Ritual performances and collective violence in divided cities – The riots in Belfast (1886) and Jerusalem (1929)

This article explores the interrelation of violence, space, and public rituals in Belfast and Jerusalem. With the image of being cities of violence, contested by two groups that compete for political and spatial hegemony, Belfast and Jerusalem are also characterised as divided, both on a material and symbolic level. The roots of this division can be traced back to the era of the British Empire, especially to the riots in Belfast in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the uprisings in Jerusalem during the British Mandate of Palestine. In the wider context of British imperial policies of differentiation along religious lines and urban separation, communal identities were strengthened, and processes of residential segregation were accelerated, thereby creating urban frontiers. On the basis of historical sources, particularly reports by Royal Commissions of Inquiry that were set up to investigate the riots in Belfast and Jerusalem, this paper analyses how violent urban geographies were created in both cities in different but also remarkably similar ways. Down to the present day, public religious and political rituals, often combined with nationalist and militarist elements, are a crucial part of periodic manifestations of collective violence in these cities. Practices of appropriation of space and a temporary redrawing of borders and boundaries are dominant features of these rituals. Religious ceremonies, street parades, funeral processions or political demonstrations take place at contested sites or are led through areas “belonging” to the “other” group. The analysis shows that these ritual practices contributed greatly in transforming parts of the cities into urban spaces characterised by exclusion and imbued with memories of violence. This paper concludes that ritual performances in public space have a strong impact on the production and shaping of collective violence during riots.     

The Intellectual Construction of the Fifth Empire: Legitimating the Braganza Restoration

Summary

Under the Iberian Union, the Portuguese discourse on empire had been both relatively muted and intertwined with Spanish debates. The Braganza Restoration presented a radical break from this tradition. A new network of preachers, theologians and jurists from the four corners of the Portuguese empire made the case for the recovery of independence. Instead of buttressing a common moral universe and the old pan-Iberian network of higher learning, the new network focused its energies on the establishment of the particularity of the Portuguese imperial and missionary enterprises. The contribution explores the importance of networks in establishing intellectual independence and the strategies employed by the partisans of the newly independent Portugal. It was no longer good enough for Portugal to be the other Iberian empire; her very raison d'être was now to become the only Iberian empire.     

Empire and ethnicity†

ABSTRACT. Historians and social scientists have typically assumed a conflictual or exploitative relationship between empire and ethnicity. On the one hand, empire might be seen (as perhaps Ernest Gellner saw it in Nations and Nationalism) as a superstructure of coercion to which a group of ethnic units were subject. On the other (according to an influential view), empire fabricated ethnicities (tribes or castes) to divide and rule. This article suggests that both of these views are too crude. In the British case at least (and in the modern history of empire, no generalisation that excludes the British case has much value), ‘imperial ethnicity’ was a much more subtle phenomenon. It existed ‘at home’ as one element in a more complex identity. It was a powerful force in British settler societies, where an indigenous identity could not be imagined. And, perhaps surprisingly, it was deeply attractive to some colonial elites in Asia and Africa – at least for a time.     

5. IMPERIAL SPACES IN PEKKA HÄMÄLÄINEN'S THE COMANCHE EMPIRE

This review focuses on Pekka Hämäläinen's characterization and analysis of the Comanche empire as a spatial category in The Comanche Empire and discusses how this work relates to broader discussions about space and power in borderlands and imperial histories. Although empires have long been central actors in borderlands histories, “empire” has not necessarily been a category of spatial organization and analysis and certainly not one used to describe spaces controlled by Native peoples. By contrast, while Hämäläinen emphasizes the imperial characteristics of the economic, political, and cultural dimensions of Comanche history (as other contributors to this forum discuss), he also uses “empire” to characterize Comanche dominance spatially. Hämäläinen helps us to rethink the spatial dynamics that both shaped and were produced by the encounters between Comanches and Spaniards, French, Mexicans, Americans, and other Native peoples in the Great Plains during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By analyzing how Comanches came to control vast stretches of the southern plains, The Comanche Empire challenges our assumptions about how Native polities and imperial powers (and groups like the Comanches that Hämäläinen argues were both) thought about territorial claims and how they employed more nuanced spatial strategies to assert their authority, extend their cultural influence, and control trade and resources.     

