Sheffield Castle and The Aftermath of The English Civil War

The demolition of castles following the English Civil War is often seen as an inevitable consequence of the conflict, with their slighting often being ascribed to a need to prevent further bloodshed and punish the ruling elite. However, recent studies have demonstrated that the destruction of elite buildings during this period was far from straightforward, and this complexity is reflected in the methodology employed to damage them. At Sheffield, so extensive was this damage that, less than a century later, not a trace remained of what had once been one of the largest castles in South Yorkshire. Whilst little remains of the building itself, the rare survival of a set of demolition accounts, alongside a large number of other sources including personal correspondence, estate rentals and town records, means it is possible to explore in great detail the circumstances of the castle’s slighting. Through these a far more nuanced picture of civil conflict emerges with the castle’s destruction taking place within a complicated dialogue between the Lord of the Manor, Parliament’s officials and the inhabitants of Sheffield themselves.     

Club Talk: Gossip,Masculinity and Oral Communities in Late Nineteenth‐Century London

Gossip is not only a guilty pleasure; it is also an important tool of social control. Nowhere is this more evident than in the nineteenth‐century gentlemen's clubs of London. This article looks at the private lives of elite men whose gossip helped shape class and gender ideals. Archival documents, private memoirs and periodical literature provide both an insider and outsider vision of a very private world. Looking at how men gossiped points to codes of gentlemanly behaviour, the importance of homosocial life, and the place of oral culture in a modern, literate age.     

A House Committee on Un-Australian Activities? An Alternative to the Dissolution Act

Abstract

Legislation introduced by Prime Minister Robert Menzies to ban the Communist Party of Australia in 1950 has been studied in great detail, but there has been little discussion about why Menzies considered that an outright ban was the best way to thwart the Communist Party. Australia did not, for example, follow the American example of public show trials, denunciations and informants, characteristics of the phenomenon known as McCarthyism. This article explores the decision to reject the American model by focusing on legislation that the Liberal Party drafted in 1948, but never introduced. It also details the internal division of the Liberal Party over communism and the conflicted nature of Menzies’ own views. As a consequence, Australia did not introduce the equivalent of the anti-communist state apparatus of the United States.     

Australia’s war in Vietnam: debate without end

Australia’s commitment in Vietnam can be interpreted as a small ally drawing its superpower partner into war for its own ends. Two studies by eminent Australian authors throw light on the role of human agency, and in so doing bring Australian historiography of the war closer to the trend in the United States. Peter Edwards’s history just about describes Vietnam as ‘Menzies War’. However, he finds no new sources on Menzies’s mindset, and diminishes the roles of his foreign ministers, Garfield Barwick and Paul Hasluck. The late Geoffrey Bolton’s intimate biography of Hasluck shows him as an active minister and also that his private papers are thin on Vietnam, the part of his distinguished career on which he never wrote. The Cabinet meeting of 17 December 1964 reveals much more about Australian decision-making on going to war than can be gleaned from Edwards’s cursory treatment and Bolton’s second-hand account. Barwick’s different approach, and even Hasluck’s last-minute caution, show Australia had a choice. Barwick, if he had remained Foreign Minister, might have kept Australia out of the Vietnam war, so freeing it to continue to play a leading regional political role.     

Monuments,Reputation and Clerical Marriage in Reformation England: Bishop Barlow's Daughters

The impact of the English Reformation upon women and women's agency in effecting religious change has been much debated. This paper examines the key innovation of clerical marriage by studying the family of Bishop William Barlow (d. 1568), whose five daughters married five bishops. It establishes that Barlow himself married well before it was lawful to do so, and reviews the circumstances that led to his daughters’ remarkable marital achievements. Subsequently, the commemorative acts of this family between 1595 and 1630 were crucial to the creation of an honourable role for the clergyman's wife in English society. By manipulating the representation of the dead, Barlow's daughter Frances Matthew improved her and her sisters’ place in the world. Monuments and their influence upon historical memory are therefore shown to be a hitherto unrecognised means available to women for transforming social order.     

