Sir Edward Grey,France, and the Entente: How to Catch the Perfect Angler?

ABSTRACT

This article will focus on the nine-year relationship between British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey and the French Ambassador at London Paul Cambon, principally during the years 1912 to 1914. It will show how the French perceived Sir Edward Grey himself, his foreign policy, and his understanding of the Entente. It will analyse the means by which Cambon in particular, and through him the French in general, sought to coax from the Foreign Secretary some form of Franco-British alliance. It will do so by analysing three things: first, what Paul Cambon hoped to obtain from Sir Edward Grey and how; second, the Anglo-German Haldane Mission in which Grey's manoeuvring got the better of Cambon; and third, the Grey-Cambon letters of November 1912, when Cambon got the better of Grey. More broadly the article might be seen as an example of how ambassadors seek to secure policies from the country to which they are accredited and how foreign ministers attempt to parry them.     

Traces of empire: Architectural heritage,imperial memory and post-war reconstruction in Sarajevo and Beirut

ABSTRACT

Beirut and Sarajevo share a long Ottoman past followed by urban expansion under the protectorate of further imperial rule – of the French and Habsburg Empires, respectively, as well as a recent experience of urban warfare, segregation, and post-war reconstruction. This article examines how the architectural heritage of empires in the two cities has been transformed, reimagined and mobilized through urban post-war reconstruction by a number of actors: local authorities and politicians, architects, international organizations and investors. Discussing the tensions between the memory of empire and contemporary nation-building processes, the essay argues that the politics of memory and amnesia surrounding the recent wars shape and reconfigure the memory and heritage of empire. Moreover, it reflects how the reshaping of urban space acts both as an arena and as an enhancer of the politics and practices of memory and amnesia.     

The United Kingdom and the Negotiation of the 1969 New York Convention on Special Missions

During 1968–9, members of the United Nations, meeting in the Legal Committee of the General Assembly, negotiated a Convention on Special Missions, sometimes known as the New York Convention, setting out the privileges and immunities of ad hoc embassies between states. The negotiation was part of a process through which the UN sought to clarify the status and rights of official representatives, so that diplomacy could function with security and certainty. This article looks at the role of one leading power, the United Kingdom, in the talks. It explores how British interests were defined, the tactics used to secure them and how London came to terms with pressure from other states to redefine its approach. The focus is on the overall political thrust of the British negotiating position, as formulated mainly by the Foreign Office, rather than the detailed talks on such thorny issues as tax avoidance and diplomatic property. The article shows that, while London was keen to see a codification of diplomatic law, cold-war considerations made it less than enthusiastic about an upsurge in the number of special missions that the New York Convention might encourage.     

Preserving the Status Quo: Britain,the United States,and Bolivian Tin, 1946–56

This article analyses the relationship between Britain, the United States, and Bolivia in the context of the tin nexus after the Second World War. While the connection between Britain and Bolivia was long-standing - Bolivian tin had been shipped to Britain since the nineteenth century - it extended far beyond simple bilateralism. Such was the intricate web of connections in the global tin industry that any rupture in the Anglo-Bolivian relationship would have fundamental ramifications on the equilibrium of the industry, and, in turn, Britain's predominant position within it. The United States had overtly challenged Britain's dominance during the Second World War by constructing a smelter to be supplied by Bolivian ores. Despite the financial exigencies of the post-war period, the profound upheavals in the domestic Bolivian tin industry, and the contentious, destabilising tin-procurement policy pursued by the United States, Britain was determined to confront this threat. By actively seeking to preserve its long-term contract for Bolivian tin, Britain was able to maintain its predominance in the post-war global tin industry. At the same time, Bolivia deftly utilised Anglo-American rivalry to ensure more than one outlet for its most critical export commodity.     

A False Start? British Perspectives on Italy’s Participation in the Early Phases of the European Economic Integration Process: The Case of the OEEC (1948–1952)

Abstract

This article examines how Anglo-Italian relationships unfolded in the aftermath of the Second World War within the framework of the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC). By analysing Italy’s participation in the early stages of the European integration process through the lens of British diplomacy, this contribution aims to shed new light on the international dimension of Rome’s post-1945 political and economic strategies. First, the article considers the main concerns that characterized Italy’s involvement in the OEEC activities between the late 1940s and the early 1950s: the promotion of the circulation of the intra- and extra-European manpower and the liberalization of trade and payments. Second, rather than making a ‘classic’ comparison between the divergent policies – particularly the internal and international economic programmes – that Britain and Italy pursued within the OEEC, this article highlights the extent to which an ‘asymmetry of power’ impacted Italy’s ability to realize its strategies. To conclude, the essay assesses how bilateral and multilateral relationships in the OEEC arena mutually contributed to the shaping of Italy and Britain’s patterns of post-WWII economic reconstruction.     

