The effect of the telegraph on law and order,war, diplomacy,and power politics

Abstract

Until the invention of the electric telegraph in the 1830s, transferring messages at speeds greater than that of a galloping horse was on the whole an unreliable process and one that could produce ambiguous results. The electric telegraph was pioneered on the Continent, but commercialisation was left to the Englishmen Charles Wheatstone and William Fothergill Cooke, who built the first public line in 1839. From that date until well after the end of the First World War, the British dominance of worldwide telegraph cable production and ownership was overwhelming. This article traces some of the more significant effects of the telegraph in general, and of the British telegraphic hegemony in particular, in the spheres of politics, international diplomacy, and law and order.     

The Historical Snow Survey of Great Britain: Digitised Data for Scotland

Abstract

Mountain snowline is important as it is an easily observable measure of the phase state of water in the landscape. Changes in seasonal snowline elevation can indicate long-term trends in temperature or other climate variables. Snow-cover influences local flora and fauna, and knowledge of snowline can inform management of water and associated risks. Between 1945 and 2007 voluntary observers collected a subjective record of snow cover across Great Britain called the Snow Survey of Great Britain (SSGB). The original paper copy SSGB data is held by the Met Office. This article details the digitisation of the Scottish SSGB data, its spatial and temporal extents, and a brief example comparison of Met Office snow-lying gridded data. The digitised SSGB data are available from the Met Office authors.     

Two flags in the sand: anti-Communism in early Cold War Northern Ireland

ABSTRACT

This article reveals how the Cold War impinged upon not just national, but local political considerations and became woven into communal narratives. It contributes to the examination of religion in the conflict, adds to the historiography of Britain and the Cold War, and provides a context by which British Cold War experience and responses can be assessed. With Northern Ireland’s political similarities to Great Britain, its consistency with European norms and its overlaps with popular sentiment in the United States, Northern Ireland offers a gauge to better understand the nature of anti-Communism in the Cold War’s first decade and offers an unexplored perspective on the conflict.     

Amplified British Aviation Authority in Africa, 1947–1960: Regulation of Low-cost Overseas Airlines

ABSTRACT

Britain first exerted considerable civil and military aerial authority in Africa in the 1920s and 1930s. The occasional but striking presence of British pioneer pilots and aircraft was soon followed by formal agreements about Empire airbases, and operation of imperial airline service. During the Second World War, all British aviation resources in Africa were tailored to mobilising and executing military action. At the end of the War, Britain’s nationalised airline resumed scheduled commercial services to and from Africa. In the post-War Commonwealth there was demand for air services at lower prices than Britain’s flag-carrying airline offered. Private charter airlines provided long-haul but low-cost ‘trooping’ flights, ‘colonial coach’ passenger flights, and ‘tramp’ cargo flights, and consolidated and extended British aerial presence and influence in Africa. Mostly, London set and managed the regulatory regime under which they operated. Coloniality provided a key licensing element. In the 1950s, before widespread decolonisation, the authority for the least expensive long-haul flying across Africa vested in layers of complex regulation in Britain.     

Making leeway in the Leewards, 1929–51: The negotiation of colonial development

Britain began to sponsor economic development in its colonial territories under the Colonial Development Act of 1929. The first CDA project was for housing on Antigua; other schemes for the Leewards soon followed. The isolation and poverty of this colony highlighted the practical difficulties of promoting development. Challenges included the negotiation of new methods of administration. Governors conceded autonomy in return for assistance; under pressure from Treasury, the Colonial Office learned how to supervise far-flung projects, while its subject departments gained influence at the expense of the regional. Trial and error in the design and supervision of projects on the Leewards provided information about what types of housing policy were cost-effective and acceptable locally. By the 1950s the advice of United States experts also made itself felt. Funds provided under the CDA and later development Acts were limited, but they transformed the machinery and influenced the content of colonial policy.     

Standardizing the state while integrating the frontier: the Chilean telegraph system in the Araucanía, 1870–1900

Beginning in 1870, the Chilean government built a telegraph network to support its conquest of the Mapuche people of the Araucanía, a region on its southern frontier. The telegraph not only facilitated military domination of the Mapuche, but also served to bring, first, army commanders and, later, civilian regional governors under more direct control from the capital. As this new technology was introduced, army commanders and telegraph officials each fought to control the frontier telegraph lines. This conflict, and a rapid but partial victory by the civilian telegraph specialists, demonstrates the role of the telegraph in making state services run by expert civilian professionals into an important part of and defining characteristic of the Chilean state by 1900.     