Still ‘breadwinners’ and ‘providers’: Singaporean husbands,money and masculinity in transnational marriages

As international marriages continue to be on the rise around the world, and in East and Southeast Asia in particular, there is an increasing need for more focused studies on the phenomenon. While the extant literature has paid attention to the complex dynamics of marital intimacies through a ‘gender-sensitive’ lens, the experiences of men are still largely under-examined. This article considers the gendered and classed subjectivities of Singaporean husbands who have married Vietnamese wives and focuses on ‘money’ as a key vehicle through which the men are able to construct masculinities in the spaces of transnational marriage and family. We argue that these non-migrant men engage with transnational processes and practices strategically in order to reclaim respectable and honourable masculine status. In doing so, they dislodge themselves from the idiom of ‘failed masculinity’ commonly ascribed to men who seek foreign spouses, but at the same time reproduce dominant models of masculinity predicated on ‘breadwinning’ and ‘providing’. This article draws on the narratives of 20 Singaporean Chinese men from a range of social backgrounds to demonstrate the endurance of money and economic potency in the performance of masculinities.     

The Huatou Revolution,Pure Land Practices,and Dahui’s Chan Discourse on the Moment of Death

Song-dynasty Chan depended for its place in society and its financial resources on lay patrons. Educated gentleman-officials (shidafu) were the wealthiest and most powerful of men. From the time of Dahui Zonggao in the Southern Song, Linji teachers shifted from elaborate comments on gongan in periodic sermons to a new method of gongan inspection termed “critical phrase” (kan huatou). Scholars have argued that Dahui’s invention of huatou practice was primarily related to internal Chan rivalries for elite patrons. I argue that Dahui’s motive was also connected to a rivalry with Pure Land Buddhism over the making of appeals to lay followers among scholar-officials. Dahui was aware and tried to communicate the usefulness of huatou in addressing the elite laity’s doubts about birth and death, and in particular their anxieties about facing the decisive moment of death. Therefore, he developed a gongan discourse that is related to anticipation of dying by harnessing the power of doubt to create an experience of spiritual awakening.     

Peace negotiations in the political marketplace: the implications of women's exclusion in the Sudan-South Sudan peace process

This article investigates the implications of women’s exclusion for the nature and durability of peace processes, and whether factors that undermine peace consolidation post-settlement might be prevented through more inclusive peacemaking. It examines the Sudan-South Sudan peace process that produced the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement, the roles women played in peacemaking and their exclusion from official negotiations, and the sources of insecurity post-CPA. South Sudan’s peace process shows that the exclusion of women can be understood as a canary in a coal mine: a highly visible marker of the broader exclusivity of such processes, and the complex dynamics of elite capture in war and peace processes. Women’s exclusion was the product of the region’s political marketplace, in which power and authority is secured by elites through violence and bargaining, to the exclusion of other groups. By understanding exclusion as a deliberate strategic tactic that extends from war into peacetime, I argue that the exclusion of women is not the reason why peace processes fail in and of itself, but rather the product of elite ownership of peace processes and the structure of many peace processes that facilitates and rewards such ownership, with serious consequences for the sustainability of peace post-settlement.     

‘He Likes Women More Than He Likes Drink and That Is Quite Unusual’: Working-Class Social Clubs,Male Culture,and Heterosocial Relations in the United States, 1920s–1930s

Throughout the early twentieth century working-class men spent much of their leisure time in their basement hangouts, known as social clubs. Social clubs usually formed out of the associational life of young working-class men and remained attached to a larger male culture. But they were also used for dances and other heterosocial interaction. This essay examines the organisation of these clubs and how members used them to negotiate homosocial and heterosocial leisure. In particular, it explores the struggles between men and women over the use of club space and how those struggles affected their relationships and male culture.     

