Conservative instinct in Australian political thought: The Federation debates, 1890–1898

Many historians of Australian political thought have attributed its pragmatic and anti-speculative tendencies to a Benthamite influence. Without denying the influence of Bentham and Benthamism on Australian thought and institutional development, this article challenges the assumption that the abovementioned tendencies necessarily betray a Benthamite heritage. By analysing the theoretical justifications for pragmatic, anti-speculative approaches to institutional design in the Federation debates (1890–1898), this article shows that there was a very strong Burkean impulse behind the sort of pragmatism that is usually attributed to Bentham. If the argument of this article is correct, then it is an invitation for historians and political scientists to reconsider significantly the nature of Australian political thought.

研究澳大利亚政治思想的史家将澳大利亚政治思想的实用、反思辨倾向归之于边沁的影响。本文并不否认边氏对澳大利亚思想以及制度发展的影响,但对上述倾向为边氏遗产的说法不能赞同。笔者分析了联邦辩论（1890—1898）中实用的、反思辨的制度设计,指出通常被归到边沁的实用主义,其背后跃动的实乃伯克的思想。如果此论不谬,历史学者和政治学者就应好好考虑澳大利亚政治思想的性质了。     

“Tearing Down the Burning House”: James Buchanan's use of Edmund Burke

The 1854 Ostend Manifesto has long been scorned as an expansionist treatise, a leading indicator of “Young America's” hold on the antebellum Democratic Party, and a signal of Franklin Pierce's failed presidency. Unnoticed is the genesis of the document's most famous metaphor, of Cuba representing a neighbor's “burning house” that could cause American intervention. The primary author of the Manifesto was minister to Great Britain and future president James Buchanan, and he attempted to smooth over the rough suggestion of an American takeover of the island by borrowing imagery from Edmund Burke's 1791 Reflections on the Revolution in France. Buchanan's use of Burke, the anti‐revolutionary English philosopher of prudence and critic of ideology, demonstrates the wide but underappreciated popularity of Burke with American politicians of all parties. Not just Whigs and Southern planters, but also Northern Doughface Democrats such as Buchanan, especially in the 1850s, used Burke to preach calm, moderation, and political prudence. As his use in the Manifesto makes clear, a larger study of Edmund Burke's appeal to Americans is badly needed to plot his broad influence on American politics leading up to the Civil War.     

In “Savage” Company: Sublime Aesthetics and the Colonial Imagination

Edmund Burke’s speeches and writings during the trial of Warren Hastings—from 1788 to 1795—remain one of the most comprehensive assessments of the effects of colonial trade and territorial expansion on Britain’s nationalist self. A rhetorical reading of his prosecution speeches reveals how they affected the public response to the trial by evoking the sublime and framing terror as the basic feature of Britain’s mercantile imperialist agenda in the colonies. Moreover, by associating Hastings’s governance of Bengal with sublime terror, Burke altered the interpretations of virtue and corruption, thus distancing both Britain and India from the rampant profiteering of the East India Company. Burke’s critique of the degenerative influences of commercial imperialism along with the reformulation of his ideas in subsequent colonial historiography is crucial for assessing how the aesthetics of the sublime conferred greater moral force to the sporadic and fragmented reports about the Company’s abuses of power in India.     

‘A Beautiful Fiction of Law’: Rhetorical Engagements with Terra Nullius in the British Periodical Press in the 1840s

This paper analyses two critiques of the jurisprudential basis of settler colonialism in Australia published in the early Victorian periodical press. Review articles in the North British Review and Fraser's Magazine in the 1840s deployed claims of legal sophistry to dispute the fiction that Australian colonies were settled, rather than conquered, and that the country was a terra nullius. By examining the politics and rhetoric of each article, the significance of legal ideology for both literature promoting colonization and humanitarian critiques of colonial policy is assessed. Through a combination of discourse analysis and intellectual history, the North British Review article is read as fusing Scottish Enlightenment concepts of social evolution with the rhetoric of sensibility to defend the existence of Indigenous rights to land and to argue for the degenerative implications of colonial social practices. Similarly, the Fraser's Magazine article offers an epitome of the place of law in colonial policy-making by invoking utilitarian and pragmatic approaches to law to rationalize doctrines of sovereignty and jurisdiction, minimizing legal protections for Aborigines while maximizing the legal powers of colonists. By tracing the use of jurisprudential rhetoric in reviews published in two leading metropolitan journals, the paper offers evidence that the literary sphere contributed to the emergent culture of colonial legality.     

