The geography of the political party: Lessons from the British Labour Party's experiment with community organising, 2010 to 2015

This paper highlights the geographical contributions made to academic debate about democracy, representation and the role of the political party. It argues that while geographers have made important arguments in relation to the structure and operation of representative democracy, there is scope for paying greater attention to the internal spatial dynamics of the political party. A successful political party requires a balance between the national party machine and its local membership base. This paper draws on research to explore the way in which the British Labour Party sought to renew its local membership base by adopting community organising techniques and establishing a new arms-length organisation, Movement for Change (M4C), between 2010 and 2015. It uses this research material to highlight the importance of the internal balance of power within any political party, and the need for a multi-scalar approach to understanding the successful operation of any political party.     

从英国史研究到世界现代化进程研究--访钱乘旦教授

钱乘旦教授在蒋孟引先生的引导下从事英国史研究,首先探讨了改革在英国历史发展中的作用。以英国史研究为切入点,进一步比较了英国、法国、德国等国家近代历史发展的异同,从而深入到发达国家现代化的研究领域。他又从英国现代化的研究扩展到整个英联邦国家的现代化研究,进而探讨了世界上不同国家的现代化的历史进程,并且反思了这一进程中出现的诸多问题。     

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.     

殖民地时期美国史研究中的若干重要问题

国内美国史学界对殖民地时期研究相对薄弱,而美国学者的研究则至为丰富。在研究中通常会遇到许多棘手的难题：如何确定殖民地时期在美国历史中的地位?如何看待不同种族和族裔群体的历史作用?如何理解英格兰文化与北美文化的关系?如何解释北美13个殖民地从分到合的变化过程?如何借鉴和利用美国学者整理的历史文献和发表的研究成果?这都是研究殖民地时期美国史所必须处理的问题。     

英国殖民当局与马华公会的成立

针对学术界对马华公会成立过程的不同观点和分歧,在认真研究英国殖民部相关档案的基础上,在马来亚华人社会的分化问题、马华公会领袖们的组织宗旨、英国殖民当局在马华公会成立过程中的作用等方面进行了探讨。得出结论,华社并不总是处于一盘散沙的状态,在某种特定的条件下是能做到团结一致的;马华公会是英国殖民当局发起成立的组织,英国殖民当局在马华公会成立过程中发挥了决定性的作用。英国殖民当局的主要动机是希望马华公会成为协助当局恢复秩序的政治力量;马华公会的华社领袖们则希望与马来族群合作,结束英国殖民统治,建立一个新的民族国家。     

Communicating with the European Resistance: an assessment of the Special Operations Executive’s wireless facilities in the UK during the Second World War

Summary: This article presents for the first time an examination of the Special Operations Executive’s (SOE) UK-based communication facilities. Established in 1940, SOE was responsible for coordinating all acts of sabotage against the enemy overseas. This was only possible with the aid of a reliable communications link with the Resistance. By examining SOE’s Home Stations, this article will demonstrate the value the organization placed in reliable wireless communications.     

The cologne map publisher Peter Overadt (fl. 1590–1652)

Abstract

Peter Overadt is one of the many lesser‐known figures of the second generation of the Cologne school of map making, which had been founded about 1570 by Frans Hogenberg. Overadt is noteworthy as the first continental publisher (aside from Jodocus I Hondius, who was at that time active in London) to have decorated printed topographical maps with marginal historical‐political images. During the first phase of his business (1592–1600), he issued eight maps, with a three‐sheet map of Germania as the pinnacle of his production. After 1600, Overadt's firm was primarily engaged in the publication of religious prints with a Catholic orientation. Topographical productions from this later period are three large town views and the re‐issue of a map of the Rhine area, printed from a re‐worked copper plate of 1594 by Theodoor de Bry.     

The ‘Sex Question’ in Anglo-American Relations in the Second World War

During the viceroyalty of Lord Curzon, 1899–1905, the Persian Gulf states came to be treated by Calcutta as closely analogous to Indian Princely states. This shift in policy was most clearly expressed in the state tour of the Gulf in 1903 by the Viceroy. During this tour a number of symbolic, informational, diplomatic, and military methods were employed by the British to expand the role of the Indian Empire in the Persian Gulf. Curzon paid particularly close attention to his government's relationship with Muscat (modern Oman) and Kuwait. The catalyst for this change in the way the Government of India treated the Gulf states was a fear that France, Russia, and Germany were attempting to gain a foothold in the region. Historians of British Indian expansion have tended to focus on the role of ambitious frontier agents; the result has been a distortion which underplays the central role of metropolitan Calcutta, and in this case Lord Curzon, the Viceroy himself.