The defence dilemma in Britain

The UK faces a pressing defence dilemma. The declaratory goals of defence policy are struggling to match the demands made by operational commitments and the financial and organizational capacities. The article examines how and why this situation has come about. While recognizing that existing calls for higher defence spending, reform of the Ministry of Defence, efficiency gains or a renewal of the so‐called military covenant between the military and society may address discrete elements of the defence dilemma in Britain, it argues that current problems derive from a series of deeper tensions in the nexus of British defence more widely defined. These include a transnationalization of strategic practice, in ways that both shape and constrain the national defence policy process; the institutional politics of defence itself, which encourage different interpretations of interest and priority in the wider strategic context; and finally the changing status of defence in the wider polity, which introduces powerful veto points into the defence policy process itself. It argues that while a series of shocks may have destabilized existing policy, prompted ad hoc organizational adaptation in the armed forces and led to incremental cost saving measures from the government, a ‘dominant crisis narrative’—in the form of a distinctive and generally agreed programme of change—has yet to emerge. The article concludes by looking forward to a future strategic defence review, highlighting the critical path dependencies and veto points which must be addressed if transformative change in British defence is to take place.     

The decomposition of the Danish imperial monarchy

One of the classical questions in the study of nationalism concerns the end of empires. Is nationalism, to use the phrase of Hiers and Wimmer, the cause or consequence of the end of empire? This paper considers a neglected case, that of the decomposition of the Danish imperial monarchy in the years between 1848 and 1864. We find that nationalist conflicts indisputably caused the end of this political entity. Crucially, Danish nationalists in the imperial core preferred to downsize the territories controlled by the Oldenburgs rather than to share power with German speakers in the periphery. Decomposition was not, however, inevitable: an early introduction of power‐sharing schemes might have saved the imperial monarchy.     

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 historical trend of Ming China: An imperial agric-mercantile society

Majority of contemporary Chinese historians have been employing a conceptual framework focusing on the difficulty of capitalistic development in China to analyze the historical trend and potentials of late imperial China. This approach based upon the presupposition of viewing the pattern of Chinese history as abnormal reflects with the remaining influence of the Western-centric methodology. Further, based upon a “normal” point of view, seven fundamental, irreversible, and systematical changes to the Ming society could be identified. By conclusion, China in the Ming period was transforming into an imperial agric-mercantile society. This process proves that late imperial China was not stagnate society without “history,” meanwhile, its pattern of development was clearly not identical to the Western style modernization progress.     

明代中国历史趋势:帝制农商社会

Majority of contemporary Chinese historians have been employing a conceptual framework focusing on the difficulty of capitalistic development in China to analyze the historical trend and potentials of late imperial China. This approach based upon the presupposition of viewing the pattern of Chinese history as abnormal reflects with the remaining influence of the Western-centric methodology. Further, based upon a “normal” point of view, seven fundamental, irreversible, and systematical changes to the Ming society could be identified. By conclusion, China in the Ming period was transforming into an imperial agric-mercantile society. This process proves that late imperial China was not stagnate society without “history,” meanwhile, its pattern of development was clearly not identical to the Western style modernization progress. __________ Translated by Chen Cheng from Dongbei Shida Xuebao 东北师大学报(Journal of Northeast Normal University), 2007, (1): 5–13     

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.     

The imperial gospel according to Frederick Madden

Select Documents on the Constitutional History of the British Empire and Commonwealth edited by Frederick Madden. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 8 vols., 1985–2000.

I. ‘The Empire of the Bretaignes’, 1175–1688 (1985, 0–313–23897–9)

II. The Classical Period of the First British Empire, 1689–1783 (1985,0–313–25176–2)

IE. Imperial Reconstruction, 1763–1840 (1987, 0–313–25916‐X)

IV. Settler Self‐Government, 1840–1900 (1990, 0–313–27326‐X)

V. The Dependent Empire and Ireland, 1840–1890 (1991, 0–313–27757–5)

VI. The Dominions and India Since 1900 (1993, 0–313–27317–0)

VII. The Dependent Empire, 1900–1948 (1994,0–313–27318–9)

VIII. The End of Empire: Dependencies Since 1948 (2000,0–313–29072–5, £83.95)     

Australindia: the geography of imperial desire

A tradition of imperial geographical fantasy fuses India and Australia. This paper discusses the strategic role these utopian proposals played in imperial erotics, in aiding the foundational ambition of empire, which is to connect. The proponents of these geographical hybrids (T.J. Maslen, W. Pickering and Thomas Livingston Mitchell) occupied very different positions in Greater Britain's colonial administration and the minority knowledges represented by their speculative overlays of India onto Australia circulated in very different cultural circles. The insider/outsider status of these ex-army, turned surveyors suggests a more complex ecology of alternative discourses circulating in the imperial imaginary: as proposals for future places, the schemes discussed in this article were fictions that aestheticized invasion, making it a metaphor for ultimate unity.     

Empire‐nation: national and imperial discourses in England

When the states of England and Scotland combined in 1707, conditions were created whereby English nationalism could merge into British nationalism. With the expansion of empire, English nationalism was expressed through imperial‐national discourses allowing English nationalists to claim non‐English space when articulating what might be best understood as an Anglo‐British nationalism. Accordingly, such discourses largely ‘hid’ what one might now understand as ‘English nationalism’ within a ‘British’ discourse of empire. The case of England illustrates that imperial discourses can become intimately bound up with the ‘national’ discourse of the nations at the core of the imperial structures. Accordingly, it is here argued that imperial and national discourse are not necessarily opposed to each other, but are able to feed into each other, affecting the manner in which ideas of the nation and empire are conceived and articulated.     

1934—1936年间中美关系中的白银外交

美国政府 193 4年通过的《购银法》造成世界银价飞涨。作为银本位大国的中国深受其害 ,白银大量外流 ,金融出现严重危机。中国政府与美国政府进行了长达两年的艰苦交涉 ,最后与美国达成了白银交易 ,先后三次向美国售银总计 1 44亿盎司 ,并利用售银所得的外汇改革和稳定了中国的币制 ,实现了中国多年来一直追求的货币现代化。     

Writing imperial history in the age of high nationalism: imperial historians on the fringes of the Habsburg monarchy

For a long time, the late period of the Habsburg Monarchy has been characterized as a battlefield of nation-building elites who employed historical scholarship (among other means) to promote nationalistic ideas. More recent studies, however, have examined and called attention to the powerful structures which held this monarchy together. In the age of historicism, the Habsburg Monarchy also needed a plausible historical narrative on which it could base claims of the legitimacy of its rule. This narrative was created first and foremost by Viennese historians. Yet there were historians in the Habsburg Monarchy’s regional centres who made significant contributions to the development of concepts of an imperial history, too. In this article, the author examines their efforts. Until around 1900, supranationalism and regionalism were the dominant concepts in the historical writings of the authors in the Military Frontier and Bukovina and also in the works of the renowned Prague historian Anton Gindely. Loyal to Vienna, some Hungarian historians reassessed national history in order to reconcile it with the imperial past. Transnational history was also a method of demonstrating the congruity of national and imperial interests. In the age of high nationalism, historians thus contributed to both national and imperial cohesion.