Further Thoughts on Imperial Absent-Mindedness

When my The Absent-Minded Imperialists was published in 20041 [1]. Oxford University Press added a by-line to the dust-jacket of The Absent-Minded Imperialists which read, in place of the formal sub-title, ‘What the British really thought about empire’. That was without my sanction. I would not have been so assertive. it stimulated – or provoked – a great deal of discussion. Among those most provoked were Antoinette Burton, who dismissed the book as not ‘worth arguing either with or about’,2 [2]. I understand that this review has attained a kind of celebrity for its virulence. and John MacKenzie: ‘some reviewers may be taken in by this, but I am not’.3 [3]. I tried to persuade OUP to include that with all their ‘puffs’ on the back cover of the paperback edition, in order to warn potential readers that it was controversial, but they declined. Other reviews, of course, were more positive. This paper is partly a reply to some of the more critical ones, but also seeks to place the general debate on the domestic impact of British imperialism in context, and will finish with a suggestion for moving it forward in a new way.     

Zu monumentum ancyranum

Like many of his contemporaries, Montaigne quotes abundantly from classical sources. But unlike most sixteenth-century writers, he does not use his quotations primarily as a source of authority or as rhetorical ornament. He deploys them in such a way as to make his readers take note not only of the quotation itself but also of its original context. He thus engages in a much deeper and more complex dialogue with his sources, one which may be regarded as a form of cross-cultural communication. As such, his quotation practice illustrates a fundamental (but often overlooked) feature of human communication: a great part of the information transmitted through an utterance or a text is communicated implicitly.1 This article is based upon a paper given at the workshop “Virgil's Eclogues and Georgics, and their reception”, organized by Dr Juan Christian Pellicer and Professor Monika Asztalos at the University of Oslo in November 2007. 2 I wish to express my gratitude to Terence Cave and Kyrre Vatsend, who read with great care earlier drafts of this article and gave valuable advice on crucial aspects of it.      

Re-Thinking Legislative Productivity: Commemorative Legislation and Policy Gridlock

This research charts the levels of commemorative legislation passed in Congress in the postwar era and assesses the conditions generating such legislation. Utilizing a statistical model of stalemate developed by Sarah Binder, it demonstrates that conditions hypothesized to produce gridlock on salient legislation also generate (even more statistically robust) activism on commemoratives. ¹ Our joint appreciation to Paulina Burdge-Small and Michael Williams for their help in collecting the data analyzed in this paper. In addition, Dodd expresses appreciation to the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars for support that aided his contributions to the paper.      

Wheel Ceremony

This article addresses the way in which collective ideas of cultural identity in song are appropriated and customised at the local level. More specifically, it examines how the cultural construction of Scottishness in popular song was deployed and mediated in my Scottish/Australian family's song repertoire. [1] ?[1] The substance of this article draws from a recent Ph.D. study of my own migrant family's Scottish song traditions in Australia. It thus considers how song performance served as a vehicle for the formation of family and cultural meaning.     

Site Management: An Application to Wadilmeluk (the Valley of the Kings)

‘Value has always been the reason underlying heritage conservation. It is self‐evident that no society makes an effort to conserve what it does not value.’ ¹ 1. de la Torre and Mason, Assessing the Values of Cultural Heritage, 3–4. However, assessing the value of a cultural heritage asset as a representative sample of our tangible and intangible heritage for present and future generations is a difficult concept to deal with. It is, therefore, the aim of the researchers to help the conservation decision process by attempting to make an assessment of the values attributed to the cultural heritage assets of one of the most notable heritage sites in Egypt: the Valley of the Kings in Luxor.     

Nabataean echoes in al-Ḥarrah: New evidence in light of recent field work†

ABSTRACT

During a survey conducted by the authors in the eastern part of al-?arrah in Jordan in 2017,¹1. The term al-?arrah is used to refer to the basalt steppe-desert located in northern Jordan and southern Syria. a number of new Safaitic and Nabataean texts were found. Some of them mention events dated during the reigns of ?r?t and rb?l, others refer to the revolt of dm?y. Other Safaitic texts contain references to the Nabataeans. Three Nabataean graffiti were also found and are presented here. These sixteen new texts constitute a remarkable addition to the corpus of Safaitic and Nabatean texts found in this region.     

Discipline,compassion and monastic ideals of community,c.950–1250

Those who are not flogged here on earth are not received as sons there in heaven […] and will be flogged alongside the devil for eternity.

