‘Science must be the Basis’. Sir Oswald Mosley’s Political Parties and their Policies on Health,Science and Scientific Racism 1931–1974

This article investigates the health and science policies of the New Party, British Union of Fascists (BUF) and Union Movement, founded by Sir Oswald Mosley. Throughout his life, Mosley believed in science as a gamechanger. Health policies also mattered because the New Party and the BUF wanted a nation of ‘fit’ men and women. In reality, opportunism guided the parties in relation to these concerns. Only the BUF developed comprehensive health policies. Science was used to justify ideology, but was seldom integrated in party policies. Despite eugenics and scientific racism being available to lend credence to BUF and Union Movement attitudes, this avenue remained unexplored. Inter-war BUF racism targeting Jews tended to be cultural, though some was biological. Post-war Union Movement racism targeting Commonwealth immigrants was biological. Ultimately, however, science merely provided a convenient excuse for how the parties could promise results without making tough decisions.     

The ingathering of (non-human) exiles: The creation of the Tel Aviv Zoological Garden animal collection, 1938–1948

This article examines the formation of the animal collection at the Tel Aviv zoological garden. Using Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, the article analyzes the images and practices of animal importation. It shows that in spite of the importance of Zionist enthusiasm in driving the establishment of the Tel Aviv zoo, and the attribution of Zionist vocabulary to animals living in it, its significance cannot be reduced to Zionist ideology and practice. The zoo’s animal collection was the product of the specific historical, colonial-imperial circumstances formed under the British Mandate. The gathering of the animals reflects the indispensable British contribution to the development of cultural endeavors in Palestine, and the coexistence of British and Zionist aspirations.     

War stories: British and American writers in/on the Italian front (1915–18)

In 1919 the British historian G. M. Trevelyan complained about the ‘not very large stock of English literature on Italy’s part in the war’ that had just ended, a phenomenon he attributed to ‘the mutual ignorance of the English-speaking and Italian peoples’. Nearly a hundred years later the situation seems to be no better. Secondary sources as there are devote only passing mention (if any) to the war stories that were put together by British and American writers who visited, served or worked as volunteers in the Italian front between 1915 and 1918. This article intends to give some details about the Italian front writing of these committed individuals, whose praiseworthy contribution to the war effort was, indeed, fighting the above-mentioned ignorance.     

AN IMPERIAL SYLLABUS

Ten Books That Shaped the British Empire, edited by distinguished historians Antoinette Burton and Isabel Hofmeyr, brings together ten essays on individual books with a substantial methodological introduction. Covering the full geographical expanse of the Empire, the volume seeks to unify book and imperial history through careful accounts of the circulation, recycling, and uptake of each of the books under consideration. The upshot is an invaluable overall work with important individual contributions. At the same time, the project's methodology and mode of presentation raise questions for the writing of history, particularly at the nexus of the histories of empire and of the book, that are reiterated but never queried within the volume itself. Specifically, in its focus on the moment of the circulation of texts, Ten Books That Shaped the British Empire reflects a general condition in the human sciences: a resistance to narrative, to causality, and to critique, which this essay attempts to describe and briefly explain.     

Enclosures from Below: The Mushaa’ in Contemporary Palestine

This article traces the declining fortunes of the mushaa’, a once‐prominent Levantine culture of common land. Palestinians managed to resist attempts by the Ottoman Empire and the British Mandate to break up the mushaa’. Under Israeli colonization, the remaining commons are now subject to another type of appropriation: individual Palestinian contractors seize hold of mushaa’ land and build on it. This article introduces the concept of “enclosures from below”, whilst looking at the dynamics of seizure of the commons by Palestinian refugees, who once were peasants practising mushaa’ on their lands and are now landless, some having become expert contractors. I show that the contractors consider their actions to be a form of resistance against the settler colonial project, manifested in the advancing of the Wall and settlement expansion. This is described through a case study of the Shu'faat area in Jerusalem. Changing uses of mushaa’ land reflect wider tendencies in the Palestinian national project that has become increasingly individualized.     

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.     

John Francis Davis as governor and diplomat on the China Coast (1844–1848)

This paper explores the role of the nineteenth-century sinologist-cum-diplomat, John Francis Davis, in Sino-British relations after the ratification of the Treaty of Nanjing in 1843. It examines his time as governor of Hong Kong and as Britain's effective minister to China from 1844 until 1848, in which he attempted to have the city of Canton opened to foreign trade. Arguing that Davis's view of Sino-British relations was as cultural in character as it was political, this paper suggests that Davis fundamentally sought to establish strict equality between the two empires. He attempted to use his knowledge of Chinese civilization to build an equal international relationship between two sovereign nations rather than an imperial relationship between a conqueror and the conquered people. While this conviction laid the groundwork for Hong Kong to become a bilingual Anglo-Chinese colony, it fractured diplomacy with Qing officials. Davis's insistence on political equality would amount to an aggressive imposition of European diplomatic norms on his dealings with the Qing representative Qiying. More precisely, the paper explains how the policies of this archetypal British ‘China Hand’ bifurcated in the directions of both progressive cultural policy but also gunboat diplomacy.     

Adjusting to partition: from irredentism to “consent” in twentieth-century Ireland

When the Irish constitution was amended after the 1998 Good Friday agreement to replace an apparent claim to jurisdiction over Northern Ireland by an aspirational statement, it seemed that many of the issues of conflict in the North–South relationship had been resolved. This article traces the process by which ideological change and policy shift in southern Ireland during the course of the twentieth century facilitated this agreement and the associated constitutional reformulation, looking at three areas within which change is obvious. First, demands for Irish unity, vigorously expressed but confined substantially to the domain of rhetoric, were softened in the early 1970s when the fuller implications of Irish unity became clearer, and in the context of a possible British withdrawal from Northern Ireland. Second, distaste for North–South institutions such as a Council of Ireland, on the ground that they implied recognition of partition, was replaced by acceptance of a modest level of institutionalised cross-border cooperation. Third, reluctance to recognise the legitimacy of Northern Ireland was reversed, with Irish governments moving progressively towards recognition of the principle of “consent” in the late twentieth century. Together, these changes amounted to a reversal of traditional irredentist policies and a formal acceptance of partition.     

Spying in the British Post Office,Victorian Politics and Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White

In 1844, the British public learned that the government was secretly opening exiled Young Italy leader Giuseppe Mazzini’s private letters and sharing information with continental authorities. For outraged citizens, espionage in that quintessential liberal institution, the reformed British Post Office, appeared un-English, despotic and criminal, the makings of a Gothic plot. Representations of the Post Office Scandal in Parliament and print predict the revision of the Gothic into the sensation novel that occurred with the publication of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White. Attention to the fields of Anglo-Italian studies, mid-Victorian print culture and the development of narrative form in the mid-nineteenth century illustrates the historical and political implications of letter-opening for the emergence of a new fictional genre. The Post Office Espionage Scandal and The Woman in White share a central place in a mid-Victorian moment of evolution in the mutually constitutive relationship between Italian and British national identities, producing and reflecting a crisis in Britishness focused on the secret tyrannies concealed beneath the surface of Victorian liberalism. The letter-opening scandal reveals a crisis in Victorian liberalism in the political realm and the media, while The Woman in White translates this Victorian crisis of confidence into a literary genre defined by exposing the sordid undercurrents of British society: sensation fiction. Together, the espionage scandal and Collins’s novel respond to and generate a challenge to Victorian complacency that emerged out of the collision of British and Italian politics and culture in the mid-nineteenth century.