‘Motherly Hate’: Gendering Anti–Semitism in the British Union of Fascists

Throughout the interwar period, Britain’s fascist movement was marked by anti–Semitism. That anti–Semitism was such a striking feature of the movement is well known, and studies of British fascism have consequently paid attention to the implications and effects of racial prejudice on Britain’s Jewish community, and on British society more generally. However, the history of women in Britain’s fascist movement has been less well known, and the narrative of racial politics and racial tensions in interwar Britain must now be modified by a consideration of gender relations and women’s activism on the extreme right. The first part of this article is thus concerned with the questions of how British fascist women gave vent to their racial hatreds, the particular tone of their rhetorical invectives against the Jewish community, and the distinctiveness of their expressions of anti–Semitism. From their support for Jew–baiting activities on the streets, to their high level of participation in an anti–war movement dedicated to keeping Britain out of the ‘Jews’ war’, to their choices to educate their young children in the principles of Jew–hating, British fascist women did, in fact, show themselves to be ‘Jew wise’. Their active expression of anti–Semitism certainly challenged the optimistic liberal supposition that the female sex was the more tolerant. The second part of this article is concerned with the theoretical implications of putting women back into the history of British anti–Semitism, and explores how the powerful gender paradigms of feminine tolerance, maternalism, and feminised pacifism were subverted to justify a seemingly incongruous sentiment of ‘motherly hate’.     

Managing 'civilian deaths due to war operations': Yorkshire experiences during world war II

Air raid precautions prior to and during the Second World War included guidance on the burial of civilians who had been killed by enemy bombardment. The Ministry of Health Circular 1779 was published before the start of the war, on the understanding that 'scheme-making' authorities would need time to prepare for the interment of mass fatalities. As the Blitz got underway, tensions emerged between the state's pragmatic concerns to restrict the cost and resources afforded to burial, and the wish of many local authorities to secure decent burial for their citizens. Key issues on which there was disagreement included the state-proposed use of shrouds instead of coffins, and mass interment. These practices carried overtones of the much-hated pauper funeral and ran counter to the political imperative to present civilian death as 'heroic'. This local study is placed in the wider context of the history of death and burial, and provides an indicator of the strength of attachment to customary funerary ritual during the middle of the twentieth century.     

Islands,the Anthropocene,and Decolonisation

The Anthropocene is deployed as incontrovertible fact, yet its foundations merit strong critique to challenge how particular voices and locations are absented, silenced, or enrolled in the fallacies that attend this epochal framework. Other placed, grounded, and scale-sensitive explanations exist for present and future state scenarios, including on islands—often the focus of apocalyptic thinking. Dealing with historical and contemporary struggles to decolonise is more powerful than engaging with a reified framework that is part of ongoing colonial-imperial excesses, uneven development, and racial capitalism. This work considers how four of us, as instigating authors, worked with five others, as collaborating authors, to understand academic works, activism, and artistic expressions of island life and concerns. Our aim was to learn about how and why their efforts to prioritise decolonisation is at the heart of what is needed to shore up island peoples’ futures.     

IMPLAN's Induced Effects Identified Through Multiplier Decomposition

An analysis of regional multipliers is developed to reveal a structural flaw in how IMPLAN computes induced effects. This analysis reveals a fixed ratio across sectors between total and Type I employment multipliers, and that IMPLAN's "Type III" income multipliers are inversely related to the average wages in the direct and indirect sectors, and that "Type III" output multipliers are not affected by wages. A multiplier decomposition is developed that separates direct and indirect effects from the induced and further separates the induced impact into relative wage and regional income retention effects. The decomposition is useful in making comparisons among impact models.     

On Morel's 'épilepsie larvée: the first Danish epileptologist Frederik Hallager's opposition in 1884 against Morel's psychical epileptic equivalents

In 1860 B. A. Morel published some cases of masked epilepsy, i.e., paroxysmal behaviour disturbances or "epileptic equivalents". The majority behaved criminally. Hughlings Jackson opposed and Hallager showed that all the cases related later as épilepsie larvée could be explained as postepileptic attacks, general paralysis, paradoxical normalization, schizophrenia, mania and otherwise. True criminal behaviour was exceptional. The present author agreed. There is no need for épilepsie larvée. It is discussed whether Blumer's recent "Paroxystic neurobehaviour disorder" will revive "Morel's disorder".     

Letters to Lizzie: Archival Practice and the Entangled Worlds of Charlie Fraser

Letters exchanged between immigrants and their relatives who remained ‘at home’ are recognised as a valuable resource for exploring identities and emotions in the formation of settler societies. This article departs from this cultural approach to focus instead on the materiality and mobility of the letters as ‘analogue’ sources of knowledge suitable for digitisation, and what this means for histories of place. Our case study traces the movement of an emigrant’s correspondence from Newcastle, Australia to Duffus, Scotland between 1914 and 1924, the subsequent return of these letters and their enclosures to Newcastle and our decision to request digitisation of the items. We show that while traditional archival practice necessarily alienated collections of letters from either their point of origin or their destination, digitisation has the potential to reconnect geographically distant but entangled worlds.     

The Polanyian Way? Voluntary Food Labels as Neoliberal Governance

Abstract: Voluntary food labels that express ecological, social, and/or place‐based values have been posed as an important form of resistance to neoliberalization in the Polanyian sense of protecting land, other natural resources, and labor from the ravages of the market. At the same time, these labels are in some respects analogs to the very things they are purported to resist, namely property rights that allow these ascribed commodities to be traded in a global market. After reviewing the Polanyian claims about these labels, the paper examines how these labels are operationalized and notes important differences in the sort of barriers to entry they erect, which in turn have quite different distributional consequences. It then goes on to discuss how these labels look to be an expression of roll‐out neoliberalization. Following Heynen and Robbins who note four dominant aspects of neoliberalization of environmental governance (governance, privatization, enclosure, and valuation), to which a fifth (devolution) is added, the paper shows how these labels not only concede the market as the locus of regulation, but in keeping with neoliberalism's fetish of market mechanisms, they employ tools designed to create markets where none previously existed. In recognition that neoliberal political economies and subjectivities have delimited the possible, the paper also grapples with how these labels may produce political openings outside of their most proximate effects.