Azerbaijan between Two Empires: A Contested Borderland in the Early Modern Period (Sixteenth‒Eighteenth Centuries)

The first part of the paper examines the evolution and transformation of Safavid ideology in the context of confessional changes and the role of Turkoman tribes in the Safavid social movement in the Ottoman?Iranian borderland. The second part examines the impact of Ottoman?Safavid wars and religious rivalry on the society and economy of Azerbaijan from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries.     

The European Far North of Russia and Its Territorial Constructions in the Sixteenth–Twenty-First Centuries

Abstract

This article addresses the problem of the homogeneity and structure of the identity of the European Far North of Russia. The author comes to the conclusion that the structure of this territory has been determined since the sixteenth century by a rift between the Kola North and the Arkhangelsk North. While this rift deteriorated or was partially healed at different times, the differentiation of the European Far North of Russia into two territorial segments persisted over the periods of Muscovy, the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union. Although the Kola Peninsula was integrated for two centuries (1708–1921) into the vast province with a centre in the city of Arkhangelsk, it not only preserved features of its identity, but in fact managed to strengthen them, which eventually led to the administrative separation of the Kola North from the Arkhangelsk Province. The development of the two northern territories has been accompanied by competition, which is still there to a large extent. The phenomenon of the division of the Russian Far North in two parts is treated as a consequence of the importance which meridional strategic ties between the centre and the outlying northern areas acquired in the Russian State, in contrast to the weaker latitudinal peripheral ties between the provinces.     

Claiming Commerce,Quality and Credit: Raisons d’être of the Antwerp and Brussels tapissierspanden (Sixteenth–Eighteenth Centuries)

Literature on the Antwerp and Brussels tapissierspanden tends to give a one-dimensional account of the institutions as very similar commercial enterprises that were embraced wholeheartedly by everyone involved in the Antwerp and Brussels tapestry worlds since they all shared the same concerns and a single goal — namely, to develop and secure a central meeting point and marketplace. This essay, however, adopts a different vantage point. It discusses the tapissierspanden from the viewpoint of the conflicting business conduct and strategies developed by Antwerp city council and tapestry entrepreneurs on the one hand, and Brussels tapestry entrepreneurs on the other. This essay argues that those who founded the institutions in Antwerp and Brussels established and used them to further completely different objectives — and that their strategies, which both manifested themselves and crystallised in the panden, present tapestry scholarship with a fundamental methodological problem, the magnitude of which has yet to be appreciated.     

Excavations at Opovo, 1985–1987: Socioeconomic Change in the Balkan Neolithic

Abstract

This is the second preliminary report of excavations and analyses of Opovo-Ugar Bajbuk, a Neolithic settlement of the Vin?a-Plo?nik culture located in the lower Tami? river valley, NE Yugoslavia. The Opovo Archaeological Project began in the summer of 1983; this report coversthe 1985–1987 field seasons. Work at Opovo has continued to reveal more about the unusual reliance placed by the site’s inhabitants on wild food resources, the apparent lack of long-term settlement occupation, and the social organization of production and consumption. An unexpected find of the 1987 season was a fragment of linen, the earliest direct evidence for textile production in European prehistory. Detailed examination of methods of house construction and house destruction—part of an effort to investigate the role of households at the site—led to the discovery of the first two-story dwelling ever encountered at a Vin?a site. The site of Opovo-Ugar Bajbuk is providing new light on previously unknown dimensions of variation within the Vin?a culture.     