‘The Weary Titan Staggers under the Too Vast Orb of its Fate’. Post-Federation Australia and the Problem of Imperial Defence

This article investigates an under-studied aspect of the British/Australian defence relationship in the immediate post-Boer War period. The essential nature of the Australian Imperial Force was not an accident of 1914. Rather, as this article will show, the form, style and structure of the force that fought at Gallipoli was set in stone more than a decade before that famous name entered the popular Australian lexicon.     

英国旧殖民体制的特征及其瓦解的原因

17—18世纪是重商主义盛行时期,重商主义成了英国的国策。整个第一英帝国就是在重商主义理论指导下产生、发展、壮大的,重商主义成了旧帝国最主要的特征。因而,英国旧的殖民体制的特点就表现为政治上控制松弛、经济上严格限制。1763年“七年战争”结束之前,英国与殖民地的关系比较融洽。然而战争结束不久,蕴藏于旧的殖民体制之中的危机便迅即爆发。旧的帝国殖民统治体制越来越难以维持,旧的帝国体制已经解决不了帝国的危机,英国与美洲殖民地发生了激烈的冲突,最终导致了帝国的瓦解。     

Pillars and perspective: demarcation of the Belgian Congo–Northern Rhodesia boundary

From 1911 to 1914 an Anglo-Belgian boundary commission demarcated the 885 km boundary between the Belgian Congo and Northern Rhodesia along the watershed of the Congo and Zambezi rivers with a total of just 46 markers. Such low-density boundary demarcation with widely spaced pillars was typical of early British boundary-making in southern Africa. Less than fifteen years later, a second Anglo-Belgian boundary commission was created to re-demarcate the boundary. Not only was it unique for a colonial boundary in southern Africa to be re-demarcated, this second Anglo-Belgian boundary commission worked for six years with a budget that exceeded any previous British boundary commission in colonial Africa. This commission marked the Belgian Congo–Northern Rhodesia boundary on the ground with nearly five times the number of pillars as the first commission, literally etching the boundary in the African landscape. Its techniques of survey and boundary demarcation set a new standard, serving as a model for later British colonial boundary commissions and influencing boundary-making theory through the present day.     

Spaces of Intemperance & the British Raj 1860–1920

ABSTRACT

The history of the British Empire in India is one awash with alcohol. Drinking was a common practice throughout colonial society, acting as social necessity and source of a public anxiety. However, rather than only acknowledging what and why individuals in colonial India drank, it is of equal importance to consider where they did so. Despite its ubiquity, alcohol consumption in India was responsive to the dynamics of space and place, and both the habits of drinkers and the social, military or governmental response to their actions altered greatly depending on locations individuals were able to access, and in which they consumed alcohol. This article draws focus on the spatiality of colonial drinking through an examination of key environs that characterise the British experience of India, and in which colonial Britons drank regularly. Examining published sources alongside archival material, the article argues that drinking in colonial India is rendered simultaneously private and public, personal and socially performative, as a result of the hybrid spaces in which individuals access alcohol. The culture of drinking in colonial context, and the manner through which the drinker is constantly under scrutiny makes the act of drinking as much to do with social performance as it is to do with personal taste, with space in each instance a governing influence on choice of beverage, intent, behaviour, and the perceived identity of the drinker themselves.     

Max Weber,charisma and nationalist leadership1

ABSTRACT. One of Max Weber's most well‐known achievements was the formulation of three concepts of legitimate authority: traditional, legal‐rational and charismatic. However, there are particular problems with the last of these, which is not historically grounded in the manner of the other two concepts. The charisma concept originated with Weber's sociology of religion, was pressed into service in pre‐war writing on the sociology of domination, shifted focus in his wartime political writings and changed meaning again in his post‐war writing on basic sociological concepts. To use the concept in historical‐political analysis, I argue, one must distinguish between a pre‐modern and modern form of charismatic domination. I argue that doing this enables us to understand features of the leadership of colonial nationalist and fascist movements.     

