The Formative Years of Anglo‐Iranian Relations (1907–1953): Colonial Scramble for Iran and Its Political Legacy

As the title largely illustrates, this study seeks to investigate, from a diplomatic‐history and geostrategic perspective, the key developments in Anglo‐Iranian relations during what may best be dubbed their “formative years,” ranging from 1907 to 1953. Having thus provided a glimpse into pre‐twentieth‐century Persian–British relations, it moves to analyze the division of Persia into two spheres of influence between Great Britain and Tsarist Russia in 1907, the Anglo‐Iranian agreement of 1919, the English control of Iranian oil during the first half of the twentieth century and the nationalist struggle against it, and finally the 1953 coup d'état orchestrated by the United Kingdom and the United States against the democratic government of Mohammad Mosaddeq, which managed to topple him and bring Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi to power. While the article focuses mainly on the complex history of Anglo‐Iranian relationship, it strives to shed light on the implications of such a history for future bilateral relations, its impact on the contemporary Iranian perception of the British, and finally the cultural‐political legacy it has left behind in Iran. The study follows a chronological order and draws on a range of English and Persian sources in trying to fulfill its task.     

Persia through the Lens: Poetics and Politics of Architectural Photographs in Pahlavi Iran

Having been introduced to the scholarly community and the general public through a variety of photographic presentations during the inter-war period, monuments in Iran, particularly those of pre-modern Islamic periods, became key buildings to be seized upon as the ultimate embodiment of Persian beauty. The lasting image of Persian Islamic architecture that was articulated through photographs continues not only to set an important benchmark for the understanding of the aesthetic and political matrix of the early twentieth century but also to provoke a methodological question as to the future of Persian architectural studies.     

All quiet on the western front? Royal politics in Galicia from c.800 to c.950

For complex reasons pertaining to the course of Spanish historiography throughout the twentieth century, the region of Galicia has been seen as politically peripheral to the initial stages of the Reconquista. In this article I argue that Galicia was a key marcher region in the ninth and tenth centuries, and that its magnate class, far from being marginal, was closely implicated in the rudimentary political structures of the kingdom. I propose that documents which seem to disclose little more than idealized abstractions of the political relationships between Astur‐Leonese kings and Galician magnates reveal aspects of elite political practice in action.     

二十世纪甲骨文语法研究的回顾暨展望

本把一百多年来的甲骨语法研究史分为四个阶段,从研究成果、学术背景、研究领域、研究热点、研究人员、研究材料、研究方法等方面对二十世纪的甲骨语法学研究做了回顾,并对新世纪的甲骨语法研究进行了展望。     

Public debt and financial crises in the twentieth century

The costs of wars have been the main driver of public debt in the Western World during the modern era. The late twentieth century stands out as a period that saw a pronounced increase of government debt to GDP ratios in peacetime. This paper assesses the role that financial crises have played in shaping the public debt trajectory in the twentieth century. Focusing on the experiences of 14 industrial economies, I show that financial crises have long and lasting effects on public finances. I provide evidence that the costs of financial crises have increased strongly in the second half of the twentieth century and that the costs of financial crises grow with the size of the financial sector. In many countries, the rising costs incurred from stabilizing the economy after financial crises were an important cause of the peacetime surge of public debt ratios in the late twentieth century. In today's highly financialized economies, financial crises have become a key risk for public finances.     

Demographic growth and the “cultural factor” in ireland: rethinking the relationship between structure and event

The structure/event dichotomy has been a bone of contention in anthropology for many decades. The so‐called “synchronic paradigms” such as functionalism and structuralism saw “structure” (defined in various ways) as the object of anthropological analysis, whereas “events” were left to historians. Recent trends in anthropological thought are eager to dismiss the ahistoricity of traditional approaches as they attempt to include the diachronic perspective within anthropological research. Very often, this re‐historization of anthropology has entailed the criticism of the structure/event dichotomy. By using data from Irish demographic history, in this article I postulate the need to recover this dichotomy as a fundamental component of the anthropological approach to human affairs.     

Oral/Past Culture and Modern Technical Means in the Literature of the Twentieth Century in Greenland

Abstract

The present article takes as its starting point a short story from 2001 and relates it to the development of the Greenlandic literature in the twentieth century. The Greenlandic literature evolved around 1900 and mirrors the socio-political trends and the stages of nation building through the twentieth century. The overall tendencies of the century start with a striving towards more knowledge of and competence in European culture (including technical know-how) before 1950. Then a feeling of overwhelming impact from Danish culture followed during the Danification policy of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s and this resulted in a protest movement in the 1960s and 1970s and Home Rule from 1979. However, if we read the literature in details and supplement it with the contemporary newspapers a much more diverse picture of an appropriation process (i.e. a conscious adaptation of selective parts of the impact from outside) emerges. The present article focuses on how these sources give us glimpses of an ongoing debate already in the first half of the twentieth century i.e. in colonial times: the Greenlandic population was not just passively under colonial domination. The history of the twentieth century is the history about a fairly well functioning appropriation of technical means and cultural impact from outside up till 1950, and then – after three decades of heavy modernization and Danification –-a process from 1979 on towards more and more agency in a “ glocalized” Greenland.     

