Lost Palaces,Lost History: The Wang of Bangkok’s Rattanakosin

Siam’s practices of polygamy variously bemused and shocked European visitors to the kingdom in the nineteenth century; however, especially in the case of the early Chakri monarchy, there was always also a strong political rationale to such customs. Multiple liaisons would yield multiple sons who could subsequently serve as defenders of both realm and dynasty; later, as the nation evolved, they could form a pool of ministers and administrators. Multiple daughters, in turn, were always useful in shoring up support from a restive nobility. Sons in particular, however, presented a real estate challenge as they had to be housed in appropriate style and this called for a profusion of both small and large palaces, wang, throughout the old historic city of Rattanakosin. From the locations of wang and their degrees of splendour one might have been able to read the evolving politics and political economy of early Bangkok, also the always evolving role of the monarchy, except that most have been swept away for more mundane urban development. Yet enough evidence remains for the story still to be pieced together, thereby throwing some light on currently fraught debates over the political context and role of the monarchy.     

King Solomon’s Gold: Ophir in an Age of Empire

Contemplating King Solomon’s enormous importation of gold from the mysterious land of Ophir filled Victorians with vicarious pride and glutted their pedantic appetite with no end of tempting antiquarian puzzles concerning the identity of his trading partners. This article provides details and context regarding the various putative Ophirs proposed by British travellers during the nineteenth century, which ranged from Sumatra to the Gold Coast. It concludes in the latter decades of the century, when the legend of King Solomon’s mines converged with the discovery of gold in South Africa. As scholars have noted, the mid-century discovery of ancient ruins in present-day Zimbabwe by the German explorer Karl Mauch rekindled the Ophir debate and focused most people’s attention on South Africa as its location. This was also the immediate context to Rider Haggard’s fascination with ancient African civilization in his immensely popular novel King Solomon’s Mines. Numerous subsequent explorers, adventure novelists, and armchair archaeologists added to this wave of speculation about Ophir in the three decades that followed Mauch’s original identification of Great Zimbabwe with the biblical Ophir. By connecting these later depictions of Ophir (both fictional and archaeological) with speculations from earlier in the nineteenth century, this article presents King Solomon’s gold as a common context for evolving justifications, ambivalences, and understandings of British imperialism, from an empire of trade to one of conquest and annexation.     

Australia’s war in Vietnam: debate without end

Australia’s commitment in Vietnam can be interpreted as a small ally drawing its superpower partner into war for its own ends. Two studies by eminent Australian authors throw light on the role of human agency, and in so doing bring Australian historiography of the war closer to the trend in the United States. Peter Edwards’s history just about describes Vietnam as ‘Menzies War’. However, he finds no new sources on Menzies’s mindset, and diminishes the roles of his foreign ministers, Garfield Barwick and Paul Hasluck. The late Geoffrey Bolton’s intimate biography of Hasluck shows him as an active minister and also that his private papers are thin on Vietnam, the part of his distinguished career on which he never wrote. The Cabinet meeting of 17 December 1964 reveals much more about Australian decision-making on going to war than can be gleaned from Edwards’s cursory treatment and Bolton’s second-hand account. Barwick’s different approach, and even Hasluck’s last-minute caution, show Australia had a choice. Barwick, if he had remained Foreign Minister, might have kept Australia out of the Vietnam war, so freeing it to continue to play a leading regional political role.     

The construction of gender-sensitive peacebuilding in Australia: ‘Advance Australia Fair’

Australia was the first United Nations member state to commit to the United Nations Peacebuilding Fund when it was established in 2006, and it has made annual contributions since then. Australia has also made significant contributions towards enhancing gender equality in peace and security governance, most recently during its 2013–14 term of office on the United Nations Security Council, recognising that gender matters in and to all aspects of peacebuilding activity. This article offers a discourse-theoretical policy analysis of a range of Australian Agency for International Development guidelines and strategies addressing gender and peacebuilding issues, and reads these against the international framework to explore the discursive construction of gender-sensitive peacebuilding in Australia. The authors argue that the representations of peacebuilding in the documents they analyse shape how Australia engages in peacebuilding-related activities and inform how Australia is positioned internationally as a peacebuilding actor.     

Australia’s Detention Centre and the Erosion of Democracy in Nauru

Since 2013, the Nauru government has undermined democracy by reducing the independence of the judiciary, treating opposition MPs as potential traitors, curbing freedom of speech and restricting visits by variously defined groups of people who include journalists, Australians and New Zealanders. New Zealand responded by suspending its aid to Nauru’s justice and border control department. Australia, by contrast, has said little. The Nauru government would not have acted so boldly in curbing civil freedoms and weakening the rule of law if Australia had been less dependent on its goodwill to act as host for Australia’s Regional Processing Centre, which houses asylum seekers who have attempted to reach Australia by boat. Australia’s reliance on Nauru – driven by urgent domestic political considerations – has fostered an atmosphere where the principles of good governance can be flouted with little fear of significant criticism from Canberra.     

