‘The Cow is Still the Most Important Figure in Indian Politics!’: Religion,Imperial Culture and the Shaping of Indian Political Reform in the 1930s

This essay assesses the impact of imperial culture, particularly constructions of India and hinduism, on British responses to the Indian nationalist movement in the 1930s. The essay draws on personal and governmental papers, paying special attention to the language and vocabulary employed by British policy makers concerned with Indian affairs. The major issue addressed here is the British presumption that the 1935 Government of India Act, a plan for a federated India with British central control, would defuse nationalist agitation. Such a sanguine view of this proposal seemed misplaced, given the popular success of the nationalists, especially Gandhi, and given the explicit demands of Indians for full self‐government. However, such an optimistic assessment drew on presumptions about Indian political and social behaviour, and especially on conceptions of hinduism. Policy makers in Britain and India argued along well‐established lines, that hinduism inculcated moral and physical weakness, among other deficiencies, and that a British offer of compromise would attract many Indians who feared continuing confrontation with the Raj. Moreover, colonial advisors relied on a belief that social and caste divisions within hinduism would recur within the nationalist ranks as well. This sense that Indians would respond to half‐measures of reform persisted until the 1937 provincial elections. Though British administrators predicted only a moderate showing by the Indian National Congress, the polling proved otherwise, as Congress took power in the majority of the provinces. The Raj lasted another decade, but the confident cultural assumptions sustaining it took a fatal blow.     

In the Shadow of the 1919 Total Solar Eclipse: The Two British Expeditions and the Politics of Invisibility**

This paper addresses the legendary total solar eclipse of 29 May 1919. Two British teams confirmed the light bending prediction by Albert Einstein: Charles R. Davidson and Andrew C. C. Crommelin in Sobral, Brazil and Arthur S. Eddington and Edwin T. Cottingham on the African island of Príncipe, then part of the Portuguese empire. By jointly analyzing the two astronomical expeditions supported by written and visual sources, I show how, despite extensive scholarship on this famous historical episode and the historiographical emphasis on the plural dimensions of knowledge construction, many human and non-human actors have been kept in the shadow of the eclipse. I do so by focusing on what I call knowledge from the periphery together with knowledge from below, grounded literally on how localities (sites) affect choices and events, and growing outward to encompass a wide range of participants. I show how the geopolitical status of the two nations where the observational sites were located, and specifically Portugal's condition of colonial power, affected main decisions and events, while highlighting the active role of participants, ranging from experts from the peripheries and those involved in the travels to local elites and anonymous peoples, some of whom contributed to the observation of totality.     

British Lobbying in Newspaper and Parliamentary Discourse, 1800–1950

Lobbying is a significant component of the modern politics industry in Britain, but we know relatively little about its historical origins and evolution. This article draws on parliamentary debates and three databases which together account for 51 newspaper titles, in order to explore how lobbying was discussed in parliament and the media between 1800 and 1950, and to gauge the growing professionalisation of lobbying. Perceptions of lobbying became somewhat less negative over the period; there are relatively few reports or allegations of corruption associated with lobbying; and lobbying by the railway industry seems to have been less substantial, while public sector lobbying was more significant, than is commonly supposed. Direct advocacy with policymakers is overwhelmingly the dominant tactic used by lobbyists of the period, with few reports of coalitions or grass‐roots campaigns. Particular concerns were expressed about the influence of lobbying around private bills. While lobbying back‐bench MPs and parliamentary committees (rather than ministers and civil servants) accounted for over 80% of the activity revealed across the whole period, there are signs by the middle of the 20th century that the focus of lobbyists is beginning to turn away from Westminster and towards Whitehall. The article paints a detailed view of the scale, scope, and significance of lobbying as it was developing into a national and systematic industry.     

陈寅恪与牛津大学

陈寅恪曾被牛津大学聘为汉学教授 ,却终未到任。中国中英文化协会和英国利用庚子赔款建立的大学中国委员会在聘任过程中扮演了重要的角色。陈寅恪赴英受阻是由于战争令交通中断的说法并不准确 ;令陈滞留香港的很可能是当时一些中国外交官掺杂了政治和外交因素的做法。英国汉学家修中诚与陈寅恪商定在牛津大学开展中国历史研究的计划和有关信件 ,展示了陈寅恪的学术抱负。     

A foot deformity from a Romano‐British cemetery at Gloucester,England, and the current evidence for talipes in palaeopathology

