"Desperate Fighting at the Cape": The SalvationArmy's Arrival and Earliest Work in Late-Victorian Cape Town

Many scholars writing on colonial themes have associated the early Salvation Army with imperialism and related ideologies. Historians of Victorian Cape Town have been no exception. Their research has essentially identified the organisation with the imperial concerns of the city and its dominant middle-class culture. While there is some truth to this assessment, especially after the Army adopted an extensive social scheme in 1890, the earliest efforts of Salvationists at the Cape were often defined by very different objectives. The military-clad Salvationists arriving in Cape Town in 1883 owed something to a colonial age, but their sensational methods of evangelism quickly angered the local authorities. Despite sharing a bourgeois interest in temperance, the Army's working-class followers also received little support from the middle classes. Animated by a revivalism that violated conventional notions of religion, gender, and race, its pioneers in South Africa possessed few ties to imperialism or middle-class ideology.     

Putin's Russia: shaping a ‘grand strategy’?

Since the middle of the last decade the Russian leadership has conducted a strategic overhaul, publishing a cascade of new concepts, strategies and doctrines that attempt to frame plans in a long‐term horizon to 2020 and beyond. Following Vladimir Putin's re‐election in 2012, a series of presidential instructions and new plans have been published to update this overhaul. This article examines this commitment to strategic planning and whether it is tantamount to a grand strategy. The article explores the various understandings of Russian strategy in the existing literature, before sketching a definition of grand strategy. It suggests that Moscow has shaped a broad horizon and made some progress towards achieving the goals it has set out. But a grand strategy is more than formulating plans, it is also the coordination of relevant organizations and resources—‘conducting the orchestra’—to execute effectively the plans. The article thus concludes by exploring the difficulties Moscow faces: on the one hand, an evolving and competitive international context and, on the other, a domestic context burdened by a heavy inheritance from the USSR and contemporary Russian problems. Taken all together, these suggest that although Moscow is committed to strategic planning, a grand strategy remains a work in progress.