The Tudor Speakers 1485–1601: Choosing,Status, Work*

During the Tudor period the Speaker was nominated by the crown. The house of commons acquiesced with the crown's nomination, but not entirely passively. There is a body of evidence suggesting that the crown's nominee became the focus of disapprobation once his name became known. What hostility there was to the Speaker-designate from the mid 16th century was displayed to better effect outside the House than within.     

The awkward years: defining and managing famines, 1944–1947

Abstract

Famines in the years immediately after World War II occurred during a period of global flux, as international famine response evolved from its ambitious, early twentieth century goals toward more modest, technocratic objectives during the second half of the century. For economists, social scientists and politicians immersed in the world of emergency food aid, these were uncertain, awkward years for famine relief. Herbert Hoover’s idealistic large-scale projects of famine relief that had dominated the first three decades of the century had been proven to be expensive and of limited efficacy, but Cold War loyalties had not yet taken over as the primary logic behind large-scale humanitarian assistance projects. Ultimately, when faced with famine conditions between 1944 and 1947, states and experts balanced a call to action against pragmatism that recognized famines were also politically expedient events that could weaken rural resistance to governance and simplify wartime and postwar administration. Ultimately, both science and humanitarian concerns learned to orient themselves toward economic expediency in these awkward years.     

British Imperialism and Cyprus 1878–1914: The Inconsequential Possession

In recent decades historians have devoted considerable attention to the historical treatment of indigenous title in Anglophone settler colonies. These scholarly accounts have tended to emphasise the role metropolitan legal and intellectual discourses played in the dispossession of indigenous peoples. In this article I present a critical analysis of an influential example of such work in respect to the British denial of Aboriginal rights in land in the colony of New South Wales before providing an alternative account of the manner in which Aboriginal title was treated, which focuses on the nature of the relations on the ground between sojourners, settlers and Aboriginal people, the ways in which these encounters were represented by the British and the local practices regarding the transfer of land.     

French imperial outposts in post‐imperial India, 1947–54

Despite the end of the British Raj on 15 August 1947. the French initially sought to retain their imperial possessions on the Indian sub‐continent. By focusing on the conflict in Vietnam, however, conventional studies of French decolonisation tend to ignore French India. Nevertheless, the two problems of French India and Vietnam were closely linked, not least by the role played in both disputes by the government of India: the ending of the conflict in Vietnam in 1954, in which India played an important part, smoothed the French transfer of power in India.