A Victorian Embarrassment: Consular Jurisdiction and the Evils of Extraterritoriality

In 1856, the Treaty of Paris nominally welcomed the Ottoman Empire into the Concert of Europe, but this exposed a deep fault line in international relations. Although the gesture implied full sovereign rights, it seemed incompatible with the extraterritorial privileges held by Europeans in Ottoman lands under the age-old capitulations. New commercial treaties complicated the issue by extending similar privileges to British subjects as far afield as China, Siam and Japan. Consular jurisdiction soon became the focus of controversy in Westminster as extraterritoriality featured prominently in local disputes following British commercial expansion across Asia, among them the Arrow incident that led to the Second Opium War. In Japan and other states, it would also become a key grievance in popular campaigns against ‘unequal treaties’ and the injustices of informal empire. This analysis shows how, even before such narratives of resistance emerged, there was already a seam of ambivalence in Victorian political discourse on the question of extraterritoriality. In the Foreign Office, it came as no surprise to be told of defects in these treaties, but it was the context of the existing debate, notably fresh initiatives to set up mixed courts, that framed the British response.     

The taming of psychoanalysis in geography

In the last decade, social and cultural geography has experienced a 'psychoanalytic turn': geographers have used insights from Freud, Lacan, Klein, Winnicott, Kristeva and others to deepen and re-orient our understandings of subjectivity and socio-spatial formations. In this paper, I argue that in the process, psychoanalytic geography has tended to render psychoanalysis compatible with the imperatives currently driving social and cultural geography (such as the demand to theorize resistance and develop particular understandings of politicized subjectivities and spatialities). Many of Freud's founding insights, however, work at odds with such imperatives: Freud's formulation of the unconscious points to a realm that is not malleable in terms of cultural resignification, and that conceives the individual as subject as much to inertia and repetition as to progressive transformation. The paper demonstrates how geography has worked to tame psychoanalytic theory by downplaying its more politically unpalatable aspects. In so doing, it argues that the time is now right for those aspects to be brought to light.     

Lancashire's ‘War’ with Australia: Rethinking Anglo-Australian Trade and the Cultural Economy of Empire, 1934–36

Following the recent cultural turn in economic history, this article resurrects a neglected imperial trade war between Lancashire and Australia to explore the nature of the cultural economy of the British Empire in the interwar period. New work has emphasised the importance of Britishness as the basis for co-ethnic networks that helped underwrite imperial expansion through the nineteenth century. However, this welcome new focus on culture’s significance for economics has, curiously, tended to obscure its dynamic interaction with the economy. Economic activity did not simply benefit from culture, as concepts like co-ethnicity suggest, but also helped to produce that culture. As result, the meanings of Britishness mobilised by trade were never stable, even in the heart of empire itself. This article focuses on a boycott of Australian produce started by grocers in Lancashire cotton towns in 1934, in response to new Australian tariffs on imported cotton goods. Tracing the cultural meanings constructed from the very first planting of cotton in Australia, through to the boycott and its aftermath, exemplifies the dynamic and contingent nature of Britishness generated through trade.     

The Palestinian Museum,Ramallah

Abstract

Whereas recent studies have correctly identified a clan-based social structure presumed in the place names of the Samaria Ostraca, an analysis of the power relations within these structures has not been sufficiently developed. Approaching the evidence from a consumption perspective of the commodities for yn y?n (‘aged wine’) and ?mn r?? (‘washed oil’) suggests that the economic significance of these items is tied to complex social interactions. Specifically, both archaeological and ethnographic studies associate such prestige commodities with elite feasting and ceremonial displays. By gifting these items, the central power engaged in a form of ‘competitive feasting’ to secure political capital for future use from clan leaders of the periphery of Samaria. Accordingly, the Samaria Ostraca hint at the use of redistributive mechanisms to secure power relations at elite gatherings.     

Nunneries,Communities and the Revaluation of Domesticity

This is a review of three books: a collection of essays edited by Diane Watt on medieval women in their communities, and two monographs, by Jeffrey F. Hamburger and Marilyn Oliva, on nunneries in late medieval Germany and England. All three suggest in different ways that women's activities are regularly undervalued by the assumption that women try to do the same things as men, and fail. Hamburger argues that the artistic production of late fifteenth‐century nuns has been dismissed because it does not satisfy the criteria of (male) ‘high’ art. He shows that ‘nuns' work’ is in fact the product of a complex symbolic visual and textual culture. Oliva argues that the study of nunneries has been neglected because it is assumed that, since they were not rich and powerful like the monasteries, there is no evidence about them. She shows that it is possible to undertake a detailed prosopographical study of a group of nunneries from a single diocese. I argue that when in this context we talk about ‘women’, we are often in fact talking about the domestic sphere, with which women were so strongly associated. A revaluation of women's activities entails a revaluation of domesticity and the home.     

How diverse were early animal communities? An example from Ediacara Conservation Park,Flinders Ranges,South Australia

Coutts, F.J., Gehling, J.G. & García-Bellido, D.C., August 2016. How diverse were early animal communities? An example from Ediacara Conservation Park, Flinders Ranges, South Australia. Alcheringa 40, xxx–xxx. ISSN 0311-5518

Fossils of the Ediacara biota record the earliest evidence of animal communities and, as such, provide an invaluable glimpse into the abiotic and biotic processes that helped shape the evolution of complex life on Earth. A diverse community of Ediacaran macro-organisms is preserved with high resolution in a fossil bed recently excavated from north Ediacara Conservation Park (NECP) in the Flinders Ranges, South Australia. Many of the commonly described Ediacaran taxa from the Flinders Ranges are represented on the bed surface and include: Parvancorina, Rugoconites, Spriggina, Dickinsonia, Tribrachidium, Kimberella, Charniodiscus and Yorgia, including two new taxa. Numerous additional fossil-bed fragments from the same locality were analysed that preserve a similar suite of taxa and shared sedimentology. On all surfaces, preserved microbial mat appeared complex, both in topography and in texture, and the unique combination of fine grainsize, high diversity and trace fossils provide insights into the palaeoecology of the ancient organisms that lived during the Ediacaran Period some 550 Ma. Several trace fossils are overlapped by body fossils, indicative of successive events, and complex organismal behaviour. The complexity of this fossil surface suggests that the primordial community was relatively mature and possibly at late-stage succession.

Felicity J Coutts [felicity.coutts@adelaide.edu.au], School of Biological Sciences, University of Adelaide, Adelaide 5000, South Australia, Australia. James G Gehling [jim.gehling@samuseum.sa.gov.au], South Australian Museum, North Terrace, Adelaide, South Australia 5000, Australia. Diego C. García-Bellido [diego.garcia-bellido@adelaide.edu.au], South Australian Museum, North Terrace, Adelaide, South Australia 5000, Australia.