The role of the chair in informal international organisations: Australia’s Group of Twenty presidency

Scholars of international relations have devoted significant effort to understanding international organisations. However, two areas have been understudied: the role of the chair in international multilateral negotiations and the role of informal international organisations. Yet informal international organisations are increasingly important in international affairs as world leaders turn to smaller and more flexible forums to address global challenges. This article addresses these two blind spots in the literature by considering the role of Australia as chair in one of the most important yet most understudied informal international organisations: the Group of Twenty (G20). Drawing on primary interview data and the participant observations of the first author, who was a member of the G20 chair in 2013–14 during Australia’s presidency, the authors examine two theoretical puzzles: (1) why states delegate control of the negotiation process to a chair and (2) how the chair can, and does, influence the negotiation process. It is argued that member states delegate control to the chair to overcome specific institutional failures and, in doing so, provide the chair with the power to influence the negotiation process. The authors also argue that the G20 case indicates that existing theory overlooks key factors which restrict the capacity of the chair to influence the negotiation outcome.     

Academic Journals in the Digital Age: An Editor’s Perspective

The contributors to this forum each reflect on a particular aspect of the future of academic publishing. James Mussell outlines how the form of the online academic journal, and in particular ongoing use of pdf, remains resistant to the potential that the digital environment can offer. Lucinda Matthews-Jones continues the conversation by explaining how journal blogs, such as JVC Online, act as digital spaces that facilitate more creative engagement with multimedia and which allow authors to foster and to interact with new and often broader networks of readers. Finally, Helen Rogers surveys the current landscape of academic publishing and urges us, as scholars, to move beyond the traditional schema and embrace the potential that Web 2.0 can offer. As more and more of our scholarly lives are lived online, the investment of the scholarly journal in print culture becomes apparent. These essays recognize the value of longevity, of scholarship’s commitment to both the past and the future, but they also suggest that scholarly publication needs to attend more closely to the times in which it is published.     

Testing the waters: the limits of consequentialist logic in Australia’s asylum seeker debate

This work takes existing justifications for Australian asylum seeker policy at face value. For the past five years now both major parties have articulated themselves using the rhetoric of consequentialism, arguing that the policies of offshore detention and boat turn backs are all about securing the safety of refugees. This work puts the personal opinions of each member of parliament aside and examines whether these rhetorical justifications are internally consistent. What will become clear is that the utilitarian framework used in this debate does not sit on terra firma. Rather, its foundations lead to conclusions many might find uncomfortable – suggesting that existing theoretical justifications for Australian asylum seeker policy are ultimately implausible.     

The Landscape of China’s Participation in the Bronze Age Eurasian Network

Journal of World Prehistory - In the last decade, much has been learned about the network of interactions in Bronze Age Eurasia, and the importance of the steppe pastoralists in the creation of...     

The Henequen Ports of Yucatan’s Gilded Age

Over the last two centuries, the coast has played a major role in the economy of Yucatán, and has served as a key venue in its growing engagement in the global economy. A prominent chapter in this history took place during the Gilded Age (1860–1915), which saw the emergence of a powerful plantation class whose wealth was based on meeting international demand for the fiber of the agave, or henequen plant, which was used to manufacture rope, cordage, and twine. The cultivation of this plant gave rise to hundreds of plantations, and an accompanying infrastructure of haciendas, fiber processing plants, and an extensive regional network of railways for transporting henequen to the port of Progreso, from whence it was exported to North America and Europe. As part of this infrastructure, several plantation owners laid rail lines from their haciendas to the coast and built small ports for shipping their henequen to Progreso. These ports, which are documented in these pages, represented a substantial capital outlay, and were built under the shadow of the gathering clouds of the Mexican Revolution. Viewed in retrospect, they offer an insightful perspective on the economic outlook of the Yucatecan elites in the dawn of the modern age.     

Australia’s China policy of strategic ambiguity: navigating between big fish

History, little understood, shows that for 55 years a policy of ‘strategic ambiguity’ about the application of the Australia, New Zealand, United States Security Treaty to Taiwan, a flashpoint in Asia, served Australia well. Return to it could lessen the risks of embroilment in any Sino-American war in East Asia, and enhance Australia’s middle-power options.