Institutional Transplantation: The Chinese Lawyers in Republican Shanghai,1912-1937

Sun Huei-min's book is the latest among a number of scholarly works on the role of the legal profession in Republican China.While some of the issues addressed in this book were covered in those other works,the author has provided more details and introduced new issues,partly through primary sources that were not taken up earlier.Alison Connor's works ("Legal Education during the Republican Period:Soochow University Law School," Republican China 19,no.1 (1993):84-112;"Lawyers and the Legal Profession During the Republican Period," in Kathryn Bernhardt and Philip Huang,eds.,Civil Law in Qing and Republican China.Stanford:Stanford University Press,1994),for instance,did not use the Shanghai Bar Association (SBA)'s annual reports,while Xiaoqun Xu's works ("The Fate of Judicial Independence in Republican China,1912-1937," China Quarterly,no.149 (1997):1-28;Chinese Professionals and the Republican State:The Rise of Professional Associations in Shanghai,1912-1937,New York:Cambridge University Press,2001) did use the SBA's annual reports but not the SBA's archives.     

The Non-Geographer: Overlooked but not forgotten

This paper is concerned with epistemological and attitudinal problems encountered in communicating geographical concepts to non-geographers. It reflects a Canadian context and offers a case study of a group of non-geographers whose special needs are often overlooked: the teachers of social studies. An inductive approach, using systematic geography only as required in order to understand a case study, is found to be effective in building bridges for those new to the subject. The choice of sequence should be from the empirical to the theoretical, in which fieldwork fulfils a point of entry for non-geographers.     

Out of the dark but not out of the cage: women's empowerment and gender relations in the Dangme West district of Ghana

In Ghana, strategies to address poverty among rural women have often been linked to women's empowerment programmes with credit as a core component of these. Yet, many programmes focus on the economic benefit to women without necessarily looking at the impact on gender relations at the household level and its implications on women. Using quantitative and qualitative data from the Dangme West district of Ghana, this article shows how poverty reduction programmes with credit components can reduce women's vulnerability to poverty and empower them. But much more needs to be done to complement these efforts. The study shows that women beneficiaries as against women non-beneficiaries have significantly improved their socio-economic status through access to financial and non-financial resources. This has in certain instances improved gender relations at the household level, with women being recognized as earners of income and contributors to household budget. However, some women still regard their spouses as ‘heads’ and require their consent in decisions even in issues that have to do with their own personal lives. Moreover, the improved economic status of women has resulted in a ‘power conflict’, creating confrontation between spouses. The article recommends that, as part of their programmes, assisting organizations and institutions must address ‘power relations’, the basis of gender subordination at the household level, otherwise socio-cultural norms and practices, underpinned by patriarchal structures, will remain ‘cages’ for rural women.     

From territorial to ethnographic colonies and back again: The politics of Italian expansion, 1890-1912

For Italy, unprecedented mass migration in the late nineteenth century overshadowed the European Scramble for Africa. To secure Italy's place in the new imperial order, Francesco Crispi proposed to harness emigration for colonial expansion, by settling Italy's East African colonies with the surplus Italian population. Defeat at Adwa in 1896 shattered Crispi's project, and turned attention to colonial possibilities elsewhere. Luigi Einaudi and other Liberals trumpeted the value of Italian collectivities or colonie across the Atlantic, where Italy exerted only indirect influence. In theory, these 'spontaneous colonies' would boost the Italian economy at little expense. Italian colonialist societies turned from Africa to the Americas, working to make Italian migration more prestigious, successful and profitable. After 1908, however, Enrico Corradini and the Italian Nationalists mocked these initiatives, and called upon the Italian state to return to traditional imperialism in Africa.     

"Give the ladies a chance": gender and partisanship in the Prohibition Party, 1869-1912

In the nineteenth-century Prohibition Party, American women ascribed new gendered meanings to party work traditionally performed by male partisans, and also drew upon their gendered roles as women, mothers, and wives to create new partisan strategies. This article investigates the political culture that sustained a remarkable departure from traditional Democratic and Republican practices, and further explores why women's contributions to the Prohibition Party declined in the early-twentieth century. In so doing, it traces how gender and gender roles shaped the meaning of party and politics, and elucidates the interplay between institutions, constituencies, and policy during one of America's most tumultuous political eras.     

The Siberian Curse: How Communist Planners Left Russia Out in the Cold. Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy

An American geographer examines the return migration of ethnic Kazakhs from Mongolia to their ancestral homeland of Kazakhstan, and the adjustment problems confronting them upon return. This specific example of "diasporic return migration" is emblematic of a process affecting nearly every state within the former USSR, and is especially acute in Central Asia. The study, based on the author's interviews, explores obstacles to the integration of Mongolian-Kazakhs into Kazakhstani society, and raises the question of whether this process might best be conceptualized as "repatriation" or "patriation." Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: F22, J61, O18, R23. 54 references.     

Tolerated,but not Preferred: Troubling the Unconscious of Televisual Multiculturalism

Canadian televisual exports make up at least 30 percent of the original content on US cable television. And from many angles, Canadian youth-television series look more diverse, more positive, and more attentive to interracial and interethnic issues than do similar US series. This article explores Canadian representations of interracial relationships and situates them within readings of Canada's official multicultural policy. It argues that much of this surface-level positivism about race reveals unconscious anxieties that ultimately manifest in drastic ways of treating “diversity” or “multicultural” subjects.     

Pomp,circumstance, and wild Arabs: The 1912 royal visit to Sudan

This article examines the use of British-imperial symbolism in public life throughout the period of the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium. The visit of George V to Port Sudan in 1912 proved the catalyst for large-scale imperial display, which was subsequently reworked into the unique annual commemoration of King's Day. Through such overt imperial pageantry, the British-dominated Sudanese government actively promoted its own position within Sudan at the expense of its Egyptian co-rulers, a strategy which illustrates the political tensions along the Nile Valley. Demonstrating the government's dominance over the landscape and people of Sudan to both the metropolitan and Sudanese audiences, these imperial events aimed at consolidating Britain's hold over the country throughout the Condominium. Sudanese political elites soon became active participants in imperial displays, seeing an opportunity to secure their position through demonstrations of loyalty, and using the propagated values of imperialism and monarchy in imaginative and selective ways. Although it was a valuable tool in creating a focal point of Sudanese unity in an otherwise culturally diverse territory, British imperialism was at the same time always a limited instrument, constrained as it was by Egypt's legal claims to the territory.