The Tragedy of Cambridge Anthropology: Edwardian Historical Thought and the Contact of Peoples

The essay identifies and explores the intellectual formation of a hitherto overlooked constellation of ‘anthropologists’ in Edwardian Cambridge. Three core members of this group were William Ridgeway, Hector Munro Chadwick, and William H. R. Rivers, who today are more normally associated with (respectively) Classics, Anglo-Saxon studies, and Anthropology. However, in the decade before World War I all three were active members of the new Board of Anthropology, and each, in his particular field of study, began to turn away from established evolutionary explanation to investigate social phenomena as arising out of the contact of different peoples. The essay first shows the connections between the work of Chadwick and Rivers, and then suggests that both were following a path recently beaten down by Ridgeway who, in his disputes with the so-called Cambridge Ritualists, advanced an account of ancient Greek tragedy as arising out of a fusion of native and intrusive performances, both relating to the commemoration of the dead.     

Co-Producing Mobilities: negotiating geographical knowledge in a conference session on the move

In an experimental session entitled Co-Producing Mobilities held at the 2014 Royal Geographical Society-Institute of British Geographers Annual Conference, 20 mobility scholars travelled around London on foot, by bus and by Tube to investigate how mobilities could be considered co-produced. In this paper, 18 participants reflect on this collaborative experiment and on how it influenced their thinking about mobilities, geographical knowledge and pedagogy. Contributions cast light on the function of conferences and the multiple forms of pedagogy they enable, and provide guiding resources for those now wanting to continue such experiments.     

SPATIAL COMPETITION À LA COURNOT: PRICE DISCRIMINATION BY QUANTITY-SETTING OLIGOPOLISTS*

In this paper, we consider oligopolistic competition in a spatial model when firms take care of goods' delivery and discriminate among consumers. Firms compete by setting quantity schedules independently over space. We show that under general conditions a Nash equilibrium in this game exists and is unique. In equilibrium, firms’ markets overlap, a feature which accords with intuition and empirical observations. Over the interval between two firms, the equilibrium spatial price schedule is quasi-concave (quasi-convex) when transport costs are concave (convex). With linear transport costs, the model predicts uniform delivered pricing. Uniform pricing could moreover be obtained by a combination of increasing returns to volume in transportation together with concavity of unit transport costs in distance.     

Doomsday for the Queensland labour movement? The SEQEB dispute and union strategy

On February 11th, 1985, Sir Joh Bjelke‐Petersen, then Premier of Queensland, sacked 940 linesmen employed by the South East Queensland Electricity Board (SEQEB). For the next ten days Queensland was the scene of a massive industrial conflict in which many industries were forced to shut down, there was a large‐scale stand‐down of workers, and the State's economy suffered the loss of an estimated $1 billion. The SEQEB dispute represented a major turning‐point in the Premier's anti‐union crusade which climaxed in a successful confrontation with the union movement. The Premier continued his crusade — introducing a variety of legislative measures which severely curtailed union activities. (1) For the Queensland labour movement the SEQEB dispute represented an historic defeat. The Queensland Trades and Labor Council (QTLC) concluded that ‘the actions of the Government have had a similar effect on the trade union movement as the defeat of 1891’ (QTLC 1985:1).