Prostitution and infection: transnational and comparative perspectives on Italian health policy (1922–1958)

ABSTRACT

In 1958 the Italian parliament abolished controlled prostitution and closed the case di tolleranza – brothels licensed and supervised by the state. Justified in the nineteenth century as a means to combat venereal diseases, discussions surrounding the state-regulated prostitution became increasingly complex after the Second World War. This article will focus on the presumptive chief argument, the brothels’ benefit to public health. Using a historical comparison, it will identify this factor’s role in the continuation or abolition of the regulated system and any aspects unique to the Italian case. To take full advantage of the comparative approach, countries have been selected that permit an entangled historical comparison that is both synchronic and diachronic: Whereas the change in prostitution regulations occurred after the Second World War in France and Italy – the same era – we must jump back to a different period, the pre-war years, for the German case.     

Secular Islam

ABSTRACT

While he appears to have been a relentless critic of secularism as a liberal ideal, the celebrated Indian poet and philosopher Mohammad Iqbal might also be considered among its more important non-European theorists. Globally one of the most influential Muslim thinkers of the twentieth century, Iqbal started publishing in its first decade, reaching the height of his power and popularity during the inter-war period until he died in Lahore in 1938. He studied philosophy as well as Arabic and Persian thought in Lahore, Cambridge, and Munich, and drew extensively upon European as much as Asian thinkers. I will argue here that Iqbal followed an important tradition of pre-modern philosophy by thinking about the relationship between politics and theology in esoteric terms.     

Europe's twentieth century in retrospect? a cautious note on the Furet/Nolte debate1

This article takes up the “Furet/Nolte debate” over the meaning of fascism and communism for our time. It does so in order to sketch out the dilemmas that confound the construction of meaningful narratives of the twentieth century, where persistent obstacles attend the enclosure of twentieth‐century events within an integrated and coherent whole. For at least two reasons, I suggest, the correspondence of Ernst Nolte and the late François Furet is instructive in identifying the nature of these obstacles more precisely. First, Furet himself is the author of what is currently construed as being one of the most ambitious (albeit contested) attempts to narrate the twentieth century, by taking the “illusions” engendered by faith in the Marxist–Leninist project as its organising principle. Second, the positions adopted by Nolte have been contested in the public sphere as being acutely emblematic of problems latent in the attempt to enclose communism and fascism together in a narrative of mutual complicity. The correspondence between Furet and Nolte therefore provides a fruitful context in which to treat a set of related problems bearing upon the relation between historical truth and reconciliation, between history and memory, and between the contemporary world and the advent of totalitarianism. As I conclude, a key point which has to date been overlooked in discussions of this kind is the coincidence of attempts to establish a historiographic framework for the twentieth century with efforts to undertake a settling of accounts with socialism.     

The origins of Turkish Republican citizenship: the birth of race*

Abstract. This article explores the emergence of the dominance of racialised Turkish citizenship. Contrary to the conventional methods that investigate the early republican era, this paper starts by examining the final years of the Ottoman Empire with a special emphasis on the Balkan Wars as the birth of racialised technologies of citizenship. Then, I analyse the encounters between racialised thought in the Ottoman Empire in the twentieth century and its recurring counterpart in these encounters: ‘European modernity’. Next, I dwell on an illustration of a materialisation of racialised citizenship in the Ottoman Empire: the displacement and elimination of Armenian citizens. Finally, by probing the dominant strand of modern citizenship and nationhood in Europe, I articulate the commonalities of racialised citizenship in Europe and the Ottoman Empire in the early twentieth century. I conclude by arguing that race as a particular identity should not be seen as an institutionalised aspect of citizenship only in ostensibly ‘Oriental and absolutist regimes’. Instead, the focus should be on moments at which ‘European modernity’ and various nationalisms (racial, ethnic, cultural) mutually constitute each other.     

What He Thought…What He Did: An Archaeological Study of the Persian Gulf Coasts Colonial Sites of Sheikh Khazal Khan in the Early Twentieth Century

Iranian colonial sites on Persian Gulf coasts include eighteenth-century Portuguese fortresses and graveyards on the islands of Hormoz and Qeshm and twentieth-century British colonial missions in southern Iran and Kuwait. Sheikh Khazal Khan, an Iranian Arab, who lived in the early twentieth century, ruled Khuzestan and counseled the governors of Kuwait. He also apparently worked as Great Britain’s political dependent in the region at least from 1890s. He constructed five palaces on the shores of southwestern Iran and two in Kuwait. The author excavated these sites in 2008. Khazal’s identity is a problematic subject in contemporary Iranian history. He is judged variously as a spy (for most Iranians) and as a hero (for Pan-Arabs). Introducing Khazal Khan’s Persian Gulf coastal architectural data, this essay explains the context in which these colonial architectural units were constructed. The patterns of this colonial process are used to interpret Khazal’s identity, based on the material culture of the era.     

