Gendered politics of empire: the female explorateur and natural histories of the Amazon basin 1899–1901

At the turn of the twentieth century, the Brazilian Amazon was experiencing a moment of heightened exploration, mapping, border creation, and contestation. This article examines the production of the French explorateur and geographer Octavie Coudreau through analysis of the natural history/travel narrative, Voyage au Trombetas (1899), and her subsequent narrative Voyage au Cuminá (1901). Octavie Coudreau initially went to Amazonia to travel with her husband, Henri Coudreau, already a renowned explorer of the French and Brazilian Amazon. After Henri Coudreau’s death on their first voyage, Octavie Coudreau continued working under contract for the Brazilian state and published natural history narratives after each of her four exploratory and mapping missions. These travel narratives include suggestions for increased colonization along with observation of local populaces, supported by a multitude of maps and photographs. Using feminist approaches to the historiography of travel, empire, and geographical work, I look at the female European explorer’s view of imperialism during this significant period in Amazonian history and development. I examine the unfixing of gender identity as it relates to movement within a liminal space. I think of this as the in-between place in which Octavie finds herself – as a grieving widow, thrust into a position of power abroad, while still dealing with the limitations of her gender during this time period, and the space of the Amazon itself, a region in flux where multiple races and imperial powers interact in a contact zone.     

Asymmetry of power and attention in alliance politics: the US–Republic of Korea case

While power asymmetry typically defines security relationships between allies, there exist other forms of asymmetry that influence alliance politics. In order to illustrate how they can shape policy outcomes that cannot be explained solely through the lens of power capabilities, the authors examine the role of relative attention that each side pays to the alliance. It is their central argument that since the client state has a greater vested interest in the alliance and given that attention depends on interest/need, the client state can leverage attention to get its way. By analysing two specific cases, the 2002 South Korean schoolgirls tragedy and the 2008 beef protests—instances where the South Koreans succeeded in compelling US concessions—the authors show that because the alliance was more central to the client state's agendas, there existed an asymmetry of attention that offered leveraging opportunities for the weaker ally. In this study, the authors emphasise the role of media attention as a key variable, and seek to contribute to debates on weaker party leverage in asymmetrical alliances.     

Earth politics: Territory and the subterranean – Introduction to the special issue

The special issue Earth Politics: Territory and the Subterranean explores how and to what political and economic effects people have territorialized the underground. Through studies of a range of activities – from scientific exploration to 3-D geological modeling to laboratory analysis to recreational caving – authors in the issue challenge the idea that the subterranean is a world apart, detached from the sociopolitical worlds of the surface, and instead focus on the complicated relations and processes that remake and weave meaning into often unseen depths. In this introductory article, we situate the issue within expanding literatures on geological materiality, territorial politics, and vertical/volumetric space, and we discuss two overlapping themes running through the issue's articles: the politics of subterranean knowledge production and the politics of subterranean materialities. We conclude by reflecting on the meaning of ‘earth politics’, emphasizing the injustices that derive from – and are sedimented into – dominant modes of knowing and interacting with the matters of the subsurface.     

Transnational solidarities and the politics of the left, 1890–1990 – introduction

The ten articles in this special issue of the European Review of History—Revue européenne d'histoire explore the operation of transnational solidarity movements from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century. This introduction highlights the endurance of methods and strategies across this period, even while the contexts for transnational activism changed. It points to the opportunities presented by expressions of transnational solidarity, but also their inherent limitations.     

Failing to live up to the promise: the politics of equal pay in ‘new’ workplace and industrial relations institutions

Workplace and industrial relations regulations are key sites for policy intervention to address Australia's gender pay gap, which, at 15.3 per cent, is almost as large as it was in 1997. In both the Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth) and the Workplace Gender Equality Act 2012 (Cth) the goal of equal pay has a more central place than it did in predecessor legislation. In particular, the Fair Work Act has the potential to deliver more gender-equitable wage structures through addressing systemic gender-based undervaluation at the industry level. Adopting a feminist institutional approach this article examines equal pay policy in the operations of workplace and industrial relations regulation to ask why, despite some recent successes, this potential appears unlikely to be realised.     

From enemy to opponent: the politics of delegitimation in the Italian Christian Democratic Party (1945–1992)

Abstract

This article reconstructs the dynamics of delegitimation of political opponents in the Italian Christian Democratic Party (DC), which had a relative majority and almost uninterruptedly led Italy’s governments from 1945 to 1992. The DC built its strategy of delegitimation on two levels, an ideological-religious one and a systemic one, which were only partly interdependent and overlapping. In almost half a century, the DC aimed its rhetoric and politics of delegitimation mainly at those opposition parties it considered as anti-establishment, that is, the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and the neofascist Italian Social Movement (MSI), and the form of delegitimation changed a great deal over this period. However, it is possible to grasp a specific dynamic: from a rigid form of delegitimation, from time to time it became possible to legitimate (at least in part) the opposition parties at different times and in different ways, depending on the changes in the political sphere and in society. It was a process full of contradictions and ambiguities within which the political enemy gradually gave way to becoming a political opponent.     