On bullshit in cultural policy practice and research: notes from the British case

In 2005, Harry G. Frankfurt, a retired professor of moral philosophy at Princeton University, made it into the best‐sellers chart with his book On Bullshit. Taking his essay as its starting point, this article explores the analysis of bullshit and the prevalence of bullshitting in the contemporary public sphere. Frankfurt’s short essay indeed provides an intellectual framework to interpret and understand contemporary rhetoric and practice in the cultural policy field, as well as recent trends in cultural policy research. Through a discussion of selected New Labour’s cultural policy documents in Britain, the article aims to show that many of the key actors in the cultural policy debate indeed display the ‘indifference to how things really are’ and the cultivation of vested interests which Frankfurt attributes to the activity of bullshitting. The final part of the text discusses the implications of the present status quo for ‘critical’ cultural policy research.     

City–suburban electoral polarization in Great Britain, 1950–2001

The degree to which residents of British inner cities and suburbs have diverged in their voting behaviour over the post-war period is analysed in this article. Examining aggregate election results by constituency, it is demonstrated that residents of inner cities and suburbs are indeed polarizing in their electoral choices. OLS regression analysis is conducted using constituency-level data to determine the relevance of intra-urban differences for understanding geographic variation in the vote in relation to those for region, size of conurbation and urban–rural distinctions. Results show that urban place of residence is particularly important for understanding the shifting geography of Conservative support. The implications of this research for electoral change in Britain are discussed.     

‘A Hazardous Task’: Britain and the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations

In 2014, the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations celebrated its fiftieth anniversary since its coming into force in 1964. Setting out the privileges and immunities accorded to diplomats and diplomatic missions, the negotiations of this convention were part of the United Nations' plan to strengthen the international rule of law. This article analyses the role of Britain, one of the major actors in the negotiation process. It explores how Britain's negotiation position was shaped by diplomatic realities of the 1950s, and the strategies used to ensure Britain's interests being reflected in the final convention. The focus will be on the overall political pressure that underlined Britain's negotiation position, in order to reveal the general UK position on the codification of diplomatic privileges and immunities. Despite the remarkably friendly atmosphere at the 1961 Vienna conference, Britain could not press through all its amendments which, through the concluding legislation process, protracted Britain's ratification process. The article shows while London was supporting the codification of international law, codification by convention was not its ultimate choice. Therefore, the subsequent legislation process was marked by an inter-departmental dispute between the Foreign Office and Treasury, inter alia, on the exemption of Scotch whisky from excise duties.     

Towards Hume – the discourse on the liberty of the press in the age of Walpole*

The liberty of the press became one of the main topics of public debate in the 1720s and 1730s in response to Walpole’s restrictive press policy. This debate was carried on mainly in newspapers such as the Craftsman and the London Journal. Country and Court writers did not limit their discussions to legal questions, but conducted a lively debate about what press freedom actually was, and what role the press should have in political life. Among other things, they discussed to what extent it was appropriate for the press to take on an anti-governmental role. This debate is important, not least because it is a foil for one of the ‘classical’ eighteenth-century texts on the problem of press freedom, David Hume’s essay ‘Of the Liberty of the Press’. The debate reveals to what extent, and in what respects, Hume was breaking new ground in this essay.     

Cosmopolitan Catterick? Isotopic evidence for population mobility on Rome’s Northern frontier

In order to investigate how the population diversity at major Romano-British urban centres compared to small towns and military outposts, we conducted multi-isotope (carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and strontium) analyses of bones (42 individuals) and teeth (26 individuals) of human skeletons from Cataractonium/Roman Catterick in North Yorkshire (U.K.). The results suggest a markedly less diverse population at Catterick than at the larger towns. Significant differences are observed between burials from the town and fort area and the suburb of Bainesse to the south, and it is suggested that these reflect a shift to more localised recruitment for the Roman army in the Late Roman period. Isotope data for the ‘Bainesse Eunuch’, an unusual 4th century burial that has been interpreted as the remains of a ‘transvestite’ priest of Cybele, are not ultimately conclusive but consistent with origins in Southern Britain or areas with a similar climate abroad.     

