Communications Revolutions: A Historiographical Concept

This essay explores the origins and the development of a ‘communicationsrevolution’, which would give rise to a new concept withinhistoriography. It proposes that the Communications Revolutioncan be explained as a macrohistorical process, comparable tothe Scientific Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, whichhave both had permanent and irreversible consequences in themodern era. The communications revolution, like the other two,began in the early modern era, and is still ongoing. The conceptof a Communications Revolution encompasses smaller ‘mediarevolutions’, more easily ascribed to a specific historicalperiod, and to a large extent mutually interrelated and dependent.The development of postal services gave rise to a new understandingof space and time, and it is this development that the essayidentifies as the mainspring of change in the communicationsrevolution. Postal services enabled faster movements of people,goods, and information. The new medium of the printed book,newspaper or sheet magnified the effects of this faster disseminationof information and news. So the Communications Revolution canbe argued to have been the motor that enabled the constructionof the infrastructure of the modern world, newspapers, cartography,and the ‘public sphere’ of politics, of warfareand diplomacy. Indeed, there is scope for discussion as to whetherit was in fact the Communications Revolution which may haveopened the way for both the Scientific Revolution and the IndustrialRevolution.     

论20世纪20年代的日本裁军运动

近代日本政府一直奉行"富国强兵"政策,把扩军备战置于优先考虑的地位,使日本军事实力在20世纪初达到西方强国的水平,并能直接挑战西方国家的霸权.但日本的军备扩充受国内外因素的制约,并不是简单地沿着直线上升.20世纪20年代日本出现了颇具规模的裁军运动,这是第一次世界大战以后日本国内和平反战力量的兴起、日本经济对美国的高度依赖和美、英等国在远东寻求新的力量均衡等多种因素促成的.     

Imagining Poplar in the 1920s: Contested concepts of community

The concept of community as a way of describing a particular social reality has fallen into general disfavour, and geographers appear to have dropped the term almost entirely. Certain historians have refused to abandon it however, since “community” retains its popular emotional legitimacy and its meaning remains a central site of political struggle. To these writers, community is an imagined but none the less powerful discursive reality with material consequences too important to be ignored. Exploring this argument, this paper recovers the senses of community of people living in the east London borough of Poplar in the interwar period. Their strong attachment to neighbourhoods as communities is described and some explanations for it offered, and the political processes leading to a brief period of identification with their borough as a community are examined. The conclusion stresses the specificity of these imaginings of community, their precariousness and their politics, and notes the need for geographers not to work with definitions of a community meaningless to its inhabitants.     

Imagined homeland: landscape painting in Palestine in the 1920s*

Abstract. This essay examines the proposition that landscape representations both reflect and endorse national ideology. By studying in detail selected landscape paintings by Jewish artists in pre‐State Israel some of the assumptions linking landscape and nationalism will be revisited. In particular, I shall challenge received notions in Israeli art historiography that interpret the numerous landscape paintings of the 1920s as directly expressing the identification with Zionism – the Jewish national movement. Analysis of the subject repertoire reveals that artists usually ignored images of the Zionist settlement in Palestine. They preferred instead to depict oriental countryside or ancient cities in an emblematic idealistic manner supported by stylistic borrowings from contemporary French painting. The country in these paintings is more an idea than a reality. Yet they evoke neither the biblical past nor a Zionist futuristic vision, but rather an oriental Arcadia of an unspecified time.     

论20世纪20年代苏联的外交政策

我国学界对20世纪20年代苏联对外政策存在不同的评价意见。本文从斯大林、契切林的外交政策理论以及他们对苏联外交政策影响的角度对20年代苏联对外政策进行了探讨。认为斯大林、契切林都继承了列宁晚年的外交思想,斯大林在20年代已经把世界革命的胜利寄希望于未来,提出了“一国社会主义”理论,契切林已把社会主义的未来和东方被压迫民族的解放运动联系在了一起。在对外政策方面,斯大林、契切林都把苏联国家利益放在外交政策考虑的优先地位。在实践上,虽然斯大林有时依然表现出了对世界革命的追求,但契切林以其长期担任苏俄外交人民委员的经历和丰富经验影响了斯大林以及苏联外交政策的制定和实施。从整体上看,苏联20世纪20年代的对外政策尽管存在一些失误,但基本把握住了列宁晚年思想的方向,为苏联国内建设创造了和平有利的外部环境。     

Rethinking British Communist Party Women in the 1920s

Until very recently, writing on the Communist Party of GreatBritain (CPGB) concentrated primarily on the party's relationshipwith the Communist International (to which it was affiliated)and the Bolshevik leadership in Moscow. Far less attention hasbeen paid to the actual men and women who made up the ranksof the CPGB and sought to establish the party's identity ata grass roots level. This article examines the experiences ofwomen in the CPGB during the 1920s, particularly in relationto women's politics in the period, and with regard to the socialisttraditions that preceded and partly informed the CPGB's earlydevelopment. It argues that despite communist avocation of aparty of a ‘new type’, the CPGB inherited many ofthe existing uncertainties as to the role of women within socialistorganization.