‘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.     

‘Being in Being’: Contesting the Ontopolitics of Indigeneity

This article critiques the shift towards valorizing indigeneity in western thought and contemporary practice. This shift in approach to indigenous ways of knowing and being, historically derided under conditions of colonialism, is a reflection of the “ontological turn” in anthropology. Rather than seeing indigenous peoples as having an inferior or different understanding of the world to a modernist one, the ontological turn suggests that their importance lies in the fact that they constitute different worlds and “world” in a performatively different way. The radical promise this view holds is that a different world already exists in potentia, the access to which is a question of ontology—of being differently: ‘being in being’ rather than thinking, acting and world-making as if we were transcendent or “possessive” modern subjects. We argue that the ontopolitical arguments for the superiority of indigenous ways of being should not be seen as radical or emancipatory resistances to modernist or colonial epistemological and ontological legacies but rather as a new form of neoliberal governmentality, cynically manipulating critical, postcolonial and ecological sensibilities for its own ends. Thus, rather than “provincializing” dominant western hegemonic practices, such discourses of indigeneity extend them, instituting new forms of governing through calls for adaptation and resilience.     

Russian timber industry in the 1920s: on the short history of Russnorvegoles

After the Russian Revolution, with civil war and interventions, war communism (1918–1921) led to a period of great economic difficulties in Russia. The New Economic Policy was the solution, and concessions offered to Western business interests were a part of it. In the timber industry of the 1920s, the jointly Western and Soviet controlled company Russnorvegoles was an important concession. The majority of the Western interests were Norwegian, and the company was registered as a Norwegian limited liability company with seat in Oslo. The four-and-a-half-year history, involving Western interests in the operations of Russnorvegoles, is both interesting and dramatic. Profitability was undermined, and intricate currency arrangements played a significant role during the last eighteen months in which Western interests were involved. The prominent Norwegian fascist politicians Quisling and Prytz were both involved, and the latter emerged a wealthy man. Living on his means for some years following 1928, he contributed financially to the formation in 1933 of a Norwegian Nazi party (Nasjonal Samling/National Reunion). This dimension of Norwegian political history demonstrates the role that Russnorvegoles played beyond the timber industry.