U.S. Financial Aid for Iraq Under the Engagement Policy, 1988–1990

Abstract

This article reframes our understanding of the pre-Gulf War U.S. policy toward Iraq away from the issue of why the Bush administration ignored evidence that Saddam Hussein was not reciprocating U.S. efforts to moderate his behavior. Rather, it asks why the Bush administration did not consider Saddam’s abuse of U.S. export credit programs as relevant for evaluating Iraqi intentions and the efficacy of the engagement policy. It traces debates among federal agencies about two export credit programs to show that strategic considerations drove decisions to preserve or suspend these programs even though Iraq’s financial behavior offered insights earlier in time about its strategic intentions. While the Bush administration intended for engagement to reward or punish Saddam depending on his behavior, my examination of export credit controversies shows that it did not establish a rationale for deciding when and how to punish Iraq for threatening or abusive behavior.     

Postfeminist possibilities: unpacking the paradoxical performances of heterosexualized femininity in club spaces

One of the ways in which the heterosexualization of women's bodies is made apparent is through the blatant promotion of Ladies' Night at night clubs. These are typically weekly events, of which women are granted complimentary entry by club operators. Ladies' Night is thus popularly construed as a time and space in which men can gain access to many ‘heterosexy’ female bodies. The deliberate deployment of specific kinds of (post)feminine bodies and subjectivities—slim, savvy, and sassy—in club promotional material is often couched in discourses that highlight female expression, consumption, and autonomy. Such a celebratory rhetoric of women as empowered actors seems to suggest that traditional gendered expectations of women as self-reserved, timid and vulnerable to sexual aggression are archaic and are no longer valid. In light of this, I investigate how women negotiate a postfeminist terrain within the context of Singapore's night clubbing scene. By employing qualitative methods such as in-depth interviews, ethnographic work, and discourse analysis, I argue that clubs are paradoxical spaces for performing gendered and (hetero)sexualized selves that vacillate between affirming and subverting heteropatriarchal regimes. In so doing, this paper hopes to contribute to the scholarship on feminist geography by bringing recent debates on postfeminism into a productive conversation with the literature on (hetero)sexuality and space.     

‘L’île des bannis’: Jersey,Britain and the French Emigration 1789–1815

ABSTRACT

The case of the Channel Island of Jersey is an important yet understudied part of the British Empire’s response to the French Emigration 1789–1815. During its high point in 1792–3, the émigré population in and around Jersey’s main town of St Helier was as large as that in London and one of the European centres of political migration. This article explores the complicated relationship between Jersey’s political institutions, the British military authorities in London, the British government and the émigré community. It shows how a brewing humanitarian crisis in the island prompted the British government to sanction subsistence payments in Jersey and enlist Royalist émigrés months before these policies were adopted in Britain. But British support was intimately bound up with the émigrés’ anti-Revolutionary military activities, as much as humanitarian concerns. The forced expulsion of most émigrés to Britain in summer 1796 resulted not from concerns about the wellbeing of the émigré community in face of imminent French invasion, but concerns about the Royalists’ military loyalties. During the Napoleonic Wars, British policy towards the émigrés lacked coherence and was not categorized by overriding humanitarian goals, though such concerns did compete with strategic ones.     

An Enlightened path towards conservatism: critical junctures and changing elite perceptions in early nineteenth-century Russia

This article explores the historical roots of Russian conservatism by analyzing the evolution of Russia’s Westernized, Enlightenment-minded nobility to a conservative segment of Russian society in the early nineteenth century. The events of 1789 and 1812 were critical junctures that made the Russian nobility painfully aware of their own deep level of Westernization. The article first describes the reverberations of the French Revolution among the Russian elite. It also discusses the internal and external scrutiny of Russia’s relations with France under Napoleon, which made Russian conservatism a contingency. It then describes the evolution between 1789 and 1812 of a corpus of conservative ideas ranging from traditionalism to ardent patriotism and xenophobia. Napoleon’s 1812 campaign against Russia overshadowed the generational gap and diverging political and literary preferences among the elite. The reaction to it illustrates the intrinsic duality of the Russian elite: culturally Westernized, yet politically conservative. Yet the influence of several Western defenders of the ancien régime on Russia’s conservatives shows that the essentially conservative Russian identity as propagated by Putin these days originally might have been more pan-European than purely Russian.     

