Reluctant collaborators: Argentina and Chile in Antarctica during the International Geophysical Year, 1957–58

This paper suggests that Argentine and Chilean participation with the Antarctic section of the International Geophysical Year (IGY) of 1957–58 can be characterized as ‘reluctant collaboration.’ It then reflects on the implications of the nature of South American involvement for the history of the Antarctic section of the IGY, especially as it led to the negotiation of the 1959 Antarctic Treaty. During the initial planning stages of the IGY, both Argentina and Chile worried that proposals for widespread scientific research in the Antarctic continent would interfere with their contested claims to political sovereignty in the region. Yet despite their initial skepticism, Argentina and Chile found themselves swept along by the current of international scientific co-operation of the IGY, which persisted into the Antarctic Treaty negotiations of 1959. Within the limited options available, Chile and Argentina were able to negotiate an outcome that was not altogether unfavorable to their political interests. At the same time, their collaboration helped to legitimize both the IGY and the subsequent Antarctic Treaty.     

Science,geography, and nation: the global creation of Thumba

Abstract

The origins of the Indian space program are typically traced back to the founding of a rocket launch base in Thumba in the state of Kerala in India in the 1960s. In creating infrastructure at Thumba, Indian scientific elites used geography as an instrument to create a vast international network of scientific and political actors committed to the science that was possible within India, particularly cosmic ray studies. They were drawing on a long tradition of linking geography to science redolent of the colonial era but were inspired by their newly constituted political imaginary of independent India as a place where science, geography, and nation were perfectly mapped on to each other. NASA’s help was crucial in this regard, enabled as a tool in Cold War high politics, as American technocrats sought to steer India towards the West, while India itself was keenly aware of a more proximate phenomenon, Pakistan’s own burgeoning efforts to do the same. Concerned about domestic opprobrium to large Indian investments in space technology, Indian and American actors shielded the Thumba project from critique by installing it under the umbrella of the international order, in this case the United Nations. This internationalism was complemented by a deep and firm belief in the universalism of modern science as a portable instrument, capable of improving the social order anywhere, regardless of political or social context.     

An ecology of postcoloniality: disciplining nature and society in Malaya, 1948–1957

This paper examines the territorialization of the Malayan rainforest by the British colonial authorities during the Malayan Emergency in the decade prior to political independence in 1957. Through the events of the Emergency the Malaysian rainforest was constructed as a space of fear and violence in opposition to the orderly rule of the state. Disassociation from the forest was the visible criterion of good or bad, and the struggle over land became recast as a moral struggle between good (the state) and bad (the Communists). The military campaign in the forest was accompanied by legislation designed to control and discipline the Malayan population in the urban areas especially those expelled from the forests and forcibly incarcerated in the ‘New Villages’. The result was an ecology that allowed the most efficient monopoly of violence by the state and of the means to discipline its subject-citizens.     

Class and nation in the Jewish settlement of Palestine: the case of Merhavia, 1910–30

This article examines the relationship between ideology and settlement in early twentieth-century Palestine by tracing the evolution of one co-operative, Merhavia, located at the heart of the «ideological settlement core» in the northern Jezreel valley. The study begins by looking at how socialist Zionist ideology was redefined in order to endorse permanent settlement where earlier it had rejected it. The article then examines two phases of further ideological change. In the first, class-based strategies were replaced by national solutions which favoured an exclusive Jewish economy. In the second, an «ideology from below» in the form of egalitarian and collectivist values was asserted, with the effect of destroying the Merhavia co-operative while sustaining its main rival, the kibbutz. Far from marking a clash between «ideology» and «geographical realities» the new ideologies provided the most effective long-term solution for settlement, one that would hold sway for over half a century.     

