PEGGY PIGGOTT: WOMEN AND BRITISH ARCHAEOLOGY (1930–1945)

The 2021 film, The Dig, stimulated much interest in discovering more about Peggy Piggott, the archaeologist who first ‘struck gold’ at Sutton Hoo. Piggott was a leading British prehistorian, who produced over sixty published works for the field. Here we examine her early life and career, her training with the Curwens and the Wheelers, her marriage to Stuart Piggott, and her recognized expertise that led to her joining the Sutton Hoo team in 1939. During WWII, she established the modern standard for barrow excavation, and in 1944 was recognized by the Society of Antiquaries for her ‘devotion to the study of archaeology’. Piggott provides a lens through which we consider the careers of 1930s women archaeologists – those factors enabling access to archaeology (class, wartime opportunity) and factors that limited progress (lack of a degree, marriage).     

Images of ‘Wild Africa’: nature tourism and the (re)creation of Hluhluwe game reserve, 1930–1945

This paper explores the relationship between new discursive constructions of South African nature and the material imperatives that influenced game reserve management in Zululand in the 1930s and 1940s. It also investigates the social consequences of these developments. The paper traces the emergence of marketable constructions of ‘wild nature’ linked to the development of tourism and their expression in the increasing exclusion of Africans from game reserves. At Hluhluwe, this process was tentative and its outcome far from inevitable. Yet while the question of an African presence in game reserves remained open in the early 1930s, in the longer term it was clear that black people could not be part of Zululand's new, purified ‘space of nature’ – or, more correctly, they would participate only as employees and not as residents or tourists. The management of the Hluhluwe game reserve as a tourist destination ultimately entailed the more systematic exercise of spatial controls over its landscape, contributing to the dispossession and exclusion of local Zulu people. The paper argues that enhanced social controls and a new brutal geography of forced removal are implicated in the (re)creation of Hluhluwe as a romantic space in which tourists could experience wild nature and an ‘unspoilt’ African landscape.     

Anarchists and national identity: The case of German radicals in the United States and Brazil, 1880–1945

How German were German anarchists in the United States and Brazil? Did the experience of exile and immigration preserve or even heighten a national identity among radicals who openly espoused revolutionary internationalism? Anarchists distinguished between nation and nationality on the one hand, and the state and nationalism on the other. This article examines expressions of nationality by a handful of German anarchist editors and writers from the 1880s to the end of World War II. They wanted to be stateless, but not nationless. This article argues that German exile anarchists in the United States and Brazil expressed a militant, countercultural, antistatist and anticlerical nationality. They were ‘rooted cosmopolitans’: They identified with the international revolutionary tradition and at the same time remained attached to Germany's heritage of radical politics, arts and humanities. There was a remarkable consistency in their commentary levelled against Bismarck, the Kaiser, the Weimar government and the Nazis either in Germany or in the host country. Anarchists advocated for a borderless global federation of free communities and, to that end, rejected nationalism and urged people to stop ‘seeing like a state’ by exposing the false promises and crimes of statism.     

The Limits of Multilateralism: Making Policy for the Philippines, 1945–1950

On 1 September 1969, Colonel Muammar Qaddafi seized power in Libya, abolishing a pro-Western monarchy and launching a revolution that combined elements of Nasserism and Islamic radicalism. American policymakers quickly came to regard the Libyan revolution as anathema after Qaddafi expropriated U.S. oil companies and forced the Pentagon to relinquish its air base outside Tripoli. Misinterpreting the new regime's increasingly radical nationalism as evidence of Soviet subversion and failing to appreciate the broad appeal of resurgent Islam, the Nixon and Ford administrations froze arms sales to Libya and provided covert support for anti-Qaddafi forces. After Jimmy Carter's bid to improve relations with Libya backfired, tensions escalated dramatically during the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan branded Qaddafi as a terrorist and a Soviet stooge and unleashed the Sixth Fleet and the CIA in an unsuccessful bid to effect regime change in Libya that was punctuated by the U.S. air raid on Tripoli in April 1986. Qaddafi's erratic behavior and his supersized ego, of course, always made dealing with him a diplomatic nightmare, but the blend of covert action and gunboat diplomacy that Nixon preferred and that Reagan perfected only made a bad situation worse.     

The Value of Culture: Congolese Art and the Promotion of Belgian Colonialism (1945–1959)

Based on the scholarship of Frans M. Olbrechts and the changes implemented in the Museum of the Belgian Congo during his directorship (from 1947 until 1958), this article argues that the institutionalization of African artefacts as art served the late Belgian colonial regime in promoting its renewed postwar commitment to the Congolese colony. In their reinvention as art and subsequent re-installation in modernist displays, the objects acquired not only a cultural, but also an economic and political value as resources, which led to their co-option in the mise-en-valeur, or valorization, of the colony and fuelled a colonial rhetoric that replaced an earlier emphasis on the civilizing mission with a construction of cultural guardianship based on the universal value of the objects as art.     

The Morphology of a Working Place Linked to the World: The Railway Workshops of Jundiaí (Brazil, 1892–1998)

ABSTRACT

Material sources have done little to contribute to research on Brazilian railway history (except for heritage studies and history of architecture). This interdisciplinary case study focuses on archaeological evidence to reflect on topics not often discussed in Brazil: the physical and functional configuration of the workplaces related to railways; the changing of these spaces through time due to the evolution of technology; and their characterisation as highly globalised sites. In doing so, we take the railway workshops of Jundiaí (São Paulo) as a study sample and analyse it under the light of the expansion of industrialisation from the World's great powers to its outlying economies.     

The Revolt against the West: Decolonisation and its Repercussions in British International Thought, 1945–75

It has been suggested that British intellectuals were either indifferent to decolonisation or sought to downplay its impact. As a consequence, historians of international thought have overlooked the extensive debates that occurred among scholars and intellectuals concerned with British foreign policy and international relations. This article addresses those debates, examining the responses of internationalist, Whig, realist, and radical thinkers to decolonisation and to what they thought to be the changes it brought about in contemporary world politics. It argues that far from being indifferent to decolonisation, many British students of international relations were deeply worried about what some called ‘the revolt against the West’, and that those concerned helped shape the distinctive character of British international thought in the formative period of the discipline of International Relations (IR).