‘The Best Laid Plans’: The Development of British Battle-Fleet Tactics, 1919–1942

This paper provides a fresh overview of the much-debated Leith-Ross mission to China in 1935–6, in which Britain assisted the Chinese government's efforts to establish a new currency. It demonstrates that the mission should be understood primarily as an attempt to revive Britain's economic and political stake in East Asia. It argues that, while the government in London undoubtedly wished to see the amelioration of the tense relationship with Japan, the history of the mission demonstrates that it was not prepared to make significant sacrifices that would undermine British interests in China. It thus criticises the contention that the mission should be understood primarily as an exercise in appeasement and contends that in practice it constituted a challenge to Japan's claim to regional domination.     

Introduction

Abstract

For all of its political drama, the health care debate appears consumed with bureaucratic minutiae quite distant from political philosophy. Yet in important respects that debate is intimately connected with the founding premises of the modern technological project of the mastery of nature for the relief of man's estate as envisioned by René Descartes and Francis Bacon. This essay uses a recent discussion of the health care debate by bioethicist Daniel Callahan to raise some fundamental questions about the role of technology in our medical culture. It argues that modern health care is the Cartesian project come of age, and it uses Descartes' Discourse on Method to reflect on the possibility of a sensible politics of technology in our time.     

Reviews

Sam Smiles, The Image of Antiquity: Ancient Britain and the Romantic Imagination, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994. x + 252 pp., 128 b. & w. illus. ISBN 0–300–05814–4. £35.00.

Marcia Pointon (ed.), Art Apart: Art Institutions and Ideology Across England and North America, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1994. 292 pp., 39 b. & w. illus. ISBN 0–7190–3918–5. f 10.99.

Daniel J. Sherman and Irit Rogoff (eds.), Museum Culture: Histories, Discourses, Spectacles, London: Routledge and Minneapolis: the University of Minnesota Press, 1994. xx + 301 pp., 26 b. & w. illus. ISBN 0–415–09274–4. £14.99.

Sheena Mackellar Goulty, Heritage Gardens. Care, Conservation and Management, London and New York: Routledge, 1993. 176 pp., 82 b. & w. illus. ISBN 0–415–07474–6. £19.99.

Anne Fahy (ed.), Collections Management, London and New York: Rontledge, 1995. xii + 304 pp., 2 figs. ISBN 0–415–11283–4. £19.99.

Annie E. Coombes, Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture and Popular Imagination, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994. vii + 280 pp., 112 b. & w. illus. ISBN 0–300‐ 05972–8. £35.00.

Lesley Hoskins (ed.), The Papered Wall. The History, Patterns and Techniques of Wallpaper, London: Thames and Hudson, 1994. 256 pp., 185 col. and 157 b. & w. illus. ISBN 0–500–23695‐X. £32.00.     

Housekeeper,correspondent and confidante: the under-told story of Mrs Hayes of Charlecote Park, 1744–73

All too often, servants are accorded limited space in country house studies: rarely allowed to venture beyond the kitchen and service rooms, either in academic studies or interpretations for visitors. They are defined by their work not their lives and are seen as serving the physical rather than social or emotional needs of the owner. This paper challenges this viewpoint by exploring the relationship between George Lucy, owner of Charlecote Park in Warwickshire and his housekeeper, Mrs Phillipa Hayes. Drawing on their mutual correspondence, on other letters to and from Mrs Hayes, and on her Household Book, I construct a richer and more nuanced picture of the multiple roles that could be played by a senior servant. She was a housekeeper, but also a correspondent, confidante and hostess, who offered comfort and pleasure to her employer as well as sound economic and social management of his household. Although in some ways unusual, this case study illustrates the importance of placing senior servants more centrally when exploring the country house.     

Fox Palaces: the playful occupation of a Johannesburg city park

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the playful occupation of an inner-city park in Johannesburg, South Africa, by the Hummingbird Play Association. Playful occupation emerged as a strategy to create and demand spaces for children’s play, demonstrating through practice the possibilities for public play provision. Children’s play is read as a form of folklore, through which children’s and adult’s spatial experiences and imaginings of the city can be viewed. It considers how opportunities for play facilitated with Playwork Principles in mind can co-create safe spaces for children which could act as tools for social transformation and justice in the urban public realm.     

Ecological Contingency Accounts for Earliest Seagoing in the Western Pacific Ocean

Seagoing at 1 mya to Flores, and sea gaps of >50 km crossed by 47 kya to Sahul, are evidence of earlier maritime migration in the western Pacific than anywhere else. Current opinion attributes the latter to the influence of anatomically modern human cultural complexity on seagoing technology and practice, together with the impetus of serial resource depression. It is argued here that seagoing was unusually advantaged in the western Pacific by a fortuitous conjunction of the warmest seas with a ready availability of large-diameter bamboo that occurred as natural rafts, and which could also be constructed into rafts large enough to transport viable colonizing groups from island to island across Wallacea to Sahul. The geography of Wallacea allowed migration solely by drifting, and exploratory landscape learning might have produced landfalls on Sahul sooner than is implied by subsistence forcing of mobility. Seagoing by drifting raft was much harder from Sahul to the east because of the virtual absence of large-diameter bamboo and longer distance to fewer or small islands; colonization occurred much later.