Defiance to compliance: Visions of the computer in postwar Britain

In a climate of profound uncertainty over Britain’s postwar status, some industrialists and policymakers sought solace in a ‘defiant modernist’ aesthetic, proposing radical technological transformations to circumvent economic constraints. The British computer industry, which briefly challenged that of the USA for technological sophistication, presents a revealing instance of this approach and its limitations. Early promoters, notably Vivian Bowden of Ferranti, shrewdly laid the rhetorical groundwork to position the new machines as the natural outcome of a uniquely British technological trajectory. Into the 1960s, however, their agenda was disrupted not only by economic realities, but also by the increasing importance of software and compatible systems as opposed to individual machines, and by growing public and industrial familiarity with computing in general. Promoters sought new points of differentiation, but had made little headway when a combination of national policy changes, growing market dominance by US-based corporations, and Anglo-French rapprochement rendered the British national exception largely unworkable. Its powerful rhetorical appeal, however, ensured that it never entirely disappeared.     

杜伦 穿越两千年的旧时光

与英格兰的许多古城相比,拥有千年历史的杜伦或许并不算太老。蜿蜒的鹅卵石路、精致的老房子,还有那些茂密的植物,簇拥着一座雄伟的教堂与一座坚固的城堡,这是再典型不过的北英格兰古镇的风貌。威尔河不知流淌了多少年,在杜伦这里强劲地拐了一个弯儿,城堡和教堂就屹立在河床三角洲的高地上。关注过英国留学的国人一定知道杜伦,1832年建立的杜伦大学,即使在全世界的大学排名中,也是位列靠前。对自己实力有信心的人方敢报名这里,毕竟是英格兰第三古老的大学,至今仍沿用着传统的学院制。早年,Durham被译成达勒姆,随着越来越多的国人在此留学,更具英范儿的译名——杜伦,现在更被广泛接受。     

French military officers and the mapping of West Africa: the case of Captain Brosselard-Faidherbe

Through the study of projects conceived to shape colonial space, this article aims to reconsider the motives and means of French colonial expansion in West Africa in the 1880s and 1890s. The Plan Faidherbe, designed by the Governor of Senegal in the 1860s, outlined a plan for eastward development, including a road and rail link between the Senegal and the Niger Rivers (and beyond, between Algeria and Sudan). The implementation of these routes of penetration called for a number of military-led topographic missions. The study of these missions and of the maps that were produced at the time reveal how such projects and their implementation were mediated by both cartographic and field practices. The case of Captain Henry Brosselard (1855-93), General Faidherbe’s son-in-law, is an interesting example because of the diversity of the missions he led and the extent of territory which he traversed and mapped. This case also shows how, in the course of a career, an officer could assume several different functions and come to conceive the process of building colonial territory from different perspectives. This paper questions a common view of the military as having a purely strategic vision of space as a field of conquest, a view which reserves a more development-oriented outlook for civil administrators and the business community. Indeed, Brosselard’s varied career somewhat blurs the conventional divide between civilians and soldiers, requiring us to reconsider accepted ways of categorising colonial actors.