Colonial Emulation,Competition and Opportunism: A Twentieth-Century Spanish Perspective on the British and French ‘Empire Projects’

ABSTRACT

Through the views of Francisco Franco’s major adviser on African Affairs, this paper reveals a hitherto neglected aspect of the long-standing interaction between competing ‘imperial projects’ in the twentieth century. Tomás García Figueras’s (1892–1981) speeches, writings and personal archive provide a long-term and well-informed Spanish perspective on the British and French colonial systems, offering us a model to make sense of three major aspects of inter-imperial relations: emulation, competition, and opportunism. Through this insight into the dynamics of imperial interaction, and the ever-evolving dialogues and exchanges between ‘empire projects’ from around the European peninsula, this article provides some key elements to answer the long-standing question of what motivates empires to expand, adapt, or contract. It illuminates the ways in which officials engaged in the day-to-day running of European empires looked at each other, in search for examples and counter-examples, emulation or, simply, opportunities. Crucially, it illustrates how ‘empire projects’ of varying clout interacted with each other, within the limits of realpolitik but well beyond linguistic obstacles, as the multilingual material assembled in the García Figueras archive clearly attests. It also charts, among national and socio-cultural circles hitherto neglected, the evolution in thinking about colonialism and decolonisation throughout the twentieth century.     

Indian Objects,English Body: Utopian Yearnings in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South

Focusing on the representation of Indian shawls and Indian tea in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South, this article has two aims: first, it argues that the novel creates its ideology of domesticity and proper femininity through the creation of a readable object world. It is evident that one of the consequences of the empire was to Indianise its English subjects, thereby making them more cosmopolitan and making the English home a monument to imperial Britain’s success in the global system of commodity production, distribution, and consumption. These links then brought together the materiality of the empire and the Victorian preoccupation with material culture, constituting an imperial culture based on domestic interiority, visual and tactile pleasure, and political economy. Second, the article attempts to show how the ambiguities that enter the text along with these foreign objects unsettle the status quo established by the novel’s middle-class ideology and propose utopian alternatives to it through a mobile, boundary-crossing female body and a more porous domestic setting. These alternatives are entirely speculative, incomplete, and restrained, but significant nonetheless, precisely because they turn this ideology’s emphasis on the middle-class female body inside out, so as to recompose this body and its habitual spaces in new ways.     

‘I've had it with them!’ Younger migrant women's spatial practices of conformity and resistance

This article examines how younger migrant women from Turkey maneuver the public and private spaces of their everyday lives in a neighborhood in Germany, and how they challenge and affirm the patriarchal practices and gender norms that husbands, fathers, and older migrant women seek to impose within and outside private homes. Younger migrant women selectively comply with gendered and generational norms of veiling and dress, while at the same time also reworking gender roles, and avoiding and transgressing masculinist spaces. Younger migrant women's practices and spatial representations in mental maps reveal the complex entanglements of compliances and resistance, and dispel simple assumptions of being overwhelmingly victimized by their potentially violent men that are so prominent in contemporary Western societies.     

英国保守党政府的“有形帝国”政策（1874—1880）

1874—1880年英国保守党政府执政期间,为提高英国国际地位,提出了建立“有形帝国”的政策。这一政策的理论基础是迪尔克的种族帝国思想,现实动因则是随着欧洲民族国家的建立,大英帝国的霸权面临严峻的挑战。从实践方面看,重建“有形帝国”政策主要表现在保卫并扩大帝国的版图,其根本目的在于增强英国与欧洲大陆各国竞争的实力,力挽大英帝国霸权的颓势。     

中、日城市内部空间结构比较研究

本文从城市土地利用和生活空间结构两个方面,对中、日城市内部空间结构进行了对比,并从职住关系的视角解释了其形成机制。     

论马克思主义发展观的历史性与时代化

发展观是关于发展的本质、目的、内涵的总体看法和观点。马克思主义发展观遵循历史唯物主义的基本原理,是对历史发展的真实研究与表达。马克思主义经典作家对马克思主义发展观的历史性特点作出阐释与发展。恩格斯在其晚年作了更深层次的阐释,提出了历史发展＂合力的作用＂的观点。马克思主义发展观也具有时代化特征,为解决时代发展需要解决的发展问题提供方法论基础。马克思主义发展观的历史性与时代化统一于其实践性本质。     

