War veterans and the transnational origins of Italian Fascism (1917–1919)

This article explores the origins of the historical relationship between war veterans and Fascism. Transcending the predominant paradigm of the controversial ‘brutalization’ thesis (George L. Mosse), the article relies on a transnational perspective that focuses on the interconnections between historical events and on processes of political communication and symbolic appropriation. Examining historical processes taking place in different European countries, as well as their effects on Mussolini and the Italian interventionists, the article argues that a transnational process of symbolic appropriation of the notion of the ‘veteran’, taking place between 1917 and 1919, is crucial to understand how the Fascist ideology and movement were born.     

A Physiologist’s War: Captain T. Graham Brown RAMC (1915–1919)

During the five years before the outbreak of the First World War, Thomas Graham Brown (1882–1965) conducted research into the control of locomotion that gained him a deserved and long-lasting reputation as a neuroscientist and, in 1927, was recognized by election to the Fellowship of the Royal Society. In 1915, with the First World War raging, he agonized about continuing his research or joining the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC). Told by his father to seek a commission, he served two and half years in Macedonia with the British Salonika Force. Whilst in Greece, he kept a daily diary. The entries from June 1916 to May 1917 are extant. They are unpublished and provide the background to the narrative to follow. Casualties with traumatic injury to the brain and spinal cord afforded him the opportunity to carry out careful observations, particularly concerning sensory localization, which resulted in novel findings and his observations on shell shock led to him being called as an expert witness to the national inquiry into the nature and treatment of the condition. In 1920, Graham Brown was appointed to the Chair of Physiology in Cardiff, which he held until 1947.     

Australian ‘left’ and ‘right’: (Social composition and ideological integrity)

Political self‐identification and interest in politics are used in this paper to define ‘left’, ‘centre’ and ‘right’ affiliation within the Australian public. Detailed political attitudes of these three groups are then analysed. The Australian ‘left’ is half the size of the ‘right’. It is, however, much better educated and much more ideological. Its political attitudes are twice as coherent as the attitudes of the ‘right’. The left's ideological congruence partly results from the better education of its affiliates. However, the difference in ideological congruence of the ‘left’ and the ‘right’ remains quite great even when the impact of education is statistically eliminated.     

‘There and back again’: The Career of John Ramsay of Terrenzeane (C. 1464–C. 1513)

War and military activity has always engendered espionage. Christine de Pisan’s Fayttes of Armes advised its readers — kings and lesser rulers — to be ‘curiose & diligent’, and ‘to send … here & there … espies subtyli … to understande the purpose of [the] enemy’.¹1 C. Pisan, The Book of Fayttes of Armes, ed. A. T. P. Byles (2010), pp. 50–51. England’s fifteenth-century king, Edward IV, was a master of such practice, with his victories against the Scots and his capture of Berwick in 1482 owing much to a vast network of intelligence. His successor, Henry VII, also invested in the area and used a great many disaffected Scots, Picards and merchants for diplomatic and military gain. And, of this group, perhaps the most interesting and contemporaneously recorded is a Scottish nobleman, John Ramsay, Lord Bothwell and Lord Balmain, of Terrenzeane (c. 1464–c. 1513). He is an individual often neglected by researchers, but who appears very much to have played an important role in shaping the histories of both kingdoms. The following article aims to trace his noteworthy career in the later medieval and early modern periods.     

(Im)Mobilization and hegemony: ‘hill tribe’ subjects and the ‘Thai’ state

In the mountains of northern Thailand the constraints and restrictions placed upon ‘hill tribe’ people and their bodies are often counter-posed to a legendary past where people could move freely across borders, where refuge in the mountains represented freedom from oppressive state powers, and where highlanders could come down from the mountains and integrate. This paper explores how highland subjects have been transformed as the emergence of the Thai state has imposed concrete and regulated boundaries demarcating Thailand, and a Thai people. Building on historical narratives in which the freedoms of the past are counterpoised with the closely governed present, I present a more complex and contradictory picture of the national subjects in Thailand. I discuss the citizenship movement, in which activists have been fighting for citizenship status for highlanders through a strategy that seeks a place for highland people within hegemonic discourses of the nation-state and belonging. The citizenship movement establishes a new ‘Thai hill tribe’ subject position, formed in opposition to its constitutive outside—the ‘non-Thai hill tribe’. And as highlanders find new ways to fit with the hegemony of the nation-state, both more fixed and more mobile subject positions open up as Thai-ness and its ‘others’ are redefined.     

A path towards Fascism: nationalism and large-scale industry in Italy (1910–1923)

In the decade before World War I, close connections developed in Italy between the nationalists and major elements of large-scale industry. As the Italian Nationalist Association, founded in 1910, became the main political reference for industrialists, the ties between nationalism and the business community helped to undermine the liberal state and end the political system established by Giovanni Giolitti. During World War I, the Nationalist Association developed close links with the Ansaldo company and supported it in the ‘parallel wars’ of Italian capitalism. Ansaldo went bankrupt in 1921, but the nationalists were able to establish relations with other entrepreneurs. Their connection with large-scale industry lay behind Mussolini’s decision in 1923 to accept the Nationalist Association into the National Fascist Party. Nationalism not only ensured that important economic forces would support the Fascist regime but its ideology significantly contributed to the building of Mussolini’s dictatorship.     

