‘The Claims of Asia and the Far East’: India and the FAO in the Age of Ambivalent Internationalism

If any nation were poised to actualize the developmental promises that the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) extended to the international community, it was India. India's independence came in the wake of devastating famine in Bengal and the fears of its recurrence, and the nationalists who had midwifed India's freedom staked their legitimacy to the promise of food for all. Yet from independence, the FAO played only a marginal role in India's agricultural development, its projects reflecting a winnowing scale of ambition. From early investigations into the improved cultivation of basic food grains, the FAO's projects grew increasingly modest by the time of the Green Revolution, revolving around modest improvements to capitalist agriculture, from wool shearing to timber and fishery development. Instead, India drew more substantively upon resources made available by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, the United States Technical Cooperation Mission and occasional Soviet largesse. Meanwhile, the Indian most associated with the FAO, B.R. Sen (Director-General, 1956–1967), struggled to align the Organization's capacities with India's scarcity crises, even as his own understanding of famine drew upon his experience as India's Director of Food during the Bengal Famine.     

Currency Culture: Australian Identity and Nationalism in New South Wales before the Gold Rushes

This article examines the white, native-born population of New South Wales, known as ‘the currency’, between the 1820s and the discovery of gold in the 1850s. While Britishness was the dominant cultural influence before, and after, the gold rushes, the ‘currency lads and lasses’ often found their identity in opposition to British-born colonists, known as ‘the sterling’. This early incarnation of Australian nationalism is significant, it will be argued, as it reveals how quickly indigenous roots were claimed at the expense of Aboriginal Australians. Further, rather than a sense of Australianness within a larger British identity, the currency community held Britishness as part of their larger Australian identity. Drawing on examples of popular culture from the theatre, the press, and the sporting arena, this article explores the nature of this unique community who held Britishness as a secular religion but identified most strongly as white Australians.     

Citizens of Empire: Education and Teacher Exchanges in Canada and the Commonwealth, 1910–40

This article examines how one group of actors actively infused education, citizenship and Canada’s international relationships with a sense of empire in the first third of the twentieth century. Making use of archival and published sources from collections in Canada and Britain, it focuses in particular on imperial citizenship teaching in Canadian schools, a number of education conferences held in the United Kingdom and the exchanges of elementary and high school teachers and school inspectors between commonwealth countries. In this period, politicians and bureaucrats in Canada and other dominions actively connected their education systems to an imperial network at the very moment that others were striving to attain more economic and political autonomy from the British government. Education came to occupy a significant cultural space alongside the trade agreements and constitutional changes that slowly recalibrated the nature of the British imperial system in the interwar period. Imperial education projects were an important feature of the cultural politics of a fading empire, but they were driven by actors in both the imperial centre and the self-governing dominions. This article argues that between 1910 and 1940 teachers and politicians in Canada drew on an international support network, actively fostered new ideas of citizenship, and strove to assert the country’s belonging in the British Empire.     

Chester's earliest regatta? Edgar's Dee‐rowing revisited

The meeting of the kings of Britain and the Isles at Chester in 973 has usually been interpreted as a submission ritual. The object of this paper is to explore an alternative explanation, that the ritual involved was an egalitarian one of a type commonly used in the Roman world, and subsequently by parties desiring to make peace treaties. Such meetings often took place on rivers, especially those marking borders, as they were regarded as neutral. The location of the 973 meeting on the Dee is examined from this viewpoint. Finally the paper looks at whether the sources for the Dee-rowing present the event as a display of overlordship by Edgar, and comes to the conclusion that this version of events developed among Benedictine writers from c.1000 onwards, to give lustre to the ruler who had done most to establish Benedictine monasticism in England.     

From Domus to Polis: Hybrid Identities in Southey’s Letters from England (1807) and Blanco White’s Letters from Spain (1822)

ABSTRACT

Robert Southey’s fictive travelogue, Letters from England, by Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella (1807), inspired several imitators, most importantly José María Blanco White with his Letters from Spain (1822). These works rejuvenate a fictional device popularised by Montesquieu’s Persian Letters—the “familiar stranger”—at a crucial juncture when British involvement in the affairs of Europe provoked a reassessment of pre-Revolutionary cosmopolitanism. The stranger as home-interpreter calls attention to an emerging emphasis in European Romantic thought on the contingency of freedom with hybrid, mobile identities, prefiguring the psycho-social-historical terrain in which Jean-François Lyotard and Dean MacCannell link modernity with travel and tourism. This essay argues that the Romantic figure of the foreign traveller expresses a condition of travel, reflecting Lyotard’s critique of human contingency in his essay “Domus and the Megalopolis.” Southey’s sympathetic stranger modulates a conversation with Wordsworth about the nature of modern subjectivity, historically contingent yet paradoxically liberated from historical particulars. Blanco White’s Letters from Spain demonstrates how displacement, emigration, and expatriation become refigured as conditions of the modern psyche, especially visible in moments of political crisis, when the cosmopolitan polis is immobilised by the myth of the domus.     

CANADIAN NOVELS FOR SOCIAL SCIENTISTS AND HISTORIANS

Most discussions about the impact of Afghanistan on the future of NATO focus on transatlantic relations between the United States and the European Union. But for Canada, which is one of the few NATO allies that voluntarily deployed into the south, facing heavy resistance and fighting from Taliban insurgents, the Afghanistan operations have become the most salient dimension of its continued involvement in the Atlantic Alliance. While this may seem surprising, given the cutbacks in Canadian defense spending in the 1990s and the withdrawal of Canada's standing forces from Germany, it should not. For during that so-called dark decade, Canada continued to make major contributions to NATO and European security. This essay argues that Ottawa's multi-faceted military and political support of the “new” NATO of the post–Cold War era continued when the alliance undertook its involvement in Afghanistan. Indeed, in its efforts in support of NATO's mission in Afghanistan, Canada has demonstrated a dedication to the alliance that seems stronger than NATO's collective commitment to itself.