Community Driven Development,Collective Action and Elite Capture in Indonesia

In response to the well documented limitations of top‐down, modernist and authoritarian approaches that have dominated development, practitioners and academics increasingly promote more community‐based approaches. The World Bank uses the term ‘community driven development’ to describe projects that increase a community's control over the development process. In an analysis of a community driven poverty alleviation project in Indonesia, this article examines the vulnerability of such an approach to elite capture. The expected relationships among a community's capacity for collective action, elite control over project decisions and elite capture of project benefits were not found. In cases where the project was controlled by elites, benefits continued to be delivered to the poor, and where power was the most evenly distributed, resource allocation to the poor was restricted. Communities where both non‐elites and elites participated in democratic self‐governance, however, did demonstrate an ability to redress elite capture when it occurred.     

烟捐与民变:1930年代皖北宿县乡村危机与政府控制

1932年皖北宿县因烟捐引发民变是20世纪30年代国民政府治下乡村危机频发的侧影。民变前,国家政权与乡村精英结合掌控乡村,而精英间为争夺乡村权力展开派系斗争,官民矛盾、绅民矛盾和绅士间矛盾尖锐。皖省政府依靠乡绅课征烟税,劣绅借机盘剥农民,绅民、官民矛盾激化。民变发生后,关系各方展开利益博弈,政府交替运用武力与怀柔之策控制民变,但无助于化解官民矛盾、绅民矛盾、官绅矛盾和乡绅不同派系间的利益纠葛,反致乡村危机在政府控制下被雪藏。乡村危机是国家政治、经济和社会等多元因素交互作用下产生的,并非如学界过往所认同的经济单线性诱致之结果。     

The Last of Australian Imperial Dreams for the Southwest Pacific: Paul Hasluck,the Department of Territories and a Greater Melanesia in 1960

This paper is a study of the vision held at the beginning of the 1960s by Paul Hasluck, the minister for external territories, and his department of the path to decolonisation for Melanesia. Faced by the ongoing West New Guinea crisis, Hasluck and his officials proposed to keep the western part of New Guinea out of Indonesian hands by expanding Australia’s empire, step by step, to include most of Melanesia. This greater Melanesian empire would eventually be guided to self-government. The proposal stood in a long line of ideas by Pacific-minded Australians going back for 100 years for an expanded Australian empire in the southwest Pacific. Consequently the Menzies cabinet’s rejection of Hasluck’s proposal was not just an important step towards changing its policy towards WNG; it marked the end to a century of Australian dreams and designs of a greater formal empire in the southwest Pacific.     

A LIFE AND DEATH DECISION: THE INFLUENCE OF TRENDS IN FERTILITY,NUPTIALITY AND FAMILY ECONOMIES ON VOLUNTARY ENLISTMENT IN SCOTLAND,AUGUST 1914 TO DECEMBER 1915

Abstract

This article examines the influence of nuptiality and fertility patterns, and family economic strategies, on county variations in the percentage of Scottish men who voluntarily enlisted in the British Army in I9I4-I5. It relies partly on new quantitative methods, which employs the untapped War Office Memorandum of Compulsory Service [MCS] of I9I5. The MCS details the percentage of men that enlisted in British counties, and its variations for Scottish counties are cross-referenced with local demographic and economic data in a multivariate analysis. The quantitative data is then compared with reports, letters and editorials regarding voluntary enlistment in seventeen different newspapers (sixteen Scottish, and The Times) in I9I4 and I9I5. The investigation shows to what extent voluntary enlistment trends related to conditions, especially fertility trends, which pre-dated the war. It further reveals how decisions about family standards of living, made men hesitate to enlist. The article thereby further qualifies the use of ‘patriotism’ as an explanation for voluntary enlistment and the response to war in I9I4.     