Ambrose of Milan1 1?De interpellatione Iob et David, 3.3.9, Patrologiae cursus completus, series latina, ed. J.-P. Migne, 221 vols (Paris, 1841–64) [hereafter PL], vol. 14, 841: qui autem hic non flagellantur, ibi non suscipiuntur ut filii […] ut in perpetuum cum diabolo flagellentur.      

Sister-in-Law Marriage in the Empire: Religious Politics and Legislative Reform in the Australian Colonies 1850–1900

In 1835, a statute was passed in the parliament of the United Kingdom making it illegal for a widowed man to marry his sister-in-law. 1 Lord Lyndhurst's Act (1835) 5 & 6 Will VI c. 54. Marriage to a sister-in-law after a wife's death was common practice in nineteenth-century England and colonial Australia and aunts often took on the responsibility of raising children after a sibling's death. In the 1840s, a protracted parliamentary and social debate began over whether a widowed man's marriage to his sister-in-law should be made legal and this debate lasted over seven decades. In the Australian colonies, where English law had been inherited, 2 Those Australian colonies settled prior to the passing of Lord Lyndhurst's Act inherited the English position regarding deceased wife's sister marriage at the time, that such unions were voidable in the ecclesiastical courts during the lifetime of the parties, and in those colonies established afterwards, the 1835 statute applied and deceased wife's sister unions were illegal. In both cases colonial parliaments attempted to pass legislation to clarify the law. a similar debate occurred in the 1870s. The marriage was legalised in most of Australia in the 1870s while it remained illegal in England until the turn of the century. The parallel debates in each country provide a window into the comparative effect of religious culture on the development of marriage law. One of the primary reasons for the protracted nature of the struggle for marriage reform in England was its significance for the relationship between church and state. This article explores the implications of the relationship between church and state in Britain and the colonies for marriage legislation.     

How to get a 2,000% profit from selling an object

Most readers will be aware of past and present issues surrounding the illicit traffic in antiquities. There are already a number of generic books available on the subject.1 See, for example, , Stealing History: The Illicit Trade in Cultural Material; , Illicit Antiquities: The Theft of Culture and the Extinction of Archaeology; and ., Trade in Illicit Antiquities: The Destruction of the World’s Archaeological Heritage. This article reflects on the problem of treasure‐hunting in Bulgaria and the inadequacy of Bulgarian legislation, which is leading to the deterioration and destruction of Bulgarian heritage sites. As no changes in the legislative basis can be observed at this stage there is a real threat to the country’s cultural inheritance. This paper reflects upon the results of personal research undertaken in Bulgaria as part of a PhD.     

West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965-1977

In 1944 we received, hidden in a tube of toothpaste, a circular from the Central Committee of the French Communist Party addressed to party members in prisons, prisoner of war and concentration camps. It gave guidance on the tasks of the party in such places, stressing particularly the need for national and international solidarity, clandestine propaganda and preparation for escape. We had already acted on similar lines, nevertheless the letter was fully discussed by our committee, accepted and distributed, with appropriate caution to other camps. I delivered a copy to the women comrades in Rajsko, one of the subsidiary Auschwitz camps.Account by Jonny Huttner, a Jewish and Polish-German prisoner in Auschwitz-Monowitz 1 ¹Len Crome, Unbroken: Resistance and Survival in the Concentration Camps (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1988), 102. ?Peter Meyer Filardo is the archivist at the Tamiment Library, New York University responsible for US radicalism collections. See the Library's website for additional information: http://www.nyu.edu/library/bobst/research/tam/index.html      

Colonial Tutelage and Industrial Colonialism: reindeer husbandry and early 20th-century hydroelectric development in Sweden

The incentives for large-scale hydropower development in Sweden are usually explained in terms of the early 20th-century belief in progress and the need for energy to fuel industrialization and modernization. For reindeer husbandry, the consequences and cumulative effects of this large-scale landscape conversion, and the societal changes it entailed are still largely a story to be told as impacts and effects constantly evolve in the socio-ecological system of the reindeer grazing lands. The present article ¹ 1 This article is part of the multi-disciplinary research project ‘Adaptations of Natural Resource-based Communities to Climatic and Societal Changes: Sami Reindeer Herding in the Past, Present and Future’ funded by The Swedish Research Council, FORMAS, The National Space Board and Faculty of Humanities, Umeå University. investigates hydropower development in the northern parts of Sweden, and how the reindeer husbandry of the indigenous Sami people was involved, through a case study of three hydropower projects in the early 20th century. An additional perspective is illuminated: how early hydroelectric development in the reindeer grazing areas was made possible through an immersed colonialism.     