国外乡村旅游研究综述

本文总结了国外乡村旅游研究的进展,指出国外研究的成果主要集中在乡村旅游供给、乡村旅游需求、乡村旅游影响等方面.基于上述研究状况和乡村旅游发展现状,笔者认为今后国外乡村旅游研究的重点将可能为:对乡村旅游跨学科、多角度进行的实证和理论研究,乡村旅游有关术语、作用和基础理论的国际共识研究,国际合作跨地区、跨文化的乡村旅游共时比较研究及对乡村旅游发展演进不同阶段的历时归纳研究.     

Rethinking the Ottoman Imitation of Persian Poetry

This article revisits the common discourse that Ottoman poetry is a derivative imitation of Persian poetry. I begin by surveying and discussing the discourse of imitation that has pervaded approaches to Ottoman poetry in particular and Ottoman literature in general. Then I turn to explore how Ottoman poets engaged with Persian poetry by focusing on a lyric poem composed by the Ottoman sultan Süleyman the Magnificent (1494?1566) in imitation of the Persian master poet Hafiz of Shiraz (ca. 1315?90). In light of intertextual analysis, I illustrate and discuss the intricate ways in which Süleyman models himself on Hafiz in crafting his poem. I conclude with the idea that a closer analytical look at Ottoman poets’ intertextual dialogue with Persian poetry can offer better insights into the Ottoman reception of Persian poetic models as well as into the meaning and workings of imitation in the Ottoman literary context.     

Just a Little Bend on the S-Curve: The Rise and Fall of Linguistic Change in Post-Classical Biblical Hebrew

The paper deals with the text-critical challenge and the variationist analysis in application to the historical linguistics of Biblical Hebrew, coming out in recent research, particularly in Historical Linguistics and Biblical Hebrew by Robert Rezetko and Ian Young (2014). Different textual transmissions have become part of the linguistic corpus and an indispensable part of historical-linguistic research. Variationist analysis corroborates that some explicit innovative processes in the standard literary idiom of the Persian period were reversed by the conservative tendency, distinctive in the Qumran corpus, so that it will be more accurate to speak about two different stages in Late Biblical Hebrew development: Persian period and Late Hellenistic—early Roman periods.     

Reconsidering the Metamorphosis of Io: on Texts,Images and Dates

This article reconsiders the portrayal of Io's metamorphosis in texts and images from the fifth century BCE. It discusses points of synchronicity and diachronicity, innovation and variety in this myth. While the depiction of Io on vases may not help us date with more certainty the texts of the fifth century BCE, including the Prometheus Bound and Bacchylides’ Ode 19, I argue that the comparison between texts and images may draw attention, instead, to a synchronic variety in the depiction of Io in the decades preceding and following the mid-fifth century BCE. This shift in perspective leads me to advance the proposition that myth interpretation may be revitalized by a paradigm shift from “tree” to “network”.     

Differentiation between Seizure and Hysteria in a Tenth-Century Persian Text: Hidāyat of al-Akhawayni (d. 983 AD)

Although hysteria is associated largely with the nineteenth century, we find the subject treated in a tenth-century Persian medical text, the Hidayat al-Muta`allemin Fi al-Tibb [A Guide to Medical Learners] by al-Akhawayni Bukhari (d. 983 AD), a prominent physician in the Persian history of medicine. In this article, we discuss al-Akhawayni’s views on seizure and hysteria and his differentiation between the two conditions, and we place it in a historical context.     

历史记忆与族群认同变迁——巴蜀祖源传说的历史人类学解读

从历史人类学的角度来看,作为一种重要的集体历史记忆,祖源传说反映了一定社会情境下人们的族群认同。本文以巴蜀祖源传说为文本分析对象,解读了其中传递的华夏认同、本土记忆、异族认识等族群情感及其产生的社会情境,并结合其他材料探讨了周秦汉晋时期中原华夏人和巴蜀本土人对巴蜀族群认同发展的三个阶段,旨在从历史人类学的角度将共时性与历时性相结合、文化整合与时空变迁相结合。     

Mining the Way to Wealth and Power: Late Qing Reform of Mining Law (1895–1911)

This article traces the origins of Chinese alignment with Western mining laws to the last years of the Qing dynasty. I argue that the first decade of the twentieth century was the fundamental watershed in China between early modern views of mining and those held by the Chinese government today.