Stepping into the Public World： Cases of Guixiu Philanthropic Activities in Late Qing China

This article explores the of certain elite women during late little-known public philanthropic activities Qing China. By examining contemporary newspapers, it traces the new development of women＇s philanthropic engagement and further analyzes two cases, one on disaster relief and the other on women＇s education, to illustrate the issues, controversies and achievements that went along with women＇s philanthropy. It demonstrates how philanthropy, a traditionally-sanctioned field for women＇s activism, legitimatized women to move out of domestic seclusion and reposition themselves in the public sphere in a crucial transitional era when for ＂good women＂ to appear in public was something hotly debated, and how through philanthropic opportunities some were able to engage with political affairs. The broad social impact of their initiatives suggests the continued importance of traditional elite women during China＇s transition to the modern era; it challenges some of our previous notions, which often unthinkingly accepted the verdict of ＂New Women＂ that those who did not embrace their path to modernity were parasitic, unproductive, and backward. By looking carefully at philanthropy, the article reveals fascinating issues and rich details of women＇s public activities that previous historical narratives have often overlooked. It helps to understand how reconfigured traditions became essential components of modernity in the development of modern Chinese gender roles. It also adds a gender perspective to the burgeoning historiography on Chinese philanthropy.     

“Sports is Politics”: Swimming (and) Pools in Postcolonial Singapore

Almost immediately after Singapore’s independence in 1965, sports became an agent of social engineering in the creation of the new nation, and the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) government pragmatically used the institution of sports in its nation-building enterprise. Based on an analysis of the speeches and press statements of Singaporean bureaucrats and civil servants from the 1960s to the 1980s, this article investigates the ruling elite’s general perception of sports and regional sporting events, examining how such a perception influenced Singapore’s local governance and strategic thinking in foreign relations. Although scholars have pointed out that sports were prominent in the nationalistic discourses of Singapore and in the projection of Singapore’s international image, little about the history and development of individual sports in Singapore is known. The article argues that swimming was the premier sport of choice for Singapore’s ruling elite in its projects of building bodies and the nation after independence, manifested in the swimming pools that the nascent nation strove to build in the residential estates outside the “colonial stronghold” of the central town district.     

‘[A] Mere Cloak for their Proud Contempt and Antipathy towards the African Race’: Imagining Britain’s West India Regiments in the Caribbean, 1795–1838

This article examines opposition to the creation and presence of the West India Regiments in Britain’s Caribbean colonies from the establishment of these military units in the mid-to-late 1790s to the formal ending of slavery in the region. Twelve regiments were originally created amid the twin crises associated with Britain’s struggle with Revolutionary France and the horrendous losses to disease suffered by British forces in the Caribbean. Their rank-and-file were comprised mainly of men of African descent, most of whom had been bought by the British Army from slave traders or, after the abolition of the British slave trade in 1807, recruited from among people ‘liberated’ by the Royal Navy. While there was nothing new in using men of African descent, free and enslaved, in the service of the European empires in the Americas, such enrolments had tended to be for fixed or limited periods. Thus, the establishment of the West India Regiments as permanent military units, whose soldiers were uniformed, armed and trained along European lines, was unprecedented—and bitterly opposed by West Indian colonists. Indeed, although white West Indians were concerned about the protection of the colonies from both external and internal foes, they were highly sceptical about whether arming (formerly) enslaved people of African descent would serve to promote their security or might, in fact, imperil the system of racial slavery on which they relied.

The tensions arising from the establishment of the West India Regiments have been examined by other historians. However, much of the previous focus has been on the political conflict between the British authorities and local colonial legislatures, and on legal challenges to the regiments, especially during the early years of their existence. In contrast, this article takes a wider view of opposition to the regiments over a longer period up to the formal ending of slavery. In so doing, it examines how the regiments’ rank and file were viewed by white West Indians and the deep anxieties this reveals among colonists. The article also considers the efforts made by the regiments’ proponents and commanders to promulgate more favourable images of black soldiers, images that became more prominent by the 1830s. The more general argument is that this struggle around how the West India Regiments’ rank and file should be viewed was part of a broader ‘war of representation’ over the image of ‘the African’ during the age of abolition.