The New Militia: War,Politics and Gender in 1750s Britain

This article explores the role of gender in the debates around the creation of a ‘New Militia’ at the beginning of the Seven Years War. The humiliating military defeats of 1756 had precipitated a cultural crisis that focused upon gender distinctions, as the ‘effeminacy’ of men and the ‘boldness’ of women threatened to collapse the social order. In this context, militia service was presented as a cure for the nation's moral, social, political and sexual ills. This article therefore examines a range of textual and visual sources in order to suggest that certain mid‐Georgian political worldviews were fundamentally gendered, since they were predicated upon martial masculine virtues of the citizenry.     

The Politics of the Pew: Faith,Liberty, and Authority in a Sydney Church in 1828

This article examines the political implications of the dispute between E. S. Hall and Archdeacon Scott over a pew in St James’ Church in the late 1820s. Beyond the legal questions it raised about the established status of the Church of England in New South Wales, Hall's public protest, conducted every Sunday during the largest regular social gathering in Sydney, was a self‐conscious performance of his wider critique of colonial authority. This episode reveals the symbolic importance of church spaces and the role of religious ideas about authority and freedom in colonial political debate.     

Gender,Traditional Authority,and the Politics of Rural Reform in South Africa

The new South African Constitution, together with later policies and legislation, affirm a commitment to gender rights that is incompatible with the formal recognition afforded to unelected traditional authorities. This contradiction is particularly evident in the case of land reform in many rural areas, where women’s right of access to land is denied through the practice of customary law. This article illustrates the ways in which these constitutional contradictions play out with particular intensity in the ‘former homelands’ through the example of a conflict over land use in Buffelspruit, Mpumalanga province. There, a number of women who had been granted informal access to communal land for the purposes of subsistence cultivation had their rights revoked by the traditional authority. Despite desperate protests, they continue to be marginalized in terms of access to land, while their male counterparts appropriate communal land for commercial farming and cattle grazing. Drawing on this protest, we argue that current South African practice in relation to the pressing issue of gender equity in land reform represents a politics of accommodation and evasion that tends to reinforce gender biases in rural development, and in so doing, undermines the prospects for genuinely radical transformation of the instituted geographies and institutionalized practices bequeathed by the apartheid regime.     

Economics,Politics, and Storytelling in the Yangzi Delta since 1949

Empirically rich and historically illuminating, Gilded Voices contributes a new and important perspective to the growing field of scholarship dedicated to rethinking PRC cultural history beyond the conventional dichotomy of Mao-era state domination and Reform Era autonomy, By corroborating a range of historical source materials-from personal interviews, municipal archives, periodicals, and audiovisual recordings-Qiliang He constructs a convincing argument that market competition and pursuit of individual livelihood played a much larger role in early PRC culture than previously thought, a pattern that, He shows, continues in the Reform Era, rather than emerging after the Cultural Revolution as something new.