their border to protect against pandemic disease. Contrapuntally, the decision to protect Gibraltarian trade with Spain undermined any substantive claim to British ‘control’ over its colonial possession. The choice here was highlighted by Gibraltar's colonial governor, General Sir Robert Gardiner, who insisted that Gibraltar be governed as a British colony and kept open to the colonial centre at all costs, and Gibraltar's merchant community, a group that feared the economic consequences of a frontier closure at Gibraltar enough to favour keeping the Rock's quarantine policies in line with Spanish regulations rather than those set by Britain. As a result of this medical dispute, Gibraltar became a pivotal location, a metonym for a much broader conversation about the uses and purposes of Britain's overseas empire in the middle years of the nineteenth century.     

The role of morbidity in the mortality decline of the nineteenth century: evidence from the military population at Gibraltar 1818-1899

The causes of the nineteenth-century decline of mortality, characterized by lower mortality rates and increased longevity, have been the subject of debate among researchers for the past half-century. Because of a paucity of reliable data, little is understood about the role of morbidity, or illness episodes, in the mortality decline. This article introduces the results of a study that looks at the relationship of morbidity in the mortality decline during this portion of the epidemiological transition. The data are comprised of hospital admissions and deaths collected by the British army on the soldiers of the Gibraltar garrison from 1819 to 1899. Morbidity dropped during this period, but at a slower rate than mortality, and all categories of disease did not fall in concert; in some categories, morbidity rose as mortality dropped. Statistical modeling is used to analyze the categories of diseases that were most influential in the decline of mortality in this group. This research shows that there are discernible relationships between morbidity and mortality and that the two parameters are responding to different driving forces. Because changes within the military medical system may have had an effect on the relationship of the morbidity and mortality rates of the soldiers, surviving medical reports are used to reconstruct the medical care of the troops during the study period.     

Weaponizing nature: The geopolitical ecology of the US Navy’s biofuel program

The United States military is treating climate change as a crucial factor in its preparation for future conflicts. This concern manifests not only in strategic planning and forward-looking documents, but also in building infrastructural capacity and material provision. Yet, the impetus to ‘green’ the military goes beyond the deployment of existing technologies. We examine several facets of the military's role as an environmental actor, particularly through its promotion of the US Navy's ‘Great Green Fleet’ (GGF), which actively supports the development of advanced biofuels by subsidizing their development and facilitating wider marketization. The GGF promises to reduce military reliance on conventional fossil fuels and reconfigure its energy sourcing, thus reducing dependence on imported hydrocarbons; this is with an eye towards ultimately severing the logistical relationship between existing energy infrastructures and the spaces of military intervention. Taking an integrated lens of political ecology and geopolitics - ‘geopolitical ecology’ - we seek to provide an understanding of the production of weaponized nature. We demonstrate that the US military's discursive use of climate change to justify the provision of new military hardware and advanced biofuels promotes a vision of resource conflicts to support the development of technologies to overcome the constraints to delivery of fuel to emergent front lines. We argue that while this may appear to be militarized greenwashing, it signals a shift in the logics and practices of fuel sourcing driven by a dystopian vision of climate change, which the US military played a significant role in creating.     

Russia resurgent? Moscow's campaign to ‘coerce Georgia to peace’

Russia's military incursion into Georgia in August 2008 and formal recognition of South Ossetia and Abkhazia raise fundamental questions about Russian regional policy, strategic objectives and attitudes to the use of armed force. The spectacle of maneouvre warfare on the periphery of Europe could form a watershed in post‐Cold War Russian relations with its neighbourhood and the wider international community. The speed and scale with which Russia's initial ‘defensive’ intervention to ‘coerce Georgia to peace’ led to a broad occupation of many Georgian regions focuses attention on the motivations behind Russian military preparations for war and the political gains Moscow expected from such a broad offensive. Russia has failed to advance a convincing legal case for its operations and its ‘peace operations’ discourse has been essentially rhetorical. Some Russian goals may be inferred: the creation of military protectorates in South Ossetia and Abkhazia; inducing Georgian compliance, especially to block its path towards NATO; and creating a climate of uncertainty over energy routes in the South Caucasus. Moscow's warning that it will defend its ‘citizens’ (nationals) at all costs broadens the scope of concerns to Russia's other neighbour states, especially Ukraine. Yet an overreaction to alarmist scenarios of a new era of coercive diplomacy may only encourage Russian insistence that its status, that of an aspirant global power, be respected. This will continue to be fuelled by internal political and psychological considerations in Russia. Careful attention will need to be given to the role Russia attributes to military power in pursuing its revisionist stance in the international system.     