Learning to be suburban: the production of community in Westwood Hills, Pennsylvania, 1952–1958

In 1952, working-class women in the newly built suburb of Westwood Hills, Pennsylvania began publishing a mimeographed newsletter entitled The Hilltrotter. They used the newsletter to shape their community and by doing so learned and taught how to be suburban. This process occurred both discursively and materially, as the staff of The Hilltrotter simultaneously sought to create a shared conception of community and to shape the everyday lives of Westwood Hills' residents. This paper investigates the work of women on The Hilltrotter and by doing so shows how they produced a constellation of identities – of community, class, age, gender, and citizenship. They constructed these identities through their efforts to make Westwood Hills into a safe, stable, and well-ordered suburban community. In doing so they contributed to the formation of a postwar hegemonic order that enlisted the working class in the reproduction of capitalism.     

Deducing rationales and political tactics in the partitioning of Ireland, 1912–1925

Partition is an intrinsically abstract and simplistic blunt instrument applied on a complex mosaic of peculiarities that constitute reality. There are very few modern states that are ethnically or culturally homogenous. In this context, partition is a subjective territorial tactic that can treat or exacerbate symptoms of historical, political, and geographical difficulties. While exhibiting comparative scope, especially to the role of the British State and the dynamics of national majorities and minorities, the circumstances concerning the partitioning of Ireland deviate from patterns gleaned from other examples as the evolving bases of its partition between 1912 and 1925 mutated at various stages with regard to geography, political status, and function. However, Ireland served as an important historical precedent in illustrating the disparity between the original intent and eventual result of its partition. Indeed, one can extrapolate from the Irish example that partition is better understood as a catalytic tactical process that radically reconfigures the political and geographical dimensions of conflict rather than as a decisive political instrument solving it.     

The unintended consequences of emergency food aid: neutrality,sovereignty and politics in the Syrian civil war, 2012–15

This article dissects the role of emergency food aid during the current Syrian conflict. Drawing on Séverine Autesserre's concept of frames and Giorgio Agamben's theory of sovereignty, we argue that the neutrality frame, which undergirds the majority of humanitarian relief efforts in Syria, obfuscates the impact of emergency food aid, both on sovereign power relations and local political dynamics. While neutrality appears benign, it has had a tangible impact on the Syrian civil war. Through close scrutiny of various case‐studies, the article traces how humanitarian efforts reinforce the bases of sovereign politics while contributing to a host of what Mariella Pandolfi (1998) terms ‘mobile sovereignties’. In the process, humanitarian organizations reaffirm sovereign power while also engaging in similar activities. We then analyse how and why ostensibly neutral emergency food aid has unintentionally assisted the Assad regime by facilitating its control over food, which it uses to buttress support and foster compliance. By bringing external resources into life‐or‐death situations characterized by scarcity, aid agencies have become implicated in the conflict's inner workings. The article concludes by examining the political and military impact of emergency food assistance during the Syrian conflict, before discussing possible implications for the humanitarian enterprise more broadly.     

Civitatis Ghaniensis Conditor: Kwame Nkrumah,symbolic nationalism and the iconography of Ghanaian money 1957 – the Golden Jubilee

ABSTRACT. During his tenure as premier from independence in 1957 until he was ousted by a military and police coup in 1966, Kwame Nkrumah was the living personification of the Ghanaian nation‐state. As the self‐proclaimed Civitatis Ghaniensis Conditor– Founder of the State of Ghana – his image was minted on the new national money and printed on postage stamps. He erected a monument of himself in Accra, changed the national anthem to make references to himself, customised the national flag to match the colors of his CPP party, made his birthday a national day of celebration (National Founder's Day), named streets and universities after himself, and amended the constitution whereby he became Life President. Since the coup, many of the symbols of nationhood that Nkrumah constructed have been debated, demolished, reconsidered and reengineered by successive governments to rewrite the Ghanaian historical narrative. This article analyses the contentions of one of Nkrumah's first expressions of symbolic nationalism – that of the national coinage.     

Engineering the Kingdom of God: Irrigation,Science and the Social Christian Millennium, 1880–1914

Irrigation was a hot issue in turn‐of‐the‐twentieth century Australia. Most often, it was embraced by booster‐visionaries who wanted it to provide Australia with a place at the table of nations. Not all irrigation enthusiasts placed the same emphasis on wealth and national power, however — indeed, there were some who believed it would help achieve a just distribution of social opportunity. In this article, I look at two Australian “social Christians”, the Melbourne minister, Charles Strong, and the South Australian journalist, Harry Taylor, who saw irrigation as an agent of God's Kingdom on Earth. This belief was part of a more general conviction, shared both by these men and other social Christians, that it was possible to merge millennial religiosity with evolution, progressive politics and rational principles.     

