The Pre-Roman Iron Age in Britain and Ireland (ca. 800 B.C. to A.D. 100): An overview

Those communities that lived in Britain and Ireland ca. 800 B.C. to A.D. 100 represent particularly well-researched examples of the complex agrarian, nonurban, societies with high population densities that characterize the Pre-Roman Iron Age across temperate Europe. This paper provides a critical introduction to the extensive recent literature on the Pre-Roman Iron Age in Britain and Ireland. Evidence from the large number of salvage excavations and surveys, the application of a wide range of analytical techniques, and important changes in interpretative frameworks are transforming understandings of this period. After reviewing these developments, a chronological account of the period is outlined which attempts to integrate these new results. This suggests that current interpretations of social processes across Iron Age Europe in terms of state formation, urbanization, and core-periphery relations with Mediterranean civilization need revision.     

4. IMPERIAL SOVEREIGNTY IN MUGHAL AND BRITISH FORMS

Azfar Moin's recent work on millennial sovereignty in Mughal India prompts a consideration of the evolution of sovereignty in modern South Asia more broadly. Although the sovereign principles of the Mughals differed from those of the British Indian empire, which ultimately succeeded it, these empires shared important similarities in their linking of sovereign authority to visions of a cosmos in immanent interaction with human affairs. This article explores these similarities and differences and speculatively considers their implications for both similarities and differences in Mughal and British principles of statecraft. These similarities and differences provide an important backdrop for thinking about the meanings attached to popular sovereignty in modern India as well.     

British Catholics’ commercial strategies in times of international warfare (1688–1705)

This article investigates the British Catholic merchants’ commercial strategies during the Nine Years War (1689–1697) and the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1713). By focusing on the tactics deployed by John Aylward and his partners in France and England, I argue that Catholicism fundamentally sustained Aylward’s trade by ensuring access to various markets and safer commercial plans. Catholicism had not only an economic dimension and Catholics in trade proved non-communal, working with co-religionists, family but also with non-Catholics in order to pursue profits. This article tells us how Catholicism, despite being a political and social impairment, was the key to success in commerce. It contributes to recent scholarship on religious minorities in trade and on how commerce functioned in the English Channel and in European waters at times of warfare.     

“A Success in Every Particular”: British August First Celebrations in Canada and America and the Black Quest for Unblemished Commemorations,While Critiquing July Fourth, 1834–1861

British August First celebrations were an important day of the year for Blacks in North America. Elite and aspiring organizers attempted to use the holiday as a sight of excellence. Partakers understood they were watched closely during commemorations and that their slightest imperfections could be magnified to unreasonable proportions. Thereby, Blacks felt it was essential to present themselves in near “perfection” to prove that they could be “upstanding citizens.” This article asserts that the standard of outright excellence Blacks attempted to execute on August First was neither achievable nor performed by Whites at celebrations like July Fourth. While Whites could be the notorious offenders of uncivilized and imperfect behavior, First celebrations were to be as the Liberator proclaimed an “array of virtue, loveliness, moral heroism, and true piety.” In all, when Blacks utilized the power to assemble, it was viewed more as a potential site of lawlessness and subversion, despite their efforts.     

Diedrich Westermann and the Ambiguities of Colonial Science in the Inter-War Era

Diedrich Westermann (1875–1956) was a key figure in the establishment of African studies in Germany and Britain. He was a pioneer German linguist and member of the founding generation of German Africanists (Afrikanistik) who played a significant role in the field. As professor at Berlin University, the co-director of the International Institute of African Languages and Culture (IIALC) in London from 1926 and an adviser to Lord Hailey’s research team for the monumental ‘An African Survey’ (1938), he was central to the promotion of policy research in the African colonial context during the inter-war era. His own work focused on the phonetics and orthography of the Sudanic languages and the methodologies he pioneered were widely adopted in West Africa. As editor of the journals Koloniale Rundschau (Berlin) and Africa (London), with links to Rockefeller research funding, he was able, with Malinowski and J. H. Oldham, to wield considerable influence over the shape of anthropological and linguistic research for more than 20 years. His links to the Colonial Office and the International Missionary Council (IMC) in London and the Berlin Missionary Society (BMS) and the Colonial Department of the Third Reich, meant that he was uniquely placed as an adviser to both governments. This would seem to raise important questions about the similarities and differences in the climates of scientific work in these diverse contexts which has to date not attracted much attention. Westermann’s career provides a portrait of the complex academic inter-war era that Africanists scholars needed to navigate in a world charged with political conflict and the seeds of development debates that were to come to fruition with UNESCO initiatives in the post-war years.     