‘In aid of civil power’: The colonial army in Northern India,c.1919–42

India's tribal northeast continues to be a footnote in national and international historiography. Influenced by James C. Scott's recent characterisation of the non-state hill peoples of Zomia and their deliberate evasion of subject status, this article reappraises the 1826 treaty between the British political agent and Khasi leader U Tirot Sing, and the subsequent Nongkhlaw massacre. It further explores a set of British expectations of the hills as a potential site for missionisation and white colonisation. In this way, it asserts the purchase of Scott's theories, but argues for the further potential of micro-history and the colonial archive to render indigenous histories more visible.     

‘Peasantist nationalism’ in inter-war Greece (1927–41)

Abstract

‘Peasantist nationalism’ was a new radical nationalist discourse in the twentieth century. The crisis in agriculture in the 1920s, urbanism and the perceived overpopulation of the cities were important social factors that instigated the intellectual construction of the ‘peasantist nation’. Peasantist nationalism was by and large constructed by agronomists, a new stratum of technocrats who used nationalism as a vehicle for social mobility and their entry into the strata of the organic intellectuals of the bourgeoisie. Peasantist nationalist ideas, set forth earlier by the agronomists, were adopted by Metaxas' quasi-fascist regime and upgraded to the level of the state's hegemonic ideology.     

Rural youth and urban-based vocational training: gender,space and aspiring to ‘become someone’

ABSTRACT

The policy phrase Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) is rapidly gaining ground across Southeast Asia (and beyond). Despite numerous policy reports, little is known about how vocational training and education work as sites of practice. This is especially true for informal household-based apprenticeships and privately organized, commercial classroom-based training. Yet, these latter arrangements are numerous, an integral part of the widespread informal economy, and reflecting the fact that homes have retained their productive character in much of the Global South. Combining a village-based perspective (Laos) with an urban-based perspective (Cambodia), we analyse how these informal and privately organized training spaces are situated in rural youth’s gendered lives and shaped by, but also generative of, aspirations of ‘becoming someone’. In addition, comparing informal apprenticeships with classroom-based training leads us to raise some important questions about the implications of the (global) policy emphasis on the standardization and formalization of TVET.     

The 1919 ‘race riots’ – Within and beyond exceptional moments in South Shields and Glasgow

Historicising riots is a challenging process. Balancing the characterisation of violent trauma alongside the longer trajectories of associated grievances, and acts of contestation, poses representational tensions for associated scholars. Emphasis, both in contemporary sources and recent scholarship, upon exceptional episodes of violence potentially overplays the particularity of the event, and perhaps detracts from the recognition of smaller, less visible, and everyday acts of exclusion and contestation. In this paper, we propose to revisit the 1919 British seaport riots through a political geography lens, considering continuities and variations in the experiences, trajectories and contexts of the events in South Shields and Glasgow. Theoretically, we draw upon intersecting work within cultural studies, history and geography to reflect upon critical space-time geographies in relation to the political atmospheres of violent events. This facilitates an engagement with a variety of sources to characterise the 1919 riots, including trade union records, Colonial Office documents, newspaper reports and police records. We argue that bringing together these archival materials allows a recognition of the heterogeneity of experience associated with seemingly exceptional episodes of racialised violence.     

Endangered minority and regional languages (‘dialects’) in Italy

The Italian linguistic situation is characterised by a remarkable number of language varieties, although the development of Italian in the past 150 years has been the cause of a language shift from local languages to Italian. The degree of endangerment suffered by so-called ‘Italian dialects’ is shown using the Major Evaluative Factors of Language Vitality drawn up by a UNESCO ad hoc expert group in 2003, and the data offered by the 2006 ISTAT survey on language use. The debate in Italy on the vitality of ‘dialects’ and their future has done little to activate mechanisms and strategies to reverse the worrying language shift that both minority languages and ‘dialects’ are undergoing.     

‘Unclaimed territory’: childhood and disordered space(s)

This paper explores adult discourses in literary references which revolve around the relationship between childhood and disordered space. This association is often constructed as a positive expression of the romantic innocence of childhood and nature, but it can also be construed as negative in cases where ‘little devils’ are let loose in hazardous urban settings. The complex dynamics of disorder relating to childhood are discussed in terms of the disorders both of nature and of injustice. The paper argues that childhood needs to be conceptualized less in terms of innocence and more in terms of otherness. Disordered spaces in these terms represent territories of becoming-other, where rhizomatic scrambling of adult-ordered striated space makes room for upwellings of the immanent othernesses of children.