The politics of neutrality: the American Friends Service Committee and the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939

Abstract

From the early months of the Spanish civil war (1936–9) the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), the American Quakers’ central service organization, was engaged in a large-scale relief operation on both sides of the front line. While Quaker aid workers on the ground were running hospitals, orphanages and child feeding stations on the Republican and Nationalist side, the operation triggered a sometimes heated debate at home. Quakers had to bridge the tension between the universalist ethos of a transnationally connected and internationally active religious group whose individual parts, in turn, closely integrated into, and were largely dependent on a national framework of action consisting of governments, the media and national-based groups of donors and supporters. Against this backdrop the article will reflect on the complex and shifting meaning of humanitarian neutrality. In the article the author will show how the claim to neutrality, always contested and precarious, could work as a gate opener for humanitarian aid vis-à-vis state and non-state actors alike, as a platform for co-operation with international institutions as well as a deliberately used capital on an increasingly competitive ‘humanitarian market place’.     

Lightly Reinforced Walls Subjected to Seismic Excitations: Interpretation of CAMUS 2000–1 and 2000–2 Dynamic Tests

In this article a study is presented of the inelastic seismic performance of two 5-story reinforced concrete wall specimens, which were tested in the context of the CAMUS 2000 program. The structure has been sized and detailed following the French PS92 code. To investigate the simplifying assumptions made in design, a 3-D refined nonlinear analysis was conducted. Particular aspects of the behavior of the two tested specimens are presented and then test results are compared with numerical predictions. The experimental-analytical comparisons not only demonstrate the accuracy of the time-history analysis model, but also allow obtaining more detailed information about the behavior of the specimen when it is subjected to seismic excitation. The significant effect of degradation of the stiffness and strength of the wall suggests that it is always important that design procedures are derived from numerical modeling and experimental observations.     

The East Asian War of 1592–98 and the court politics in the Ming dynasty

Abstract

This article argues that to understand the Ming decision-making in the sixteenth-century Korea War (1592–8), we must understand its institutional context. The article chronologically compares the major events of the Korea War with the actions of central figures of the Ming and, using the mutual antagonism between Xing Jie, supreme commander during the second stage of the war, and Zhao Zhigao, senior grand secretary in the Grand Secretariat, argues that Beijing was another theater of the Korea War. In this theater, battles were fought between the “doves” (Zhao Zhigao, Shi Xing, and Shen Weijing) and the “hawks” (Zhang Wei, Shen Yiguan, and Xing Jie).     

London versus Sydney, 1815–1823: the politics of colonial architecture

This paper investigates the architecture designed by transported convict, Francis Greenway, and erected under the reforming Governorship of General Lachlan Macquarie in Sydney from 1815 onwards. It analyses how that architecture articulated Macquarie's ideas on how the planning and fabric of the city could facilitate the policies of reformation that he was implementing, and shows how this could have been perceived as oppositional to British Government policy after 1815. It affects this principally through considering the report of Commissioner of Inquiry, John Thomas Bigge, who arrived in Sydney in 1819, other literary sources, and the urban fabric of Sydney itself. In addition, it considers contemporary thinking on the built environment and social control, particularly as manifested in Scotland. It closes with more general observations on the ways in which Sydney contrasted with London, which city was perceived as falling short of what was expected of a great metropolis, and how its early nineteenth-century evolution into a new type of city itself affected the way in which Sydney was perceived.     

‘The Pathos of Conservation’: Raphael Samuel and the politics of heritage

When Raphael Samuel’s Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture was published in 1994, it was critically received. Yet, the book has not had the impact of other key works such as Lowenthal’s The Past is a Foreign Country (1985) or Hewison’s The Heritage Industry (1987). A number of factors have contributed to this, such as Theatres essentially being an unfinished project, and ‘heritage’ in the book having multiple personas – the net result being that Samuel’s arguments can at times be hard to pin down. Yet with interest in his approach to heritage now growing, this article seeks to unravel Samuel’s core ideas and arguments pertaining to heritage, and to give an historical background to their evolution. With the central tenets of Samuel’s argument essentially being a case for the democratisation of heritage; the validity of what we might today call ‘unofficial’ narratives and discourses; and to challenge the dominant view that heritage was ultimately history’s poor cousin, I argue that Samuel’s ideas have much to offer contemporary research agendas in heritage.