Lord Salisbury,Mr. Chamberlain and South Africa, 1895–9

In the closing decades of the nineteenth century the idea of Greater Britain, of the unity of the Anglo-Saxon colonies and the ‘mother country’, became a topic of considerable interest and controversy amongst the metropolitan intellectual and political elite. This article examines the roles played by the monarchy in the debates. Queen Victoria, as both idea and institution, assumed two central functions. First, it was argued that the institution of the monarchy, stretching back over centuries, could supply an anchor of permanence and constitutional fidelity in a redesigned global polity. This would reassure critics of such schemes that their fears about fundamental transformation were unfounded; that a thread of historical continuity ran through the proposals. Secondly, Victoria – or at least an idealised representation of her – acted as the linchpin for a sense of global national identity. The prestige and admiration that she (and the institution of the monarchy itself) generated, it was contended, bound the distant peoples of her realm in close communion. Moreover, the way in which she was sometimes represented in imperial debate harked back to (while modifying) an older civic humanist language of ‘patriot kingship’.     

Identity construction and ‘coincidental’ entrepreneurship among gay Filipino guesthouse owners in Amsterdam

This article centralizes gay Filipino entrepreneurs in the guesthouse industry in the city of Amsterdam, drawing on the narratives and trajectories of five of them. The article highlights the common threads of experiences of these immigrant entrepreneurs, as these provide interesting insights into the processes of their identity (re)construction and social embedding in the Netherlands and the role of their entrepreneurial involvement in these processes. In addition, the article describes how they relate to their home country, the wider Filipino community in the Netherlands, and the wider Dutch gay community. It will be shown that these experiences and relations sit uneasily with established positions in debates on home and belonging within transnational migration studies and queer studies, notably the idea that moving to western countries of destination cannot be treated as equivalent to moving to ‘queer cultural homelands.’ In addition, the article shows that immigrant entrepreneurship does not revolve around ethnicity per se in the sense that entrepreneurial practices cannot be understood separately from other identity forming structures such as sexuality and class.     

Amsterdam in the Red Queen's Country: Interorganizational coordination and EU‐local interaction in spatial planning and policy

This study tests alternative models of EU policy evolution, using the municipality of Amsterdam's interaction with the EU as a pilot case. Amsterdam's activities in European resource acquisition and developing EU policy are reviewed, and the coordination structures concerting these activities are analysed and evaluated. Conclusions are: Local‐EU interaction is mainly sectoral, undertaken at local line agencies’ initiative, with little intersectoral coordination; networking is the universal medium of local — EU interaction, dismissing the intergovernmental model in favour of a modified communautarianism; interorganizational networks linking EU institutions to their environments imply a growing supranationalism with significant implications for European integration.     

The Disconnected Innovation of New Urbanity in Zuidas Amsterdam, Ørestad Copenhagen and Forum Barcelona

In the latest generation of large-scale European peripheral development projects, a growing ambition is visible to plan more urban environments. We refer to this intention as planning for “new urbanity” since the aim is to reintroduce into a new timeframe and location the traditional urban concepts of density and mixing uses. Empirical evidence shows, however, that the path to realize such ambitions has been very difficult. This article presents a study on governance factors influencing the trajectory from initial ambitions towards the first physical results in three cases. An analysis is made of the different dimensions of framing of these projects in their respective metropolitan action space and of the rules that structure their operational domains. This is the basis to question the extent to which the ambition for new urbanity has developed in a social norm influencing acceptable behaviour among actors. The conclusion is that the narrowly defined operation spheres of these projects are weakly connected to important societal domains that could have better supported these ambitions. New urbanity has, therefore, predominantly remained a disconnected, free-floating, “good idea” without strong material results. It is also in danger of becoming an extremely privatized planning concept, deviating from its original spatial and socially integrative nature.     

The Amsterdam Tapestry Producer Alexander Baert (1660–1719) and his Workshop: New Findings

Drawing on archival material relating to the Amsterdam tapestry producer Alexander Baert, much of it previously unpublished, this research note marks a departure from the prevailing, undersocialised, approach to tapestry production and trade in the Northern Netherlands. Data explored here for the first time show that, before emigrating from Oudenaarde, Baert was an active member of a rich network of tapestry entrepreneurs, but that ‘push factors’ such as legal and commercial problems along with ‘pull factors’ such as certain benefits and freedoms prompted his decision to move to the Republic. While earlier studies describe his activities there as an isolated process, it becomes clear that the entrepreneur and his descendants preserved enduring business ties in the Southern Netherlands. These networks furnished Baert with the infrastructure that enabled him to import tapestries from Antwerp, Brussels and Oudenaarde and to purchase Flemish cartoons cheaply.     

J.S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion and intellectual history

ABSTRACT

Recent thinking about Intellectual History has moved beyond studying only verbal texts, to encompass other kinds of visual and aural texts that can be vehicles for generative thought. Where might music fit into this expanded conception? If ideas are defined purely as concepts that can be expressed in words, music can be no more than an “epiphenomenon”, a consequence or representation of ideas that lie behind it, but not capable of embodying those ideas in itself. Yet to many musicians, it seems obvious that music can function as a way in which ideas are developed and worked out. What kinds of knowledge might be embodied in music, then, and how do its meanings change over time? In this paper, I examine some of these issues through consideration of one of the key texts of Western art music, J.S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, exploring how it was conceived in a liturgical context in Bach’s time, how its meaning changed when transposed to the very different milieus of concert performance in nineteenth-century Berlin and colonial Sydney, and as it has been re-imagined in a variety of recent staged and recorded versions.     

Y 19 manas.paoiriia- and aṣ̌a.paoiriia-

Yasna 19 contains an Avestan exegesis of the Gāthic stanza Ahuna Vairiia, the most revered text in Zoroastrianism. The stanza is traditionally understood to be the essential statement of the religion of Mazdā. Thus, in Y 19 we have a unique opportunity to ask about the significance that the Gāthās of Zarathu?tra held for the later Avestan tradition. In what intellectual horizon did Zoroastrian priests place their founding text? Although Y 19 exegesis of the Ahuna Vairiia contains semantic obscurities, it is possible to establish the meaning of the commentary through syntactic and conceptual analysis of two key terms and the phrases where they occur. The article critically examines the earlier interpretations of the text. Having found these inadequate, it proposes a new reading and understanding of the Avestan exegesis. In particular, the article argues that the Avestan exegete understood the Gāthic stanza within an eschatological horizon.