Travelling the Route from Designation to Local Action: The Case of the Underground Railroad Settlement in Buxton,Ontario, Canada

Canada’s Buxton Settlement National Historic Site is a striking illustration of the multi‐faceted conservation of a cultural landscape, from federal designation through to local action. Buxton is designated as a ‘continuing landscape’ distinguished by its establishment in 1849 as a 9,000 acre (3,600 ha) ¹ [1] Imperial measures are given first in reference to the historic resource because the measurements are historically significant. terminus for black fugitives travelling north along the so‐called Underground Railroad, escaping the tyranny of slavery in the USA. A social experiment, in the form of a block farming settlement, waited for them at the end of their journeys. Over the intervening years inevitable shifts in agricultural practice and property ownership have transformed this rather ordinary but strongly evocative heritage resource. This is a case common to many other significant cultural landscapes—the management of the inevitable evolution that comes with a landscape that continues. This agricultural landscape confronts many of the challenges that are the focus of heritage studies today: how to give local people a voice while coordinating conservation across multiple scales of government policy.     

Visions of visibility: LGBT communities in Turin

Recent anti-discrimination campaigns by lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual (LGBT) activists in Italy have increased the visibility of these communities and individuals, but have not resulted in the desired improvements to legislation. In light of this situation, this article analyses modalities of ‘visibility’ as defined and desired by the active LGBT community in Turin, host city for National Pride 2006. The Pride committee scheduled an unprecedentedly ‘visible’ year-long programme of consciousness-raising and cultural events that went far beyond the more usual one-day march. Drawing on a series of interviews with members of the committee and of the lesbian community conducted in Turin in March and June 2006, the discussion explores social, cultural and political visibility in this LGBT community as it hosted National Pride.

I think people live in a state of non-visibility, lacking self-acceptance; there are gay men and lesbians in Italy who are in hiding. (Andrea Benedino)1 1.?Interview conducted by the author, 31 March 2006.      

Frustrated Great Gamesmanship: Sir Garnet Wolseley's Plans for War against Russia, 1873–1880

Abstract

In three books published in 1940, 1956, and 1961, Arthur J. Marder established what became the orthodox view of the development of the British navy in the years leading up to the First World War.1 A.J. Marder, The Anatomy of British Sea Power: A History of British Naval Policy in the Pre-Dreadnought Era, 1880–1965 (New York, 1940); idem,[Fear God and DreadNought: The] C[orrespondence of Admiral of the Fleet Lord] F[isher of Kilverstone: II: Years of Power, 1904–14] (London, 1956); idem, From the Dreadnought to Scapa Flow: I: The Road to War, 1904–14 (Oxford, 1961). Building upon the work of Sir Llewellyn Woodward, who argues that, from the outset of the twentieth century, British naval policy was framed as a response to the threat posed by the rising German naval power,2 E. L. Woodward, Great Britain and the German Navy (London, 1934). Marder makes precise claims about the nature of the response. In particular, he states that, under the leadership of the first sea lord from 1904 to 1910, Admiral Sir John Fisher, the admiralty undertook two root-and-branch reforms. First, it redeployed Britain's fleets and squadrons, reducing the number of foreign stations, scrapping obsolescent vessels, and stationing the most powerful units of the fleet in European waters. Next, at Fisher's prompting, it triggered a naval revolution by ordering the building of a new type of warship, HMS Dreadnought, the world's first turbine-powered, all-big-gun battleship. In both cases, Marder is unambiguous about the motive: the redeployment adjusted Britain's force posture to ensure a preponderance of strength in the vicinity of the North Sea, the theatre in which the expected war with Germany would be fought. The new type of ship was necessary to help to modernize the navy's matériel in keeping with advances in gunnery, propulsion, and torpedoes. If not explicitly aimed at Germany, the new ship would ensure that the navy was better prepared for a war that Fisher perceived to be ‘inevitable’s.     

The Diplomatic Career and Historical Work of Olympiodorus of Thebes

Abstract

The rise of the Druze emir, Fakhr al-Din II Ma’n, is best treated as a case study in political dynamics. A tax farmer in the Shuf in 1590, who received his first administrative appointment three years later, he became the most powerful provincial leader along the Levantine coast by the late 1620s, when he controlled three districts (sanjaks) in the Ottoman province of Damascus, and also the province of Tripoli. Except for Jaffa and Alexandretta, he controlled the key ports along the coast of Syria and Palestine — Sidon, Beirut, and Tripoli; smaller ports like Acre; and most of the trade in regional goods and the associated revenues. ¹ Of die five ports along the southern Levantine coast - Acre, Sur, Hait~, Tanmra, and Jaffa - olfly tile last earned sigtfificant revenues ill tile late sixteenth century, from pilgrims: W. Hfitteroth and K. Abdulfattah, Historical Geography of Palestine, Transjordan, and Southern Syria in the Late 26th Century (Erlangen, t977)., pp. 15, 18q9, 2.5-6, 95.      

