Britain's Decision to Withdraw from the Persian Gulf: A Pattern Not a Puzzle

The reasons for the British decision to withdraw from the Gulf are highly contentious. While some scholars have focused on short-term considerations, especially the devaluation of sterling towards the end of 1967, in the British determination to quit the Gulf, others have concentrated on longer-term trends in British policy-making for the region. This article sides with the latter. Britain's Gulf role came under increasing scrutiny following the 1956 Suez crisis as part of an ongoing debate about the costs and benefits of Britain's Gulf presence. In this sense, British withdrawal fitted into a wider pattern of British decolonisation. By the 1960s, the Treasury, in particular, strongly questioned the necessity and cost-effectiveness of the maintenance of empire in the Gulf to safeguard British economic interests there. Recent interpretations which seek to disaggregate the British decision to leave Southeast Asia from the decision to depart from the Gulf are also questionable. By mid-1967, it had already been determined that Britain would leave both regions by the mid-1970s, the only difference being that this decision was formally announced with respect to Southeast Asia, but not with regard to the Gulf. The devaluation of sterling in November 1967, therefore, merely hastened and facilitated decisions which had already been taken. Despite the end of formal empire in the Gulf, Britain did seek, not always successfully, to preserve its interests into the 1970s and beyond.     

A human-centered GIS approach to modeling mobility on southern Baffin Island,Nunavut, Canada

Southern Baffin Island has been occupied for several millennia, but its enormous size, coupled with scarcity of identified inland archaeological sites that can be confidently linked to coastal occupations, makes modeling ancient seasonal mobility across the region through traditional cost-surface least-cost pathway approaches impractical. We present a method that combines weighted multi-criteria cost surface analysis with a watershed function to create a “mobility-shed” of non-winter travel pathways covering the study area. We evaluate the predictive utility of the resulting pathways for future archaeological survey by assessing their spatial relationships to known archaeological sites. The results of this comparison suggest that elevation and land cover criteria should be augmented with ethnographic and resource availability data to model mobility in this region.     

Food in the City: Urban Food Geographies and ‘Local’ Food Sourcing in Melbourne and San Diego County

Perceptions of food systems and food acquisition decisions are grounded in specific socio‐economic and environmental contexts. Working in two relatively affluent urban communities in Melbourne, Australia and San Diego County, USA, this article explores the ways that individuals perceive their food systems, where they acquire food, and their definitions of ‘local’ sourcing. Surveys and interviews reveal a clear discrepancy between the ideals and the reality of food acquisition decision‐making, particularly the desire to eat ‘local food’. Survey respondents' realities do not live up to their expectations. These practices can largely be explained by the interplay between the respondents' perceived priorities, food preferences, dietary requirements, and decision‐making constraints in particular urban geographies. Further research is needed on the role of perceptions in food decision‐making in specific geographic contexts.     

Estimating Core Number in Assemblages: Core Movement and Mobility During the Holocene of the Fayum,Egypt

The utility of the cortex ratio first developed by Dibble et al. (American Antiquity, 70(3), 545–560, 2005) and extended by Douglass et al. (American Antiquity, 73(3), 513–526, 2008) is examined in contexts where cores rather than flakes may be transported. The cortex ratio is used to demonstrate the movement of artifacts by quantifying missing surface area, typically where it is the flakes that were removed and the cores that were left behind. In such situations, the removal of flakes with small volumes will result in the removal of relatively large cortical surface areas resulting in a low cortex ratio. However, when it is the cores that were removed, assemblages will lose greater proportions of artifact volume relative to the loss of artifact surface area. Here, we propose methods to investigate the effects of high-volume artifact removal from archeological assemblages as a proxy for human movement in addition to the cortex ratio. We apply the methods to stone artifact assemblages from the Fayum, Egypt, where changes in mid-Holocene mobility are closely linked to food production.     

Marie Corelli and the Value of Literary Self-Consciouness: The Sorrows of Satan,Popular Fiction,and the Fin-de-Siècle Canon

Marie Corelli's The Sorrows of Satan (1895) presents a paradoxical test case for the practice of academic literary criticism. The best-selling work of fiction of the nineteenth century, the book was demeaned by Victorian critics and has been long ignored by criticism since. In spite of Corelli's recent mini-revival, the formally self-conscious properties of this work deserve further examination: the text insistently foregrounds the act of literary criticism and demands that the reader's attention is focussed on not only the content of the narrative but also the nature of the procedure of reading. Such a strategy allows Corelli's romance to participate safely in the kinds of literary transgressions enacted in the work of her since-canonized contemporaries such as Thomas Hardy and Oscar Wilde. The narrative mode warns against the production of the wrong kinds of readings of the narrative, inoculating its consumer against the corruption suffered by many of Sorrows's characters – and by the readers of the kinds of contemporary fiction Corelli seeks to warn against. As a consequence, The Sorrows of Satan, while exiled from the canon, shows itself to be surprisingly representative of the image of fin-de-siècle literary culture constructed by its afterlife. Like so many 1890s fictions, it is a work of art about the work of art, and dramatizes such by now familiar late-Victorian tropes as: decadence, moral relativism, debates over literary taste, realism, post-Ibsen drama, the sexual double standard, the marriage market, the New Woman, motherhood, hysteria and female pathologies, degeneration anxiety, mesmerism. The Sorrows of Satan's status as forgotten best-seller, a ‘great bad book’, asks difficult questions about the relationship between literary criticism and literary pleasure.     