Feeding the Community: Women’s Participation in Communal Celebrations,Western Sicily (Eighth–Sixth Centuries BC)

In the study of the Sicilian Iron Age, most of the works devoted to their main communal ritual spaces—the so-called “acropolis”—have stuck mainly to describe both their architectures and those artifacts registered in them. However, in the realization of this practice, those objects traditionally considered as imported or exceptional have been emphasized. The return of this selective practice is that other artifacts could not be considered as extraordinary, but being also present in these spaces and, therefore, with a certain role in these celebrations, they have long been dismissed and undervalued. This is the case of all those objects that are directly related to the domestic sphere and, particularly, with those activities usually associated with the women’s world, such as cooking pots or loom weights. The invisibility of these objects relative to the domestic sphere and, above all, to the feminine sphere has led to validate and perpetuate a biased glaze over these ceremonies where only male elite actors could participate. In response to these androcentric and classist discourses, the main aim of this paper is to recover the agency of certain women in the development of these communal celebrations and to show their importance in the construction and representation of a sense of community that was created constantly through these ceremonies through the study of these long-forgotten household objects.     

Excavations in the Church of St Augustine's Abbey,Canterbury 1955–58

THE EXCAVATION of Anglo-Saxon structures below the W. end of the 11th to 12th-century nave of the church of St Augustine's Abbey, Canterbury, occupied three seasons between and 1957. Further, small-scale, excavation took place subsequently on the site of the pre-Conquest church of Sts Peter and Paul to test particular points. The need for the excavations in 1955 arose unexpectedly out of routine consolidation of the upstanding remains (which are in the care of what is now the Department of the Environment), when there were discovered by chance the voussoirs of an arch a few inches below ground level in the ill-defined mass of masonry at the extreme SW. corner of the Norman church.     

The Purposes of Land Settlement in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, 1898–1914: Drawing Paths through the Weeds

This article examines the programme of land surveying and registration that was undertaken by the British-led administration of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan in the period 1898–1914. The Legal Secretary, Edgar Bonham Carter, stated that programme was the most important project of his division in this period. Scholars have shown that the programme, known as land ‘settlement’, was used to build alliances with elites and to clarify title for European investors in the new irrigation scheme at Gezira. This article argues that, as such, the ambitions of land settlement were relatively limited. In many other colonies, and in Britain itself, politicians and administrators across the political spectrum saw the reform of private property in land as the key for addressing structural problems in agricultural labour. One might have thought that, the Sudan, land settlement might have provided a means of addressing the dependence on slave labour in agriculture. The article demonstrates that, except for a small number of administrators (including Bonham Carter), this was not the case. The general indifference to slavery itself carried through to an indifference to the transformative potential of land law. The article examines the proposals of this minority of administrators, and contrasts their views with the majority’s focus on land settlement as demonstration and opportunity to enhance state power.     

The Reception of the Elizabethan Religious Settlement in Three Yorkshire Parishes, 1559–72

Abstract

This article explores how the Elizabethan religious settlement of 1559 was experienced at parish level, up to the year 1572. Churchwardens' accounts for the Yorkshire parishes of Masham, Sheffield and St Martin's, Coney Street, York, are used alongside ecclesiastical court records and other sources to build a picture of local responses to the settlement. The factors found to be significant include the degree to which the reforms demanded a change in previous community practices, and the pace and sequence with which sacred material objects were removed and installed. The latter are viewed as concrete aspects of religiosity which gave meaning to more abstract doctrines for both clergy and laity. The way in which authority was realised in the parishes, through coercion, collaboration, negotiation or conversion is also explored. Most significantly, the ability of lay parishioners to negotiate among themselves, and with external agents of authority during the process, determined the resulting style of local Protestantism.     

Governor Sir John Field in St Helena: Democratic Reform in a Small British Colony, 1962–68

In the age of decolonisation, Whitehall generally accepted the case for political advancement even in small British colonies like St Helena judged too lacking in resources to become independent states, provided this could be granted without risk to good government. The previous experience of Sir John Field in West Africa and his sensitivity to UN expectations lay behind the democratic reforms he introduced, which by 1968 had established an elected Legislative Council and an Executive Council made up mainly of LegCo members. But the steps he took owed little to sustained popular demand for self-government, as was common elsewhere, and much to his determination to make islanders politically more responsible. Public engagement was inhibited by practical constraints, local culture and a discouraging financial dependence on the UK government.