‘‘This Secret Town’: British Intelligence,the Special Relationship,and the Vietnam War’

This article seeks to revise our understanding of Cold War intelligence as a practice. The conventional view is that Britain's MI6 waged a battle in the shadows consisting of espionage and covert action. However, a number of MI6 officers operated as observers, conducting what we might call ‘intelligence without espionage’. The dual identity of these officers raises important questions about how intelligence operated in the blurred space between traditional diplomacy and human espionage using agents. Using the case of MI6 officers in the British Consulate-General in Hanoi between 1965 and 1972, this article explores how a dual identity provided alternative means of acquiring intelligence within a highly secure state that exhibited remarkable paranoia about foreign spies. Furthermore, the United States lacked diplomatic representation in Hanoi and so the British Consulate provided a remarkable window for Western intelligence on the effect of ‘Operation Rolling Thunder’, Lyndon Johnson's escalating air campaign against North Vietnam. Both Johnson and Harold Wilson were avid readers of this material. Accordingly, in the context of the Cold War intelligence partnership between the UK and US, the consulate in Hanoi was an example of the ‘inverse’ special relationship, in which Britain enjoyed unique value.     

Geoffrey Holmes and the Urban World of Augustan England

Urban history as a sub-discipline within history began to emerge in Britain in the 1960s and early 1970s. Attention initially focused heavily on the 19th century, but the Tudor and early Stuart town also soon attracted attention. Academic interest in the post-restoration and 18th-century urban world emerged a little more slowly, but the closing decades of the 20th century produced a mounting volume of research on the subject. Geoffrey Holmes was one of a group of post-war historians rewriting the history of Augustan Britain and re-establishing its significance in the longer-term development of the country. Though not a specialist urban historian, Holmes saw towns playing a vital part in shaping the character of the period. His research anticipated and inspired many of the facets of the rapidly-emerging historiography on the 18th-century town, intersecting with it in three particular areas. First, in demonstrating the important role played by towns, in particular as the home of four-fifths of the seats in the house of commons, in the broader political system; second, in highlighting the position of London at the hub of the Augustan world; and third in revealing the part played by towns, and especially those who inhabited them, in promoting social change at the same time as securing long-term political stability.     

Nostalgia for ‘innocent homely pleasures’: The 1964 New Zealand Controversy over Washday at the Pa

In 1964, the New Zealand Department of Education withdrew and destroyed 38,000 copies of Washday at the Pa, a booklet depicting Maori family life, at the request of the Maori Women’s Welfare League. This essay explores the raced and gendered context of the ensuing uproar in the press, which debated aspects of New Zealand identity. It situates the Washday controversy in the context of post-war housing and differential standards of living experienced by Maori and pakeha. It argues that the League upheld claims to both modernity and tradition, while many pakeha used the occasion to express nostalgia for mother–centred domesticity.     

ITALY AND FRANCE IN THE SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY STAGE CONTROVERSY

Abstract

Constantijn Huygens (1596-1687) was a notable Dutch statesman who penned over 75,000 lines of verse in eight languages. He made visits to England on no less than seven occasions and wrote a significant body of poetry, primarily in Dutch, but also in Latin, and very occasionally in French and English, during these visits. In this article, a detailed account is given of the poetry, which Huygens wrote in England. It provides a case-study of someone writing Dutch, and indeed Latin, verse in England in the early-modern period. Furthermore, during a time when the fortunes of Britain and the Northern Netherlands were very closely linked, it illustrates how a Dutchman responded in verse to aspects of English social and cultural life, and events such as the execution of Charles I, and the Great Fire of London of 1666.     

The Connolly Association,the Catholic Church,and anti-communism in Britain and Ireland during the early Cold War

ABSTRACT

During the Cold War era, the Connolly Association, an Irish republican socialist political organisation in Britain close to the Communist Party of Great Britain, was seen by British Communists as a potential means of winning recruits amongst Britain’s growing post-war Irish community. This view was shared by the Catholic Church, which, amidst the broader ideological atmosphere of the Cold War, placed an increased emphasis on anti-communism in the early post-war years. This article will discuss clerical opposition to the Connolly Association in early Cold War Britain and Ireland, drawing chiefly on diocesan archives and Catholic periodicals.     