Hidden footnotes: J.A. Smith,R.G. Collingwood and Croce’s conception of history

This article examines the role J.A. Smith played in introducing Croce’s conception of history into British philosophy. In particular, it examines his influence on R.G. Collingwood’s incorporation of the Italian idealist conception of history into his own philosophy. The contentions that Smith was a key popularizer of Italian idealist ideas into Britain and that he helped to shape Collingwood’s intellectual developed is not new. Yet these interrelated topics have not been explored in any great depth. Collingwood’s own reticence over his intellectual debt to Smith, a lack of interest in Smith and an unfamiliarity with his philosophy have all contributed to this neglect. This article seeks to redress this neglect through analysing how Smith nurtured Collingwood’s adoption of a Crocean conception of history. To achieve its aim, this article first analyses Smith’s own reception of Croce’s conception of history. From this, it presents a contextualist analysis of Collingwood’s development of a Crocean conception of history and the role Smith played in its adoption. Finally, this article examines why, despite Smith’s influence over his intellectual development, Collingwood failed to acknowledge the intellectual debt he owed to Smith.     

Transitions in the Ottoman Waqf’s traditional building upkeep and maintenance system in Cyprus during the British colonial era (1878–1960) and the emergence of selective architectural conservation practices

How did the Waqf, a widespread Islamic historic institution in the non-Western world which promoted traditional building upkeep and maintenance systems, cope with the emerging architectural conservation understandings of the modern era? How did colonial transfers of knowledge, expertise and political considerations influence these systems? The present study explores these questions by examining the case of the Ottoman Waqf (Evkaf) institution in Cyprus. By collecting and analysing archival evidence on conservation projects, initiated during the British colonial period between 1878 and 1960, a model framework of initiation, authorisation and implementation processes of the upkeep of the Waqf maintained properties has been identified. This framework has been used to show the transitional role of the colonial influence at different stages, which finally led to the dissolution of the Waqf system’s sustainable elements, and initiated the emergence of selective architectural conservation practices. By shifting the focus of conservation discourses to look specifically into the background dynamics of the institutional practice, a new argument has been developed. This revealed how heritage conservation practices are negotiated with the existing institutions and how they are transferred and/or transformed at different levels of institutional governance.     

Imperial Mobility: The Colonial Worlds of Sir Anthony and Lady Jeanie Musgrave

Mobility—of people, products, and capital—is a common trope of the contemporary globalized world. Yet, mobility is not only a current phenomenon, but has an integral role in the constitution of past empires. In particular, the governance of empire requires the mobility of administrators and their families: people who, in the service of empire, travel between metropole and periphery, and even more typically, in the multiple circuits between peripheries. The life of Sir Anthony Musgrave, a colonial administrator who served in posts in the Caribbean, Canada, South Africa, and Australia, exemplifies the movement which empire demands. In their travels around the British world of the late nineteenth century, the Musgraves—Sir Anthony, his American-born wife Lady Jeanie, and their three sons—engaged with empire in ways both physical and conceptual. In this essay, I explore how the Musgraves’ mobility contributed to a sense of overlapping colonial worlds that were supported and challenged by the rise of communication and transport technologies, the flows of international labor, and the competing demands of national and imperial identities.     

From an Inconsequential Legacy to National Heritage: Revisiting the Conservation Approaches Towards the Ottoman Buildings in British Colonial Cyprus

Cyprus came under British control in 1878. At this time the Western-based orientalist mind-set, which saw ‘Ottoman’ as a synonym for stagnation was at its zenith, and this view was strategically disseminated as the European empires expanded. This also coincided with the evolution of the ethnic-nationalism that facilitated the formation of national heritage constructs. By analysing the case of Cyprus, a place which is entangled with British colonial governance as well as revolutionary Turkey, this paper aims to widen the discussion on the conservation trajectory of the Ottoman built heritage in post-Ottoman environments. Approaches to the restoration, interpretation, and management of Cyprus’s Ottoman buildings between 1878 and 1960 are dissected, assessed and categorized through British-era archival collections. The history of conservation practices is contextualised in changing political and professional perspectives, which reveal the role of Eurocentric paradigms of orientalism and nationalism in managing the perception and treatment processes of Ottoman-built heritage.     

Political theory in the Australian Journal of Political Science: A review

The place of political theory in AJPS has historically been a fairly marginal one, partly because Australia does not seem to have a strong national tradition of political theorizing. This is thought to be a function of living in a nation that never produced a great political theorist and was born neither in revolution or utopianism. Yet, although there has been a marked absence of high theory or exegetically-inclined history of ideas over the life of the journal, theorists have responded by contributing work that usefully illuminates applied problems with theoretical insight. Further, it may be the case that there is a peculiarly Australian style of political theory that is pragmatic and self-consciously embedded within our institutions and political culture. The paper explores this and other means by which Australian theorists have adapted in order to retain a presence within the journal.