A male skeleton from the Romano‐British site at Kingsholm, Gloucester, is described with abnormalities in the humerus, femur, tibia, fibula and foot. Computed tomography of the femora to enable cross‐sectional analysis suggested altered normal gait to compensate for the deformity. Differential diagnoses are considered and a diagnosis of clubfoot deformity is suggested. Palaeopathological evidence for clubfoot is rare in the literature but the cases reported to date are reviewed. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A Vast Inland Empire and the Last Great West: remaking society, space and environment in early British Columbia

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a new order was imposed on the land and inhabitants of present-day interior British Columbia. From one perspective this was a story of human progress and improvement – the advance of colonizing Europeans into lands that they considered underutilized and unproductive and that they sought, often successfully, to bring within the growing orbit of global trade and world capitalism. Yet for many people and creatures the story of resettlement was far from a story of progress. In relatively short order – less than a century – the grasslands of interior British Columbia were swept and transformed by many of the most powerful currents of western modernity. The results of this transformation were uneven and often deeply inequitable. By the late nineteenth century native peoples had been dispossessed and struggled to survive on small resource-poor Indian Reserves; a few corporate and family-owned cattle ranches controlled the best range leaving small-scale immigrant ranchers with more or less marginal land; and many types of grassland had been heavily overgrazed. This paper explores these darker sides of European resettlement in present-day interior British Columbia by emphasizing the role of ranching in colonial resettlement, by describing the stratified rural society that ranching, in part, produced, and by revealing the different ways that cattle and ranches interacted with natural and economic processes to remake an environment.     

Geographies and politics of localism: The localism of the United Kingdom's coalition government

There has always been a localist element to British politics. But recently, a particular version of localism has been moved to the foreground by the 2011 Localism Act. This paper identifies various uses and meanings of localism, maps their geographical assumptions and effects, and critiques their politics. It does this using the localism of the United Kingdom's Coalition Government as a case study of localism in practice. The rationalities, mentalities, programmes, and technologies of this localism are established from Ministerial speeches and press releases, along with Parliamentary Acts, Bills, White Papers, Green Papers, and Statements – all published between May 2010 when the Coalition Government was formed, and November 2011 when the Localism Act became law. We argue that localism may be conceptualised as spatial liberalism, is never straightforwardly local, and can be anti-political.     

The Bedouins in the Palestinian–Zionist struggle at the beginning of the British Mandate: 1920–1929

This article presents the causal factors behind the Arab riots of the 1920s and the reasons some of the Bedouin tribes joined that struggle. It provides an overview of the “Events,” as Zionist historiographers termed the riots—the developing conflict between the Palestinians and the Jews, the methods and resources used by both parties, as well as the responses of the British authorities—from the local, national, and regional perspectives, especially in the political arena. It investigates the political stances that emerged among the local Bedouin tribes regarding the Zionist–Palestinian struggle and the reasons for the diversity of stances: while some tribes took an active part in the events on the Palestinian side, others remained neutral and a few tribes even chose to ally with the Jews, or at least warn them of forthcoming attacks. These different stances consolidated during this period, affecting the events and outcomes of the Great Palestinian revolt that took place in 1936–1939, as well as the conduct of these groups during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War.     

A century of “Hate and Coarse Thinking”: anti-Machiavellian Machiavellism in H.G. Wells’ The New Machiavelli (1911)

Wells's The New Machiavelli (1911) offers an excellent case study of the use of anti-Machiavellian Machiavellism as both a philosophical and a rhetorical strategy. In Remington, Wells creates a protagonist who follows Machiavellian rules of behaviour and denounces those who do likewise. The novel is structured to show Remington's progress from an idealist refutation of Machiavellism, through a recognition of its necessity, to the formulation of a private and political method for the necessary pursuit of Machiavellian principles under the disguise of anti-Machiavellism, including trenchant criticisms of Fabians as anti-Machiavellian Machiavellians. These stages, culminating in complete personal and public failure, are reflected in Remington's party allegiances, and broadened by Wells into an account of British party ideologies around the turn of the twentieth century. Wells's rhetorical design for mapping and assessing anti-Machiavellian Machiavellism is paralleled by an exploration of that technique in himself, attested by the predominance of autobiographical elements in The New Machiavelli, and by similarities between Remington's and Wells's own deception of others and themselves. Far from incidental, anti-Machiavellian Machiavellism is the motif that unites the shifting party allegiances, political conceits and moral hypocrisies, and private and public failures of Wells, Remington, and of the period of British politics that they intend to encapsulate.     

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.