Integration and Disintegration: The Attempted Incorporation of Malta into the United Kingdom in the 1950s

Existing interpretations stress that challenges to British interests elsewhere in the Mediterranean were central to Britain's initial support for Maltese incorporation into the United Kingdom. Through a close examination of official British records, this article demonstrates, by contrast, that Britain saw integration primarily as a means of solving the complex constitutional and financial problems which had impeded smooth Anglo-Maltese relations since the restoration of responsible government in 1947. Equally, the waning of British enthusiasm for integration can be traced to concerns about the costs of the scheme, especially in the face of Maltese insistence on ‘economic equivalence’, rather than to any downgrading of Malta's importance in the wake of the 1956 Suez debacle. The Maltese premier Dom Mintoff's insistence on equivalence as the price of integration and Britain's equal determination to resist such claims provide the key to explaining the scheme's demise. Ultimately, Malta followed a more conventional path to independence within the Commonwealth by September 1964.     

Reviews Book

TIM UNWIN. Wine and the Vine: An Historical Geography of Viticulture and the Wine Trade. London and New York: Roudedge, 1991. Pp. xvi, 409. $29.95 (us). Reviewed by Norman R. Bennett

MASK GREENGHASS, ed. Conquest and Coalescence: The Shaping of the State in Early Modem Europe. London: Edward Arnold, 1991. Pp viii, 200. $33.95 (CDN). Reviewed by Simon Ditchfiel

DAVID KIRBY. Northern Europe in the Early Modem Period: The Baltic World 1492–1772. London and New York: Longman, 1990. Pp. xii, 443. $33.95 (CDN). Reviewed by Thomas Munck

JOHN CORREIA-APONSO, ed. Intrepid Itinerant: Manuel Godinho and His Journey from India to Portugal in 1663. Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1990. Pp. xi, 253. $33.50 (CDN). Reviewed by Anthony Disney

KARL W. SCHWEIZER. Frederick the Great, William Pitt, and Lord Bute: The Anglo-Prussian Alliance, 1756–1763. New York: Garland Publishing, 1991. Pp. ix, 358. $53.00 (US). Reviewed by H.M. Scott

HELEN ANGELOMATIS-TSOUGARAKIS. The Eve of the Great Revival: British Travellers' Perceptions of Early Nineteenth-Century Greece. London and New York: Roudedge, 1990. Pp. xvii, 289. $52.00 (US). Reviewed by Alexander Kitroeff

CARL VON CLAUSEWITZ. Historical and Political Writings, ed. and trans. Peter Paret and Daniel Moran. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Pp. 397. $29.95 (US). Reviewed by Christopher Bassford

LAWRENCE SONDHAUS. In the Service of the Emperor: Italians in the Austrian Armed Forces 1814–1918. Boulder, Col.: East European Monographs; dist. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. Pp. ix, 217. $32.50 (US). Reviewed by Erwin A. Schmidl

SANDI E. COOPER. Patriotic Pacifism: Waging War on War in Europe, 1815–1914… New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Pp. 336. $55.95 (CDN). Reviewed by Roger Chickering

R.S. O'FAHEY. Enigmatic Saint: Ahmad Ibn Idris and the Idrisi Tradition. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1990. Pp. xvii, 261. $42.95 (US), cloth; $12.95 (US), paper. Reviewed by Rudolph Peters

RUDOLPH J. VECOLI and SUZANNE M. SINKE, eds. A Century of European Migrations, 1830–1930. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991. Pp. 395. $44.95 (US). Reviewed by Donald Harman Akenson

MARGARET FULLER. ‘These Sad but Glorious Days’: Dispatches from Europe, 1846–1850, ed. Larry J. Reynolds and Susan Belasco Smith. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991. Pp. xiii, 338. $35.00 (US). Reviewed by Agatha Ramm

STEVEN G. MARKS. Road to Power: The Trans-Siberian Railroad and the Colonization of Asian Russia, 1850–1917. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991. Pp. xxi, 240. $31.95 (US). Reviewed by J.L. Black

