Louis XVI,the Court of the Tuileries,and the Corps Diplomatique 1789–91

The French Revolution sought to erect an edifice which would bridge the chasm between ancien regime realpolitik and a more idealistic vision of international relations based on natural law. The deputies of the Constituent Assembly, despite their noble intentions, failed to do so. They ended up hurtling into an all-too-familiar vortex, where appeals to natural law hid naked military aggression and strategic egocentrism. Whether this outcome was inevitable or contingent on circumstances continues to pose a dilemma for historical writing on the early Revolution. This article explores the question from the unmined perspective of the foreign Ambassadors resident in Paris during the French Revolution. It uses their unpublished despatches and French police reports to shed new light on the French Revolution's alienation from the international relations system of the ancien regime.     

French–German relations: the Strasbourg–Kehl encounter, 1945–55

German–French relations have proved to be pivotal to the course of modern European history. Recent success, however, has somewhat obscured our memory of the difficult path that has been trod. Directing our attention to Kehl, a small village on the upper Rhine, we can revisit the difficulties inherent in resolving feelings of mutual animosity and longstanding historical problems. Kehl stands for the quest for reconciliation at the local and regional level. In the immediate postwar era, French dreams of continued influence over the Rhine valley would have to be put aside just like German anger over their treatment by the French.     

Mirrors of Modernity: Time–Space,the Subaltern,and the Decolonial

This essay is cast as something of a personal narrative. It recounts how I have arrived at inklings and intimations of space and time, particularly pervasive procedures of the spatialization of time and the temporalization of space, in tandem with understandings of disciplines and subjects of modernity. The account begins with my pre-apprentice days in Delhi, moves onto my apprenticeship at Cambridge, covers my journeyman sojourns in Mexico, and extends unto my artisanal concerns in the present. At stake especially are encounters and entanglements with time and space as folded within the creases of subaltern studies and de-colonial understandings (yet also postcolonial perspectives and historical anthropology). On the one hand, I explore how these shifting orientations have drawn upon hegemonic representations as well as non-certified imaginations of time and space, to now press familiar associations and now unravel unusual enunciations of these concepts and processes. On the other hand, I track the active construal, the exact production, of space and time within the epistemic practice of these critical perspectives. At stake throughout are wider issues of meaning and power, alterity and authority, difference and disciplines.     

W. B. Yeats,the Abbey Theatre,and the Cinema, 1909–1939

ABSTRACT

Given the significance of new technologies to the literary and visual cultures of the early-twentieth century, it is surprising how little has been written about W. B. Yeats and cinema. Viewed by some scholars as emphatically resistant to what he termed “the leprosy of the modern,” Yeats has long been a difficult writer to situate in relation the progressive impulses of modernity. Building on Kevin Rockett’s identification of the parallels between the work of Abbey Theatre and a nascent Irish cinema culture, this article argues that Yeats played a prominent role in early attempts to develop an indigenous film industry, and to cultivate representations of Ireland on screen abroad. During the period I consider, the Abbey Theatre and the film industry were similarly affected by state censorship programmes and various forms of cultural nationalism. Exploring the Abbey Theatre Minute Books and archival materials discovered in Trinity College Dublin, I suggest that Yeats’s Abbey was a shaping force in Irish cinema history, despite the fact that most attempts to create a national cinema met with limited success.     

Ghana,India, and the Transnational Dynamics of the Congo Crisis at the United Nations, 1960–1

This article examines the role of Ghana and India at the United Nations during the Congo crisis from July 1960 to February 1961. The role of non-aligned countries both in the UN peacekeeping force, Opération des Nations Unies au Congo (ONUC), and in the negotiation of Congo policy was fundamental to the evolution of events. The article shows how Jawaharlal Nehru of India and Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana used the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and the Afro-Asian bloc to alter UN Congo policy. In leveraging their influence with in the General Assembly, the NAM was able to sustain the UN effort in the Congo and preserve the prestige of the organisation. In the process, NAM members realised the benefits and the limitations of non-aligned politics in the context of a violent, anti-colonial war. The crisis had the effect of rupturing the status quo at the UN and in the eight months under study here, it is argued that the actions of the NAM within the UN helped to activate the agency of the organisation in pursuit of neutralist principles. The Congo crisis served as the turning point in the decolonisation drama and NAM's influence over UN Congo policy represented a dynamic form of anti-colonial internationalism.     