Practising the British way of famine: technologies of relief, 1770–1985

In the past 200 years Britons have responded to famines in particular ways. This article explores these particularities by focusing not simply on the remarkably unchanging humanitarian representation of the victims of famine but on the changing technologies through which relief was collected and distributed. It shows how technologies of famine relief were created from the need to govern colonial populations rather than from the development of new sentimentality and ethics. The authors seek to demonstrate that, despite the changing nature of these technologies, the forms of expertise that sustained them, a set of routines and practices developed that allowed the performance of a British way with famine that slowly extended from the empire to the world. In the wake of two world wars these forms of expertise were extended to Europe and became internationalised through the work of voluntary organisations. After the formal end of Empire, these technologies were retooled and used to assist places in postcolonial Africa. They also helped create a new type of global citizen, informed of technologies of relief and invested in the Global South through the rise of a humanitarian culture.     

Regional Research on the Inca

The past two decades have witnessed an increase in the amount of regional research on the Inca state of Andean South America. This work has revolutionized our view of the Inca empire and has provided a comparative database for understanding the nature of imperial expansion in premodern empires. This paper places this work in historical context. It then describes the way in which a regional approach has complemented other research to give us a fuller picture of Inca imperial strategies. The Inca state used a variety of strategies to incorporate its provinces into a viable political entity. Regional archaeological approaches provide the best means of defining those strategies, giving us a more nuanced view of premodern states such as the Inca.     

Hubris and melancholy in multinational states

ABSTRACT. The article sets out to explore the rather different roles that hubris and melancholy can play in the relations between majority and minority nationalities within multinational states. In the case of majority‐type nationalities, there is a sense of being a Staatsvolk, a feeling reinforced by linguistic, cultural, geographical, and political characteristics associated with the larger nation‐state. There may also be a sense of pride caught up with the larger identity between the nation‐state and the empire with which it is associated. For their part, minority‐type nationalities have been more prone to express their national sentiment in melancholic terms. Hence a tendency to dwell on lost battles of the past, on suppressed rebellions, on recurrent threats of assimilation and linguistic extinction. There may be elements both of hubris and of melancholy to national sentiment in multinational states, and the dialectic between the two colours their overall political development.     

6. WHAT'S IN A CONCEPT? THE KINETIC EMPIRE OF THE COMANCHES

This essay revisits the main themes and arguments put forward in The Comanche Empire: indigenous agency; spatial reorientation in the writing of colonial histories; the composition of the Comanche empire and its impact on the history of North America. It also responds to a number of specific issues raised by the roundtable participants: differences and similarities between indigenous and Euro‐colonial power regimes; balancing of culture‐specific frameworks with broad‐gauge political economic analysis; linkages between indigenous agency and indigenous sovereignty in colonial encounters; the question of periodization in writing Native American and colonial histories. Finally, the essay points to new ways of understanding, conceptualizing, and comparing nonterritorial nomadic empires by introducing the concept of “kinetic empire,” which refers to a flexible imperial organization that revolves around a set of mobile activities and relies on selective nodal control of key resources.     

Regeneration and mobility: the spatial dynamics of industries in wartime Shanghai

During the three-month long Sino-Japanese hostilities in the summer of 1937, Shanghai industries suffered the heaviest loss ever sustained during any previous military conflict in the city. Yet as has been shown in a previous study, local industries seem to have recovered fairly quickly. All statistics point to a return to pre-war levels of production in most sectors by the end of 1938 in some cases and during 1939 for most industrial branches. The purpose of this paper is to try to highlight the spatial dynamics at work in this recovery process. It relies not just on original sources, but on the unique capabilities GIS offers in processing large amounts of historical data and exploring connected issues in land use, demography, and urban life. The paper argues that Shanghai industries went through a thorough phase of relocation and migration within the city, but also of inbound migration from the surrounding regions. This study is based on a particular set of documents produced by the Shanghai Municipal Council, the largely independent body that administered the International Settlement. In this study, therefore, I shall argue that what happened in the territory of the International Settlement mirrored what happened next door and possibly in other parts of the Chinese-administered/Japanese-occupied areas. Beyond the issue of industrial movement, this paper also examines connected issues in land use, demography, and urban life.