Food on the Borderlands: Josie Underwood’s Civil War Diary and the Kentucky Home Front, 1860–1862

The diary of Johanna Louisa ‘Josie’ Underwood (1840–1923), the daughter of Kentucky lawyer, politician and plantation owner Warner Underwood, portrays what happened to many elite households in Kentucky during the American Civil War (1861–1865), especially with its depiction of food as a scarce, and thus increasingly valuable, resource. Spanning the first two years of the conflict, Josie’s diary is essentially a war narrative written by a well-educated, articulate, outspoken, Unionist woman from a slave-owning family who was barely out of her teens when the fighting began. As she reveals through her entries, her state and in particular her hometown of Bowling Green, was a ‘hotbed of political and military action’, and at the centre of this ‘hotbed’ of activity was food. Often historians think about wartime hunger as a function of the later years of the war, but as Josie’s diary elucidates, food scarcity was an immediate and constant issue. Consequently, food became an important commodity in the borderlands during the war, especially in occupied cities like Bowling Green, where it was a vital, yet elusive, military and civilian resource which, when accessed and controlled, functioned as social currency and a political symbol of power, especially for women.     

‘Talking Itself Out of a Political Future’: Education and Australian Army Engagement with Papua New Guinean Independence, 1966–72

The Australian Army, while having a long association with Papua New Guinea after the Second World War and before independence in 1975, is often conceptualized as a small player in the decolonization process, of interest to scholars because of its cost and potential threat to democratic government. This article examines the Army’s education programme and associated policies in the decade before independence to argue that the institution was acutely aware of looming decolonization, and actively sought to create a national Papua New Guinean military by repurposing policies originally designed to serve Australia’s defence needs, in particular through ‘civic’ education. It embarked on this path without direction from the Department of Territories. While the results of ‘civic’ education are difficult to determine, this article shows that the Australian Army was engaged in the profound shifts occurring around it in Papua New Guinea.     

‘Just and lawful war’ as genocidal war in the (United States) Northwest Ordinance and Northwest Territory, 1787–1832

This article focuses on the United States Northwest Ordinance of 1787's profession of ‘utmost good faith’ towards Indians and its provision for ‘just and lawful wars’ against them. As interpreted by US officials as they authorized and practised war against native communities in the Northwest Territory from 1787 to 1832, the ‘just and lawful wars’ clause legalized wars of ‘extirpation’ or ‘extermination’, terms synonymous with genocide by most definitions, against native people who resisted US demands that they cede their lands. Although US military operations seldom achieved extirpation, this was due to their ineptness and the success of indigenous strategies rather than an absence of intention. When US military forces did succeed in achieving their objective, the result was massacre, as revealed in the Black Hawk War of 1832. US policy did not call for genocide in the first instance, preferring that Indians embrace the gift of civilization in exchange for their lands. Should Indians reject this display of ‘utmost good faith’, however, US policy legalized genocidal war against them.     

Peripheral creativity: temporary cultural uses as alternatives to inefficient policies?

ABSTRACT

The article focuses on temporary and improvised cultural spaces in marginalized neighbourhoods of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. They are presented here as alternatives to current urban and cultural policies, often based on international ‘best practices’ models with exclusionary and segregating consequences. It begins with a brief overview into North American and Western European cultural planning policies. It then analyses the instability of cultural policies in Brazil, highlighting that, after a period of State recognition of bottom-up actions, administrators have turned to a contradictory planning scheme that mixes outdated and recent international trends, leading lower-income inhabitants to self-build their own cultural spaces. Unlike many products of today’s global strand of ‘tactic urbanism’, Rio’s temporary spaces are politically charged territories of resistance. An example is ‘Cine Taquara’ – an improvised cinema and debate forum that illustrates how, in an unequal city, such initiatives can do more towards social inclusion than ready-made models.