Clarendon,Cavour, and the Intervention of Sardinia in the Crimean War, 1853–1855

The notorious arms trader Sir Basil Zaharoff is remembered as the archetypal ‘merchant of death’. During the First World War, he is alleged to have exercised a malign influence over statesmen in London and Paris. Recently released Foreign Office files now allow us to document Zaharoff's wartime activities on behalf of the British government as an agent of influence in the Levant. The new sources reveal that Sir Vincent H.P. Caillard, the financial director of the arms-maker Vickers, played a key role in making Zaharoff's services available to prime ministers Asquith and Lloyd George. While Zaharoff has often been portrayed as a sinister force, manipulating statesmen into pursuing his financial and political interests, the reality was the reverse. Zaharoff was a convenient tool of two prime ministers rather than a powerful political manipulator in his own right.     

Restoration Leeds and the Aldermen of the Corporation, 1661–1700

Abstract

In the 1945 General Election, the Conservative Party under the leadership of Winston Churchill was defeated in a largely unexpected Labour landslide. The former Prime Minister's son, Randolph Churchill, MP for Preston since 1940, also lost his seat, but by a swing much lower than the national average. This was hardly due to his performance as a constituency MP. He was largely absent on military service. His ability to antagonise his own constituency workers was no help to his cause. He did have the advantage of name recognition and a heroic war record, but these were hardly decisive factors. It is argued here that his comparatively strong electoral performance was due to his adoption of the cause of social reform combined with his ability to campaign in a flamboyant manner that appealed to electors, which suggests that a very different result might have been possible if his approach had been taken up nationally by the Conservative Party.     

Foucault, fields of governability, and the population–family–economy nexus in China

It was only in the early twentieth century that China discovered that it had a population, at least if a population is understood not as a simple number of people but instead in terms of such features as variable levels of health, birth and death rates, age, sex, dependency ratios, and so on—as an object with a distinct rationality and intrinsic dynamics that can be made the target of a specific kind of direct intervention. In 1900, such a developmentalist conception of the population simply did not exist in China; by the 1930s, it pervaded the entire social and political field from top to bottom. Through a reading of a series of foundational texts in population and family reformism in China, this paper argues that this birth of the Chinese population occurred as a result of a general transformation of practices of governing, one that necessarily also involved a reconceptualization of the family and a new logic of overall social rationalization; in short, the isolation of a population–family–economy nexus as a central field of modern governing. This process is captured by elaborating and extending Foucault's studies of the historical emergence of apparatuses (dispositifs) into a notion of fields of governability. Finally, this paper argues that the one-child policy, launched in the late 1970s, should be understood not in isolation from the imposition of the “family-responsibility system” in agriculture and market reforms in exactly that period, but as part—mutatis mutandis—of a return to a form of governing that was developed in the first half of the twentieth century.     

Britain,the Old Commonwealth and the Problem of Rhodesian Independence, 1964–65

This article uses new sources from the National Archives of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom to examine the consultation and cooperation between Britain and the Old Commonwealth in dealing with the problem of Rhodesian independence. It demonstrates that Canada developed a proactive approach towards the Rhodesian problem but Britain, Australia and New Zealand gave only limited encouragement to Canadian initiatives to avert Rhodesia's Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI). This article also argues that problems in British policy formulation – especially the weakness of its attempts to deter Rhodesia from unilateral action and its hesitant contingency planning for a UDI – strained the relationship with its Old Commonwealth partners. This is significant because it belies the impression that the problem of Rhodesian independence divided the Commonwealth simply along racial lines.