ANN POTTINGBR SAAB. Reluctant Icon: Gladstone, Bulgaria and the Working Classes 1856–1878. Cambridge, Mass, and London: Harvard University Press, 1991. Pp. ix, 257. $39.95 (US). Reviewed by P.R. Ghosh

ARDEN BUCHOLZ. Moltke, Schlieffen and Prussian War Planning. New York and Oxford: Berg Publishers; dist. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992. Pp. xi, 352. $59.95 (US). Reviewed by Gunther E. Rothenberg

HERBERT ELZER. Bismarcks Bündnispolitik von 1887: Erfolg und Grenzen einer europäischen Friedensordnung. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1991. Pp. 507. DM 108. Reviewed by Norman Rich

ISAHIA N. KIMAMBO. Penetration and Protest in Tanzania: The Impact of the World Economy on the Pare 1860–1960. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1991. Pp. xii, 188. $29.95 (US), cloth; $16.95 (US), paper

ABDUL SHERIFF and ED FERGUSON, eds. Zanzibar under Colonial Rule. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1991. Pp. ix, 278. $34.95 (US), cloth; $19.95 (US), paper. Reviewed by Ibrahim Abdullah

ROBERT A. KANN. Dynasty, Politics and Culture: Selected Essays, ed. Stanley B. Winters. Boulder, Col.: Social Science Monographs; dist. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. Pp. xvi, 444. $61.00 (US). Reviewed by Enno E. Kraehe

CARLO M. SANTORO. La politica estera di una media potenza: L'Italia dall'Unità ad oggi. Bologna: il Mulino, 1991. Pp. 352. L40,000

BRUNELLO VIGEZZI. Politica Estera e Opinione Pubblica in Italia dall'Unità ai Giorni Nostri. Milan: Jaca Books, 1991. Pp. 220. L22,000. Reviewed by Richard Bosworth

DAVID A. LAKE. Power, Protection, and Free Trade: International Sources of US Commercial Strategy, 1887-1939. Ithaca, N.Y. and London: Cornell University Press, 1988. Pp. xi, 242. $29.95 (US). Reviewed by Ben Baack

JOSEPH SMITH. Unequal Giants: Diplomatic Relations between the United States and Brazil, 1889–1930. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991. Pp. 296. $39.95 (US)

THOMAS D. SCHOONOVER. The United States in Central America, 1860–1911: Episodes of Social Imperialism and Imperial Rivalry in the World System. Durham, N.C. and London: Duke University Press, 1991. Pp. xiii, 253. $32.50 (US). Reviewed by Lester D. Langley

ROSAMUND M. THOMAS. Espionage and Secrecy: The Official Secrets Act 1911–1989 of the United Kingdom. London and New York: Routledge, 1991. Pp. 304. £40.00. Reviewed by Wesley K. Wark

LEE CONGDON. Exile and Social Thought: Hungarian Intellectuals in Germany and Austria, 1919–1933. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. Pp. xvi, 376. $29.95 (US). Reviewed by István Deák

ROBERT WRIGHT. A World Mission: Canadian Protestantism and the Quest for a New International Order, 1919–1939. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1991. Pp. x, 337. $44.95 (CDN). Reviewed by A. Hamish Ion

JAN WILLEM SCHULTE NOHDHOLT. Woodrow Wilson: A Life for World Peace, trans. Herbert H. Rowen. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Pp. viii, 495. $34.95 (US). Reviewed by Lloyd E. Ambrosius

CAROLE FINK, AXEL FROHN, and JÜRGEN HELDBKING, eds. Genoa, Rapallo, and European Reconstruction in 1922. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Pp. x, 262. $44.50 (US). Reviewed by Alan Cassels

B.J.C. MCKERCHER, ed. Anglo-American Relations in the 1920s: The Struggle for Supremacy. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1990. Pp. xiii, 242. $37.50 (CDN). Reviewed by Frank Costigliola

HARM G. SCHRÖTER and CLEMENS A. WURM, eds. Politik, Wirtschaft und internationale Beziehungen: Studien zu ihrem Verhältnis in der Zeit zwischen den Weltkriegen. Mainz: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1991. Pp. ix, 176. DM 48. Reviewed by Andrew J. Crozier

GERALD STUDDERT-KENNEDY. British Christians, Indian Nationalists and the Raj. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Pp. x, 274. $23.95 (CDN). Reviewed by Judith M. Brown

MICHAEL GELB, ed. An American Engineer in Stalin's Russia: The Memoirs of Zara Witkin, 1932–1934. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Pp. ix, 363. $29.95 (US). Reviewed by David W. McFadden

PAUL BROOKER. The Faces of Fratemalism: Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan. New York: The Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press, 1991. Pp. ix, 397. $89.00 (US). Reviewed by Alan Cassels

