The National Union of Students and transnational solidarity, 1958–1968

In 1968 student activism and the international connections between students became a source of interest and concern throughout the world. These international connections, however, were far from new. Internationalism has always been at the core of the National Union of Students of England, Wales and Northern Ireland (NUS), the largest student organisation in the UK. The NUS represented the majority of British students, although their policies were never universally accepted but were the outcome of sometimes vociferous debate. In the years between the end of the Second World War and 1968 the NUS was deeply involved in setting up two international student organisations, the International Union of Students (IUS) and the International Student Conference (ISC), as well as developing their own bilateral connections with students around the world. The membership and leadership of the NUS were clearly interested, and concerned, about students internationally. However, the extent to which this interest and concern should be seen as solidarity or is more rightly a new manifestation of older British traditions of paternalism and liberal internationalism is questioned in this article.     

The Correspondence of Asturian Emigrants at the Turn of the Century: The Case of José Moldes (c. 1860–1921)

The private letter, one of the most representative expressions of mass literacy, was the product of improved postal services and epistolary manuals. In the nineteenth century, which also witnessed the new phenomenon of mass emigration, letter writing became one of the most common practices. This article discusses the correspondence of José Moldes, an Asturian who left Spain for Puerto Rico at the age of fourteen and settled shortly afterwards in Chile. He died in his native Asturias at the age of sixty-one. Throughout these fifty or so years, José wrote letters to keep in contact with members of his family, to control them when he became head of the household or to manage his businesses and investments. About 120 of his letters survived in the Moldes-Barreras family archive, through which we can reconstruct his experiences. The essential characteristics of this epistolary corpus emerge from an analysis of its material and graphic aspects, suggesting the profound influence of immigration on personal writing.     

The politics of the Shanghai courts: the state,local elites,and social networks in Nationalist China, 1927–1937

This article explores the ways in which the Nationalist Party established dominance over the Shanghai courts in the foreign concession area to use them as weapons against political dissidents, and it analyzes the intricate relations among the Nationalist Party, local elites, and the Shanghai courts during the Nanjing decade (1927–1937). Building on recent studies that pay attention to the limited success of the Nationalist Party’s policy of putting the judiciary under Party control, this study demonstrates that the process of establishing the Nationalist Party’s dominance over the Shanghai courts was highly contested. The interplay between the Nationalist Party’s effort to gain control over the Shanghai courts by building formal and informal institutions and the local elites’ appropriation of their own social networks rendered the Shanghai courts vulnerable not only to the Party’s intervention, but also to the influence of social forces. I argue that due to the weak authority of the Shanghai courts, the Nationalist Party’s use of law against political foes could be a double-edged sword.