Anthropometric cartography: constructing Scottish racial identity in the early twentieth century

This paper examines racial cartography—a neglected subject in recent geographical work on the construction of race which has tended to dwell on photographic and museum representations. After sketching in something of the tradition of Victorian anthropometry, and its stress on categorizing human beings, it is argued that race is a socially constructed phenomenon, resulting partly from these obsessions. Using the conceptual framework developed by J. B. Harley this paper focuses on the cartographic products of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, during the early twentieth century. It concentrates specifically on anthropometric maps of pigmentation in Scotland, presented in the work of three anthropologists, John Gray, James Tocher and John Beddoe.     

The Civic Survey of Greater London: social mapping,planners and urban space in the early twentieth century

This paper examines work conducted between 1915 and 1919 by a group of architects and planners based at the Royal Institute of British Architects. The project, called the Civic Survey of Greater London, and the substantial collection of maps and diagrams that resulted from it are currently unknown in histories of mapping and planning, thus this paper offers a preliminary account and analysis of the work. The paper begins by assessing the development of surveying and mapping techniques in the nineteenth century with the aim of situating the Survey within broader historical trajectories. The following section of the paper examines the immediate context for the Survey, in particular the place of Patrick Geddes and his ideas. The third part of the paper focuses on the work of the Survey itself. The fourth part draws out key analytical threads in dialogue with a number of the maps of the Survey. The emphasis placed here is on exploring lines of continuity between the Civic Survey of Greater London and earlier techniques of representation and governmentality. The concluding section reflects briefly on the reasons for the Survey's subsequent relative obscurity and the importance of the project for later traditions of surveying.     

Sports, ‘race’ and the Finnish national identity in Helsingin Sanomat in the early twentieth century

The main goals of this article are first to examine through Olympic sports journalism what hierarchies and categorisations of the global space and the people populating it were considered important to the national imagery in Finland at the beginning of the twentieth century and, secondly, to assess how the notion of race was intertwined with these categorisations. Sports journalism played an important role in Finland by constructing and legitimising a national imagery and by providing accounts of other races, cultures and nationalities that were considered ‘different’ from ‘us’. The article concludes that sports journalism at that time employed three major discursive practices that were aimed at constructing an image of a white, Western and Finnish nation living in the north. The ‘others’ were placed in a hierarchy, in which their position was determined by their racial background and assumed similarities/differences in appearance and behaviour as compared with Finnish males.     

Social eugenics and nationalist race hygiene in early twentieth century Spain

In the twentieth century, the UN Declaration of 1948 is considered to be the international standard for universal human rights. In 1791, Olympe de Gouges critically analysed the French Declaration of Human Rights of 1789, and found that women were excluded from it.¹ This paper is a critical examination of the 1948 UN Declaration, with equally troubling findings.     

Race,state and nation in early twentieth century Ecuador*

ABSTRACT. This article aims to explore the ways in which the tensions involved in nation‐building and state consolidation during the half‐century following the Liberal Revolution of 1895 in Ecuador were refracted through the locus of race and the manipulation of racial ideologies. It centres the state as the primary motor of nation‐building and racialisation, arguing that nation‐building and state formation in Ecuador operated in close conjunction, and that race was central to each. Through case studies of citizenship, education and the integration of territory and resources, it explores how state discourse and policy shaped the racial boundaries of national inclusion, and how these were negotiated and contested by subalterns at the level of the state.     

Diet and the diseases of the twentieth century

Trowell, Hugh, Denis Burkitt and Kenneth Heaton, eds. Dietary Fibre, Fibre‐Depleted Foods and Disease, London: Academic Press, 1985. xiv + 433 pp. including index. $64.50 cloth.

Bjoerntorp, Per, George V. Vahouny and David Kritchevsky, eds. Dietary Fiber and Obesity. New York: Alan R. Liss, 1985. ix + 115 pp. including chapter references and index. $22.00 cloth.     

Economic fears of mass migration from southern Italy in early twentieth century America

ABSTRACT

Economic fears in the early twentieth century America about Italian immigration united trade unions and white collar workers and were motivated by reasons that ranged from the belief that migrants were disrupting the labour market and were temporary opportunist earners, unwilling to integrate and living in isolated communities, to the idea that southern Italians did not offer sufficient human capital: they were mainly illiterate, and had high dropout rates in schools, and were widely believed to have children with mental disabilities. These American fears were wildly overstated, however. First, Southern Italian migrants had to undergo a two-stage positive selection for literacy, while, secondly only 28.4 per cent of the massive incoming flow of Italians decided to stay; most Italian immigrants chose to return to their country of origin and the minority who remained did not delay long to join in the American melting pot.     

Picturing the homeland: geography and national identity in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Iran

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in geography as an ideologically loaded discourse about the world and its inhabitants which has operated both within and beyond educational institutions. Particular attention has been paid to the complex relationships between geography and imperialism, militarism and nationalism. For the most part, these studies have focused on the development of a western geographical imagination in Europe and North America. This article considers the development of geography in Iran during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and charts some of the connections between this new spatial sensibility and an emerging Iranian nationalism. Based on rare and hitherto unexplored nineteenth-century Persian sources, including several newspaper images, this article examines the importance which Iranian statesmen and diplomats in the service of the Qajar dynasty attached to geography and to geographical reasoning in their attempts to protect their authority from external threats. The forms of Iranian geography which developed in this period sustained various myths and legends about Persia's historic importance and reflected both external, western ideas and concepts as well as indigenous, Persian traditions. Forged in a context of acute vulnerability to «Great Power» incursions, Iranian nationalism and Iranian geography both represented an intermingling of external, western and internal, non-western ideas.     

Public debt and financial crises in the twentieth century

The costs of wars have been the main driver of public debt in the Western World during the modern era. The late twentieth century stands out as a period that saw a pronounced increase of government debt to GDP ratios in peacetime. This paper assesses the role that financial crises have played in shaping the public debt trajectory in the twentieth century. Focusing on the experiences of 14 industrial economies, I show that financial crises have long and lasting effects on public finances. I provide evidence that the costs of financial crises have increased strongly in the second half of the twentieth century and that the costs of financial crises grow with the size of the financial sector. In many countries, the rising costs incurred from stabilizing the economy after financial crises were an important cause of the peacetime surge of public debt ratios in the late twentieth century. In today's highly financialized economies, financial crises have become a key risk for public finances.     

Religion and the cultural public sphere: the case of the Finnish liberal intelligentsia during the turmoil of the early twentieth century

The political public sphere is at one and the same time both public, and private and religion operates in both the public and the private spheres in the modern way of life. This article approaches the dynamics between the cultural and the political public sphere from the point of view of religion; how the cultural intelligentsia developed its worldview fuelled with attitudes towards religion in times of political turmoil. The case study, based on the empirical analysis of cultural periodicals and societies around them, concerns the Finnish liberal intelligentsia in the early twentieth century. The first decade of the 1900s was a particularly important period of formation for the Finnish public sphere; the societal turmoil highlighted the importance of cultural periodicals in defining what was important for the national public sphere. The case of religion is an illustrative example of it, particularly from the point of view of the liberal intelligentsia of the era.