Evictions for development: Creative destruction,redistribution and the politics of unequal entitlements in inner-city Addis Ababa (Ethiopia), 2010–2018

Ethnographies on evictions and critical urban studies have showed how, globally, corporate and government seizure of urban space has been fundamental to the production of circuits of values under capitalism. This paper adds another layer to the scholarly understanding of evictions. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research on the economies of Addis Ababa's inner city and the politics of city building in Ethiopia's capital carried out between 2010 and 2018, I explore how evictions not only helped make room for private investments and urban regeneration. Evictions helped make the logics of investments and capital accumulation the framework within which the reach and the scope of policies of redistribution have been defined. By exploring how redistribution is made compatible with dispossession, this paper explores how evictions reshaped the terms of poor people's adverse incorporation in Addis Ababa's development through a political and moral economy of unequal entitlement.     

Parliament and the Press: Forging the United Nations in Wartime Britain, 1939–45

During the Second World War, not only the United States but also Great Britain played a leading role in planning and establishing the United Nations (UN) as a new international organisation to replace the League of Nations. While scholarship on post-war planning is extensive, relatively little exists on how the planning process was discussed and depicted publicly in Britain. The purpose of this article is to fill such lacunae by examining the two most important domains for public discussion at the time, the press and parliament. It will argue, first, that the League of Nations’ experience – its inability to use collective force and its optimistically democratic structure – overwhelmingly shaped public discourse in reference to the UN. By referring to the past, the press and politicians alike in Britain were content to relinquish interwar ideas such as equal rights and equal representation for all nations. Second, apart from the lessons of history, the less democratic structure of the new world organisation was justified from the perspective of great power politics. The desire to make the grand alliance between Britain, the United States of America, and the USSR functional despite all mutual suspicions, directed the view of the UN, and typically overrode all other concerns relating to post-war planning. Finally, throughout the wartime planning of the UN, public opinion, in so far as press and parliament were concerned, held fast to the idea that the British empire was not to be touched by the UN. In public, the establishment of the UN was hardly considered as a starting point for decolonisation. Instead, the UN was designed to become the post-war embodiment of the grand alliance, a vehicle through which the victory over the Axis powers would be managed at the global level: such management did not envision the need to let empire go. Viewed this way, it also becomes clear that nationalism and internationalism were not mutually exclusive or binary visions, but coexisted and shifted in importance throughout the period examined.     

Dynamic Trajectories,Adaptive Cycles,and Complexity in Culture Change

Trends in interdisciplinary research over the last two decades have opened new perspectives and pushed forward our understanding of how complex social systems function. This study explores several theories of social change that have emerged from increasingly interdisciplinary perspectives in combination with complexity theory. Resilience theory and related concepts of adaptive cycles and panarchy are now being applied extensively to the study of a variety of human social systems. However, there is still the need to further explore the implications of how human systems differ from the ecologies of other species. A case study drawn from early polity formation in Inner Asia is used to assess the effectiveness of differing approaches. Certain theoretical gaps are described and a series of concepts within a theory of dynamic trajectories are proposed that focus on high-level patterns of social change. The basic elements of the theory include dynamics of the scope and scale of polities, the probability space in which change occurs, and the strands or bundles of social and cultural characteristics that represent the substance of trajectory. As the trajectory patterns manifest, they envelop constraints and opportunities influencing future patterns. Agent-based models are used to illustrate aspects of the dynamic trajectory theory, especially economic decision-making within specific landscapes and control hierarchies in the context of competing polities. Rather than repeating cycles, the results reveal reorganization modes highlighting the significance of continuity and opportunity in social change.     

Life in the kitchen: Television advertising,the housewife and domestic modernity in Britain, 1955–1969

The modern kitchen was emblematic of a cold war obsession with household consumer durables as a measure of national progress. Its roots lay in a largely American idea of the ‘new household’ and the modern housewife. The article explores how television advertising in Britain played its part in helping to promote these co-joined aspects of the cross-Atlantic domestic ideal. In pursuing this argument, the article emphasises the way American domestic ideals took distinctive directions in Britain. Contributing to this adaptation of American ideals was a range of home-grown influences that shaped the remaking of the post-war home and women’s social role.