Piracy and the production of knowledge in the travels of William Dampier, c.1679–1688

Despite its centrality to the production of knowledge in the early modern period, the ship remains a rather marginal site in the work of historians of science. Accounts of ‘floating universities’ and ‘laboratories at sea’ abound, but little is said of the countless other ships, and their crews, involved in the production of knowledge through maritime exploration and travel. The central concern of the paper is the life and work of William Dampier (1651-1715), a seventeenth-century mariner who sailed as a pirate and authored genre-defining and well received scientific travel narratives. The thesis presented here is that the ‘way of life’ encouraged among the crews of the pirate ships aboard which Dampier travelled rendered him well-placed to gather the ‘useful’ knowledge and experiences which made his scientific name. Understanding this juxtaposition requires a focus which moves beyond the materiality of the ship, and which ultimately brings into view some of the social and epistemic geographies which took shape in and beyond the ship.     

Academic travel from Cambridge University and the formation of centres of knowledge, 1885–1954

This paper draws attention to academic travel as a key issue in the geographies of knowledge, science and higher education. Building upon recent work in science studies and geography, it is argued that academic travel reveals the wider geography of scientific work and thus of the knowledge and networks involved. By examining academic travel from Cambridge University in the period 1885 to 1954, the study clarifies its role in the development of Cambridge as a modern research university, the emergence of global knowledge centres elsewhere and the development of an Anglo-American academic hegemony in the twentieth century. Using unpublished archival data on all recorded applications for leave of absence by Cambridge University Teaching Officers, it is further explored how the global geographies of academic travel varied among different types of work, thereby exposing distinct hierarchies of spaces of knowledge production and sites of study.     

‘The development of higher urban life’ and the geographic imagination: beauty, art, and moral environmentalism in Toronto, 1900–1920

The existence of school art leagues in Toronto, which sought to use beauty and art in the public schools as a means of sensitizing children to aesthetics, can be explained through their ideational affiliation with the city beautification impulse. In Toronto, a chief proponent of city beautification and the link between city beauty and school art was the painter, city planner, and art educator, George Agnew Reid, who regarded city beauty as more than an exercise in urban cosmetics; city beautification relied on extant beliefs in the morality of beauty and its putative efficacy as a shaper of human behaviour in the city, especially the ennoblement of the working and immigrant classes. The resulting ‘moral environmentalism’ of beautification changes the way we should think about early city planning, ultimately revealing the geographical imaginations of those contributing to the moral environmentalist milieu.     

Devolution and Parliamentary Representation: The Case of the Scotland and Wales Bill, 1976–7

For as long as devolution has been debated in the UK, there has been fierce discussion as to the representation of the would‐be affected areas at Westminster. That this has been the case is a consequence of Westminster's dual remit as both a state‐wide and a sub‐state legislature. While this dual remit was relatively straightforward when applied to all nations of the UK, it does, however, raise serious questions about the equality of MPs at Westminster in the face of asymmetric devolution that would carve out parliament's remit in some, but not all, parts of the UK. These questions bedevilled Gladstone's Irish Home Rule Bills in the late 19th century and have been a recurrent feature of debate following New Labour's devolution programme in the late 1990s, culminating in the adoption of a system of ‘English Votes for English Laws’ by the house of commons in October 2015. This article looks at this issue through the lens of the ill‐fated Scotland and Wales Bill introduced by the Callaghan government in 1976. It explores the roots of the bill and how, and why, the idea of referring the question of territorial representation, post‐devolution, to a Speaker's conference, came to secure the initial support of cabinet as the best answer to this problem, and why the government swiftly changed its mind. Parliamentary statecraft considerations served to push a Speaker's conference onto the institutional agenda, before ultimately dooming it to failure.