OCCUPATION AND ETHNICITY IN FIVE NINETEENTH-CENTURY CITIES: A COLLABORATIVE INQUIRY

Abstract

Literary critics and historians often interpret authors and authors' works as more or less significant, but are reluctant to quantify those works. The interdisciplinary field of creativity studies, however, poses methods of quantifying the eminence of an author's works. This study uses four measures from that field (anthology entries, scholarly citations, entries in books of quotations, and auction sale records) and one measure from the fields of computational linguistics and data mining (ngrams using millions of books digitized by Google) to assess the eminence of John Milton's thirty-one prose works1. For the purpose of this study, Milton's short “A Letter to a Friend Concerning the Ruptures of the Commonwealth” (1659) was not included in the quantitative analysis out of concern with possible conflations and confusions with letters in Milton's Familiar Letters. and their relation to his greater achievement in epic poetry. These measures indicate the singular eminence of Areopagitica, Milton's 1644 tract on the liberty of unlicensed printing.     

The politics of area conservation in Cairo

The historic core of the Arab‐Islamic city has always played an integral role in the formation of the identity of the contemporary Arab city. It serves as the reference for the city’s character. This is especially so in Cairo, where historic quarters still act as the city’s most influential social and cultural source of inspiration. Today, many forces of neglect and deterioration have diminished this role. While attempts have been launched to confront this situation, they have focused mainly on restoring the historic city of Cairo, itself a World Heritage Site. This paper probes the actual reasons for the deterioration of the historic core of Cairo, as well as those that dominate the current efforts for revitalisation. In these processes it is the political dimension that is the most influential in the decision‐making affecting the proposed urban changes in historic Cairo.1 The present inquiry was supported by a workshop organised by the author to examine the attitude of the professionals representing different organisations involved in conservation in historic Cairo. This workshop was held on 12 and 13 September 2001 at the Italian Archaeological Centre in Cairo as part of the empirical work of the author’s PhD research.      

Unfinished Business from Potsdam: Britain,West Germany,and the Oder-Neisse Line, 1945–1962

Abstract

William Waldegrave Palmer, second earl of Selborne, took up his appointment as first lord of the admiralty in the marquess of Salisbury's third administration on 1 November 1900. This was Salisbury's recently acquired son-in-law's first experience of high office. Initially, as will be seen, Selborne regarded France and Russia as constituting the sole threat to British naval supremacy. Indeed, for reasons entirely to do with ‘economy’s, he was prepared to envisage the making of an alliance with Germany. He maintained this stance throughout 1901. At some point in the course of 1902, however, he displayed a dramatic change in outlook, which it is the purpose of this article to describe and, by pinning down the date with more precision than did Selborne himself in correspondence with Arthur J. Marder in 1938, to explain.1 A.J. Marder, TheAnatomy of British Sea Power: A Histo~ of B~tish Naval Policy in the Pre-Dreadnought Era, 1880–1905 (London, 1940), p. 464.      

The Form and Function of Poverty: Examining National Identity through Public Housing Architecture

Abstract

Lawrence J. Vale tells us that “grand symbolic state buildings need to be understood in terms of the political and cultural contexts that helped to bring them into being,” ¹ 1. Lawrence J. Vale, Architecture, Power, and National Identity (London: Routledge, 1992), 3. and that these buildings can help us understand our national identity. But all buildings are part of a broader political and cultural context. Even unimpressive state-funded buildings express meaning about the politics, power, and priorities of a nation. Because these buildings are not purposefully symbolic, their symbolism has the potential to provide a less contrived—though perhaps less appealing—portrayal of the nation in which they are built. Public housing provides an example of this idea. Public housing in the United States is latent with negative meanings that are reinforced and perpetuated by its architecture, siting, and design. This article examines three historical and iconic public housing communities and analyzes the meanings of these spaces through Goodman's four frames of reference—denotation, exemplification, metaphorical expression, and mediated reference—to determine what these spaces, as architecture, say about the American national identity and our relationship with public housing.