TOM BUCHANAN. The Spanish Civil War and the British Labour Movement. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Pp. xvii, 250. $47.50 (US). Reviewed by Tim Rees

MARK WALKER. German National Socialism and the Quest for Nuclear Power 1939–1949. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Pp. x, 290. $29.95 (US). Reviewed by Bruce Wheaton

IFTIKHAR H. MALIK. US-South Asian Relations, 1940–47: American Attitudes towards the Pakistan Movement. London: Macmillan, 1991. Pp. xi, 322. £45.00. Reviewed by Ayesha Jalal

SIR ALEC CAIRNCROSS. Planning in Wartime: Aircraft Production in Britain, Germany and the USA. London: Macmillan, 1991. Pp. xvi, 197. £35.00. Reviewed by Robin Higham

JOHN A. ENGLISH. The Canadian Army and the Normandy Campaign: A Study of Failure in High Command. New York: Praeger, 1991. Pp. xvii, 347. $47.95 (US). Reviewed by David I. Hall

DAVID JABLONSKY. Churchill, the Great Game and Total War. London: Frank Cass, 1991. Pp. xi, 237. £27.50, cloth; £18.00, paper

CHRISTOPHER HILL. Cabinet Decisions on Foreign Policy: The British Experience October 1938–June 1941. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Pp. xx, 359. $59.50 (US). Reviewed by John Charmley

PAUL FREYBERG. Bernard Freyberg VC: Soldier of Two Nations. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1991. Pp. xi, 627. £30.00. Reviewed by T.H.E. Travers

JOHN GILLINGHAM. Coal, Steel, and the Rebirth of Europe, 1945–1955: The German and French from Ruhr Conflict to Economic Community. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Pp. xvi, 397. $44.50 (US). Reviewed by Henry Pelling

IRWIN M. WALL. The United States and the Making of Postwar France, 1945–1954. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Pp. x, 324. $47.50 (US). Reviewed by Alan S. Milward

LOUISE FAWCETT. Iran and the Cold War: The Azerbaijan Crisis of 1946. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Pp. xii, 227. $54.95 (US). Reviewed by Fred H. Lawson

E. TIMOTHY SMITH. The United States, Italy and NATO, 1947–52. London: Macmillan, 1991. Pp. ix, 232. £45.00. Reviewed by James Edward Milles

PAUL M. EVANS and B. MICHAEL FROLIC, eds. Reluctant Adversaries: Canada and the People's Republic of China 1949–1970. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991. Pp. xii, 268. $60.00 (CDN), cloth; $19.95 (CDN), paper. Reviewed by Patricia E. Roy

LAWRENCE S. KAPLAN, ed. American Historians and the Atlantic Alliance. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1991. Pp. viii, 192. $27.00 (US), cloth; $14.50 (US), paper. Reviewed by Ritchie Ovendale

MONICA BRAW. The Atomic Bomb Suppressed: American Censorship in Occupied Japan. Armonk, N.Y. and London: M.E. Sharpe, 1991. Pp. xviii, 194. $35.00 (US).Reviewed by Kathryn Meyer

JEFFREY HERF. War by Other Means: Soviet Power, West German Resistance, and the Battle of the Euromissiles. New York: Free Press (Macmillan), 1991. Pp. xiii, 369. $24.95 (US).Reviewed by Matthew Evangelista

MARTIN STANILAND. American Intellectuals and African Nationalists, 1955–1970. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991. Pp. ix, 310. $30.00 (US).Reviewed by Dane Kennedy

DIANE B. KUNZ. The Economic Diplomacy of the Suez Crisis. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1991. Pp. xii, 295. $43.95 (US).Reviewed by Kathleen Buhk

W. DAVID MCINTYRE. The Significance of the Commonwealth 1965–90. London: Macmillan, 1991. Pp. ix, 305. £45.00.Reviewed by J.G. Darwin

KARL PIERAGOSTINI. Britain, Aden and South Arabia: Abandoning Empire. London: Macmillan, 1991. Pp. xiv, 256. £45.00.Reviewed by Michael B. Bisheu

TOMOHEI CHIDA and PETER N. DAVTES. The Japanese Shipping and Shipbuilding Industries: A History of Their Modem Growth. London and Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Athlone Press, 1990. Pp. xi, 240. $65.00 (US).Reviewed by Steven J. Ericson

WILLIAM T. TOW. Encountering the Dominant Player: US Extended Deterrence Strategy in the Asia-Pacific. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. Pp. xiv, 540. $52.00 (US).Reviewed by Paul A. Varg

CHARLES F. DORAN. Systems in Crisis: New Imperatives of High Politics at Century's End. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Pp. xviii, 294. $49.50 (US).Reviewed by Robert Jervis