Technological change and Post Office communications in Britain, 1918–1945

The pressures of both World War I and World War II made the British Post Office a central concern in national politics. Yet this development has received little attention in the historiography of the Post Office or the British state. The demands of war and expectations for service from individuals living in a consumer society raised questions as to how to improve technology and infrastructure to satisfy these divergent needs. The Post Office’s position as a department within the Civil Service meant that debates over the nature of technology, and the levels of spending required to sustain and improve Post Office services inevitably led to heated discussions concerning the practicalities of increased spending during the economic downturns of the 1920s and 1930s, and the subsequent pre-war planning period from 1937. This article will explore these issues by examining the nature of the Government-Post Office relationship in this period, and trace how the relationship evolved to accommodate the growing needs of the domestic and wartime economy. It will show the growing centrality of the Post Office to the nation’s communications planning. Moreover, it will demonstrate how a mixture of new technology, and an adaptation of working practices helped it adapt to both the peacetime economy of the 1920s, and the pressures of the World War II.     

试论民国时期英国对中国西藏的武器供应

民国时期,英国以赠送、出售方式向中国西藏提供了大批武器,对于英国控制西藏,攫取更多权益,将西藏纳入其缓冲地带战略轨道发挥了重要作用。英国对藏武器供应成为撬动英国与中国西藏之间关系的重要杠杆。本文利用英国印度事务部档案及其他史料,对这一时期英国向中国西藏武器供应的时间、种类和数量做了澄清,并论述了其性质。     

Jute Manufacturing: A Study of Camperdown Works,Dundee

Abstract

Camperdown Works is redundant. It was one of the greatest textile complexes in Britain and was remarkably intact until 1985. The article discusses its buildings, relating architecture and construction to function and to comparable mills in Dundee and elsewhere. Physical examination of the buildings proved to be the best source for the history of the company.     

Comments on relative chronology

Post‐Processualism's influence is waning in Britain, linked to the decline of its parent Post‐Modernism. Both lost credibility through attempting to dominate discourse, and their negative implications for human rights. Modernism and its offspring Processualism had reflected the scientism and socio‐economic centralism that dominated the 20th century up until the 1970s. Jameson and Harvey have exposed their Post‐Modernism as a superficial aesthetic movement spawned by Post‐Fordist economics. Perceived from the History of Ideas this temporal succession is the recurrent opposition between Positivist and Idealist philosophies. Wittgenstein's philosophy shows a ‘third way’ where objective and subjective approaches are complementary tools for scholarship. In Cognitive Processual archaeology a pragmatic merger arises from these formerly competing traditions.     

James Wray’s Carpentry Yard: archaeology of an early Williamsburg industrial craft site

Abstract

The archaeological work at the Wray Carpentry Yard in Williamsburg, Virginia offers a unique venue for the contextualization of 18th-century trades and tradesmen in the British colonies. James Wray’s craftsmen, both enslaved and free, included carpenters, joiners, glaziers and cabinet-makers working in a growing urban centre, providing services to a town that was quite literally under construction. The story these workers tell through the archaeology of their buildings and possessions is distinct in the archaeology of 18th-century Britain and its colonies, as no comparably intensive contextual examination of an urban artisan complex has been undertaken.     

Holywell Lane: A Squatter Community in the Shropshire Coalfield

Abstract

The thirty or so cottages which lined Holywell Lane in the parish of Little Dawley, about 2 miles from the Iron Bridge, formed one of many squatter communities in the Coalbrookdale Coalfield. Documentary, oral, architectural and archaeological sources are here used to demonstrate the particular features of this kind of settlement, in its buildings, the long periods of tenure by some families, and the variety of occupations and by-employments of its inhabitants. It is argued that such open communities were an important influence on industrial development not just in the Shropshire coalfield, but elsewhere in Britain.     

Scottish Windpumps & Windmills: New Information

Abstract

The author has examined documentary sources concerning the pioneering Lombe's Silk Mill on the River Derwent in Derby. He has combined evidence from both Italian and British sources with the physical remains and provided a reconstruction of the mill and its machinery layout. Its importance as a precursor of factory production in Britain is discussed.     

Making Headway: The Introduction of Western Civilization in Colonial Northern Nigeria

This article scrutinises attempts by the British Foreign and Colonial Office to control information in its colonies between 1946 and 1950. Several factors combined to alter the ground on which colonial officials operated in this period: an emerging ‘Cold War’ between Britain and its wartime Soviet ally, international debates about creating an enforceable catalogue of ‘human rights' and a heightened emphasis on public relations within British colonies as a strategy for imperial governance. These factors converged in the response of colonial officials to the writing of one of the most notorious anti-colonial activists in Britain at the time, George Padmore. By analysing British Colonial Office reports of Soviet propaganda in their colonies, the article suggests new analysis about some of the ways in which the rhetoric of the Cold War impacted on Britain's approach to empire after the Second World War.     

