Foreign rule? Transnational,national, and local perspectives on Venice and Venetia within the ‘multinational’ empire

The history of the Habsburg Empire in the post-Napoleonic era is frequently approached from the perspective of its various component nationalities. These were traditionally portrayed in the historiography as engaged in more-or-less open struggle with control from Vienna. This article argues that the over-privileging of such national categories can distort the picture. By looking at a number of case studies – the naming of Lombardy-Venetia, the Biblioteca italiana, the Panteon veneto – the relationship between Venice (and its Terraferma) and Habsburg rule during the second Austrian domination is examined. It will be argued that it is more profitable to see Venetian identities (municipal, local, Italian, and as part of a wider transnational European culture) as capable of working for as well as against the empire, and that Habsburg policy was as often concerned with managing potential local rivalries (notably between Lombards and Venetians) as with controlling a perceived Italian threat. It is also suggested that, while cultivation of local identity was often used to reinforce the national, the Austrian authorities were also happy to annex both to further imperial interests.     

Whose Opinion?: Changing Attitudes Towards Opinion Polling in British politics, 1937-1964

This article examines the early history of opinion polling inBritish politics, focusing on the initial antagonism to pollingmethods within the political and media elite in the 1930s, andthe gradual integration of polling into the political systemafter World War II. It rejects the technological determinismof scholars who assume that the adoption of opinion pollingfollowed naturally on the creation of such methodology; andinstead focuses on the time-lag between the advent of pollingand its integration into political life. While not an explicitlycomparative study, a major question which this study considersis why were British politicians and publishers so much slowerto embrace opinion research than their American counterparts?In answering this question, this article examines various structuralfeatures of the British political system, cultural assumptionsabout parliamentary politics, and specific historical aspectsof the advent of opinion polling in Britain which affected thereception of the new methodology. While this article concludesthat structural factors—namely the return of a competitivetwo-party system after the Second World War—ultimatelyled the political parties to experiment with opinion polling,this article argues that continued ambivalence about the useof poll data can only be understood through a considerationof the cultural and historical circumstances surrounding theintroduction of polling.     

Genealogy of Colonial Land Registration and State Land in Portuguese Timor

ABSTRACT

Establishing territorial control was one of the primary activities of colonial presence on Timor from the late nineteenth century. In Portuguese Timor as elsewhere in Southeast Asia, the colonial state pursued codification and regulation of land in multiple forms, including serial attempts to enact land registration in tandem with colonial projects including pacification, resource extraction, and generation of state income. Seeking to extend official purview to Timor-specific customary land use and practices, Portugal defined distinct social categorizations linked to land access and ownership. This article traces the policies governing land in Portuguese Timor from the late 1800s to the mid-1900s, highlighting state land acquisition, registration processes, laws and procedures asserting state control over land transactions, and international influences on Portuguese practices.     

TRANSLATING MIERES

Unlike journalists, anthropologists will tend to mostly anonymize the places they visit. However, as van der Geest has pointed out in these pages before, anonymity is not always what the people we research want from us. In this narrative, A.F. Robertson and Laura Cardús i Font show how our writing can become an asset to the communities we study, who, like us, are seeking to confirm their identities and improve their reputation in the overall scheme of things. In this narrative, the authors dwell on the nature of writing for both academic and vernacular audiences.     

Envisioning a Green Energy Future in Canada and the United States: Constructing a Sustainable Future in the Context of New Regionalisms?

A variety of actors in Canada and the United States are actively constructing a vision of a greener society that includes an environmentally sustainable energy future. Canadian provinces and states in the United States share environmental management, corporations collaborate to drive green development and implement local energy projects, and activists on both sides of the border share environmental protest strategies and mobilization frames. A transition to regionalism of greener energy resources along the Vermont–Canadian border is indicative of a larger “new regionalism” of sustainable identity, despite very concrete and pressing external pressures and energy challenges concerning global climate change, resource depletion, and energy sustainability challenges within the larger nations of both Canada and the United States. In this article, we aim to characterize this green visioning of a sustainable energy future, by focusing especially on the Vermont–Canadian border region, and additionally point to the benefits and contradictions that result.