Defences of classical learning in St. Augustine's De Doctrina Christiana and Erasmus's Antibarbari

New information technology can be an invaluable aid to research in the history of ideas provided it is built on scientific foundations. This article discusses the case of Diderot and D'Alembert's Encyclopédie and analyses its use of earlier dictionaries (the Dictionnaire de Trévoux, Chambers's Cyclopaedia and Moréri's dictionary). It also shows how neglect of existing research in the history of ideas and ignorance of how these eighteenth-century European publications were elaborated, combined with inappropriate use of software for detecting plagiarism, have led to totally mistaken findings. These findings, widely publicised thanks to the Internet, constitute a real danger for future research. The article concludes that the intellectual community urgently needs to invest seriously in the digital humanities in order to safeguard future research.     

Human Encumbrances: Political Violence and the Great Irish Famine

Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 by Peter Hulme. London: Methuen, 1986. Pp. xi + 399; maps and illus. £25.

The Aggressions of the French at Tahiti and other Islands in the Pacific, by George Pritchard, edited by Paul De Deckker. Auckland: Oxford University Press (New Zealand), 1985. Pp.253. £35.00.

A History of Christianity in India 1707–1858 by Stephen Neill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1985. Pp. xiv + 578. £45.

Out of the House of Bondage: Runaways, Resistance and Marronage in Africa and the New World edited by Gad Heuman. London: Frank Cass &; Co., 1986. Pp. vii + 199; maps. £19.50.

Victorian Shipping, Business and Imperial Policy: Donald Currie, the Castle Line and Southern Africa by A.N. Porter. Royal Historical Society Studies in History 49. Woodbridge: Boydell &; Brewer, 1986. Pp. 332. £29.50.

Speculators and Patriots: Essays in Business Biography edited by R.P.T. Davenport‐Hines, London: Frank Cass &; Co.Ltd., 1986. Pp. viii + 139. £21.00.

Julius Vogel, Business Politician by Raewyn Dalziel. Auckland: Auckland University Press and Oxford University Press, 1986. Pp. 368, illus. NZ $45.00.

Kipling and ‘Orientalism’ by B.J. Moore‐Gilbert. London: Croom Helm, 1986. Pp. 228; £18.95.

The Imperial Imagination, Magic and Myth in Kipling's India by Lewis D. Wurgraft. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1986. Pp.xxi + 211; £7.95.

A Short History of Tasmania by L.L. Robson. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1986. Pp.xii + 189. £7.95.

Horace Plunkett, Co‐operation and Politics: An Irish Biography by Trevor West. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1986. Pp. xviii + 288, illus. £12.95.

The Canadian Career of the Fourth Earl of Minto: The Education of a Viceroy by Carman Miller. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1980. Pp.225.

Lord Minto's Canadian Papers: A Selection of the Public and Private Papers of the Fourth Earl of Minto, 1898–1904 edited by Paul Stevens and John T. Saywell. Toronto: The Champlain Society, 1981. Vol. I. Pp. lxxix + 467.

Robert Thorne Coryndon: Proconsular Imperialism in Southern and Eastern Africa, 1897–1925 by Christopher P. Youe. Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 1986. Pp. xiv + 241; maps, tables, and illus. $29.95.

The Ambiguities of Dependence in South Africa: Class, Nationalism, and the State in Twentieth‐Century Natal by Shula Marks. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986. Pp. ix + 171; illus. £13.75.

Oil Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century by Fiona Venn. London: Macmillan, 1986. Pp.xii + 228. £7.95 (paperback); £25.00 (hardback).

The Third Reich and the Palestine Question by F.R. Nicosia. London: I.B. Tauris, 1986. Pp.343. £24.50.

Old Sinister: A Memoir of Sir Arthur Richards, GCMG by Richard Peel. Privately printed, n.d. Pp. 196, £8.

Yanks Down Under 1941–45: The American Impact on Australia by E. Daniel Potts and Annette Potts. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1985. Pp. xxiii + 455, illus. £29.50.

Anthony Eden: A Biography by David Carlton. London: Allen &; Unwin Paperbacks, 1986. Pp.528: illus. £8.95.

Anthony Eden by Robert Rhodes James. London: Weidenfeld &; Nicolson, 1986. Pp. xiv + 665; map and illus. £16.95.

The English‐Speaking Alliance‐ Britain, the United States, the Dominions and the Cold War 1945–1951 by Ritchie Ovendale. London: George Allen &; Unwin, 1985. Pp. 308; bibliography and index. £30.

Black Africa 1945–1980: Economic Decolonisation and Arrested Development by D.K. Fieldhouse. London: Allen &; Unwin Ltd., 1986. Pp.xix + 260. £22.50 (hardback), £9.95 (paperback).     

The political future of ASEAN after the Asian crisis

The 1997 Asian financial crisis has been a debilitating experience for the ASEAN countries, with attendant political transformation and economic readjustment. Regional unity has also been affected: ASEAN appears to lack resolve and cohesion as well as the ability to forge common action. While political change has been effected and more open systems are in place, ASEAN countries now seem set to bounce back with renewed vigour and a business-as-usual approach to their economies. However, ASEAN's revitalization into the next century will significantly depend on the region's most important polity, Indonesia, the country most affected by the crisis and now undergoing substantive change.     

Seismic Hazard Analysis Using Discrete Faults in Northwestern Pakistan: Part I – Methodology and Evaluation

This article is the first of two companion articles that evaluate the seismic hazard in northwestern Pakistan. The area, located at the western edge of the Himalayas, has numerous active faults including the Main Boundary Thrust (MBT) and Main Mantle Thrust (MMT). This article describes the methodology used to perform regional deterministic and probabilistic seismic hazard analyses. Here, seismic sources were defined from 32 identified faults while prior studies have been based on diffuse seismicity and areal source zones. Fault parameters were selected using available data and empirical correlations for faults elsewhere. Recurrence relations were constructed for all discrete faults based on both historical and instrumented seismicity in addition to geologic evidence. Due to lack of region specific attenuation relationships, four plate boundary attenuation relations from the Next Generation Attenuation of Ground Motions Project [Abrahamson et al., 2008 Abrahamson, N., Atkinson, G., Boore, D., Bozorgnia, Y., Campbell, K., Chiou, B., Idriss, I. M., Silva, W. and Youngs, R. 2008. Comparisons of the NGA ground-motion relations. Earthquake Spectra, 24(1): 45–66. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]] were employed to predict ground motions. Predicted ground motion parameters are compared to measurements from the recent 2005 Kashmir earthquake. In the companion article, the methodology developed and evaluated here is used to conduct deterministic and probabilistic seismic hazard analyses for the entire study region.     

Myth of the Triad? The Geography of Trade and Investment 'Blocs'

The notion that the world is increasingly divided into a triad of economic regions based on North America, the European Union and Japan has become a form of conventional wisdom across a range of disciplines. However, despite the near ubiquitous use of the idea of a triadized world, it remains a somewhat normative assertion, the empirical existence of which has yet to be demonstrated. By using the intramax method to analyze the intensity of international trade and foreign direct investment flows during 1985 and 1995, we examine the changing shape of trade and investment 'blocs' globally. We find that while international trade is increasingly organized around fewer world regions, the presumed outcome of a triad-based world economy remains questionable. We further show that investment intensity patterns do not currently conform to any bloc-like formation, but exhibit instead, globally diffused network regions.