Britain and the Indo-Pakistani Conflict: The Rann of Kutch and Kashmir, 1965

Britain mediated successfully in the Indo-Pakistani clash over the Rann of Kutch region in spring 1965, but when hostilities broke out over Kashmir soon afterwards, 10 Downing Street managed to alienate New Delhi with what was supposed to be an even-handed statement. The Indian government seemed to feel that the Labour government had violated some kind of historic special obligation to them, and the Anglo-Indian relationship was damaged. For his part Prime Minister Harold Wilson condemned the ‘pro-Pakistani faction’ in the Commonwealth Relations Office responsible for drafting the statement, although he had been warned of the likely consequences. Eventually, the Soviet Union, operating through the United Nations, mediated an end to the war. The article draws upon British government documents to fill a gap in the literature, and it ends with a few reflections on Britain's ‘decline’ as demonstrated by the failure to end the conflict over Kashmir in 1965.     

Skiffle in the U.K.: the indigenization of a musical genre

ABSTRACT

This article examines the creation and diffusion of skiffle, and analyses how it emerged from the transatlantic flow of popular music from the United States to the United Kingdom, and the process by which it became “indigenized” in the U.K. I have also looked at the salience of race, the legacy of English music hall song traditions, and the idea of indigenization of music in post-WWII Britain. I have highlighted how skiffle eventually became “English,” its later impact on popular music in the U.K. in the 1960s and thereafter, and the complexities inherent in the idea of musical genre.     

Spying in the British Post Office,Victorian Politics and Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White

In 1844, the British public learned that the government was secretly opening exiled Young Italy leader Giuseppe Mazzini’s private letters and sharing information with continental authorities. For outraged citizens, espionage in that quintessential liberal institution, the reformed British Post Office, appeared un-English, despotic and criminal, the makings of a Gothic plot. Representations of the Post Office Scandal in Parliament and print predict the revision of the Gothic into the sensation novel that occurred with the publication of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White. Attention to the fields of Anglo-Italian studies, mid-Victorian print culture and the development of narrative form in the mid-nineteenth century illustrates the historical and political implications of letter-opening for the emergence of a new fictional genre. The Post Office Espionage Scandal and The Woman in White share a central place in a mid-Victorian moment of evolution in the mutually constitutive relationship between Italian and British national identities, producing and reflecting a crisis in Britishness focused on the secret tyrannies concealed beneath the surface of Victorian liberalism. The letter-opening scandal reveals a crisis in Victorian liberalism in the political realm and the media, while The Woman in White translates this Victorian crisis of confidence into a literary genre defined by exposing the sordid undercurrents of British society: sensation fiction. Together, the espionage scandal and Collins’s novel respond to and generate a challenge to Victorian complacency that emerged out of the collision of British and Italian politics and culture in the mid-nineteenth century.     

Culture builders: A historical anthropology of middle-class life

ABSTRACT

James Boswell (1740–1795) is most famous for writing the masterly biography of his friend and mentor The Life of Samuel Johnson, published in 1791, only a few years before his own death. However, during Boswell’s own lifetime he was far more famous for his other major work, the Account of Corsica (1768). The Account of Corsica has been rather neglected by modern scholarship. This article will attempt show its importance in the context of the mid eighteenth century. Boswell’s Account was in fact the latest in a series of British publications concerning the island of Corsica during the eighteenth century. This article will attempt to trace the evolution of the ideas of Corsica that developed in Britain; beginning with the outbreak of the Corsican revolt in 1728, and culminating with the publication of Boswell’s Account of Corsica in 1768. Corsica became an important case study for British self-reflection, concerning the type of Empire they would become. The main question raised by the case study of Corsica was whether Britain should be an empire that protects liberty across the globe, or a metropolitan commercial state?     

Communications,Qajar irredentism,and the strategies of British India: The Makran Coast telegraph and British policy of containing Persia in the east (Baluchistan)—Part I

Qajar irredentism brought Persia to make some advances in Baluchistan in the 1830s and 1840s, but in early 1860s, the continuation of this advance was threatened by one of Britain's main imperial interests and needs: the Indo-European telegraph line, which was to cross the Makran Coast overland. Persia sought to use this need for getting British recognition for its claims over Baluchistan. This put the British under pressure, for they did not wish to alienate Persia, through whose territories the line was to pass. The British government tried to appease the Persians with a simple declaration that the telegraph would not affect their claims and by taking the telegraph away from disputed territories. One major thing was faulty in this “solution,” for it was the British who decided which territories were “disputed” or “undisputed,” not the Persians.     

Holocene archaeological evidence of extinct and very rare British Scarabaeoidea

Abstract

The analysis of British Holocene insect assemblages has discovered nine species of scarabaeoid dung beetles which are now extinct in Britain and two more that are extremely rare. Some of these species had been suspected as native by early 19th century entomologists but doubt had been cast on specimens in old collections of British Coleoptera. Eight are dung feeders which, although they would have initially been favoured by clearance for pasture and a possible warm climate episode in the middle Bronze Age, subsequently declined as a result of increasing cultivation and a slight cooling of the summer climate. The other three species probably became extinct due to human-induced habitat loss.