Maintaining the Bar: Regulating European Barmaids in Colonial Calcutta and Rangoon

In 1902 the government of India banned the employment of European women as barmaids in Calcutta and Rangoon. This article examines this intervention, proceeding from the premise that a close look at this ban, and the women whose lives were affected by it, illuminates the entangled and at times contradictory ideas about gender, sexuality, mobility, labour and racial boundaries that characterised British imperial policy in India and Burma at the beginning of the twentieth century. This article argues that European barmaids, while seemingly marginal, in fact occupied a unique and important position within the British Empire, being at the heart of the recreational worlds of Calcutta and Rangoon. It further argues that the ban on the employment of barmaids reflects a wider official ambivalence about the new social forms emerging from the interactions of mobile subjects in these colonial port cities. Finally, it argues that Curzon’s and his colleagues’ intervention to ban the barmaids demonstrates the way that the relations of empire were negotiated through the control of mobile subjects.

The employment of barmaids was controversial in multiple sites across the British Empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, including in London. Yet the campaign against barmaids in London was unsuccessful, whereas the campaigns in Calcutta and Rangoon succeeded. The particular dynamics of the specific colonial context help to explain this difference: European barmaids in South and Southeast Asian colonial cities were marginal in multiple dimensions. Some of the women employed as barmaids were members of the domiciled European community, who occupied a place on the margins of both Englishness and ‘whiteness’. The barmaids’ employability in drinking establishments catering to a predominantly but not exclusively European clientele was in part a function of their European identity, yet that identity meant that their presence in the morally ambiguous space of the bar posed a threat to British prestige. To colonial officials, including Curzon, European women’s employment behind the bar was additionally problematic because these women could be employed in serving alcohol to non-European men in an inversion of the desired colonial hierarchy.     

The Training of Secret Police in Conflictual Intelligence Cultures: British Failure in the Middle East during the Cold War

This article explores the nature of security training chiefly associated with MI5. It shows that, akin to the security training implemented throughout the colonies, policy-makers in London hoped to strengthen Middle Eastern security services via British training, which would safeguard British interests in the region. This article argues that an unintended consequence was that strengthening Middle Eastern security services became part of the problem rather than the solution. The policy served mainly to bolster increasingly unpopular, authoritarian regimes against a rising tide of anti-British sentiment. Thus, British foreign, more specifically anti-Communist, policy in the Middle East was short-sighted and a failure.     

Out of Arabia: British Strategy and the Fate of Local Forces in Aden,South Yemen,and Oman, 1967–76

The British engagement with Oman from 1967–76 came at a time when other imperial and defence commitments were being reduced in the Gulf region and elsewhere. Following the ignominious retreat from Aden, the British chose to support the Omani regime in its conflict with Communist-inspired insurgents (1970–6). This article gives context to the dichotomy of outcomes in southern Arabia and examines the role of local military forces in the counter-insurgencies. It demonstrates that Britain's domestic political considerations, regional strategic requirements, and concerns for its global reputation, rather than counterinsurgency operations and the local forces, were the main drivers of outcomes. Insurgents and local actors nevertheless responded to changes taking place in and around Oman, recalibrating their decision to co-operate or resist on their own terms, and changes in the international support for the insurgents were decisive. The key argument is that the dynamic combinations of international support, British strategic assumptions and miscalculations, and local agency, were crucially important to the outcomes in the region. The ‘fate’ of those who had allied with, or resisted, the British, needs to be set in this context.     

《中华大帝国史》与英国汉学

西班牙传教士门多萨的《中华大帝国史》（1585）是第一部对中国社会、文化、历史等各个方面进行全方位介绍的通史型的巨作。1588年该著的英译本在英国广泛流传,成为英国人获得真实且周详的中国文化资料库。该著对英国人中国观的形成,汉学知识的获得起到了重要的启蒙作用,是英国人认识和了解汉学之肇始。     

A regional examination of surgery and fracture treatment in Iron Age and Roman Britain

The study macroscopically examined 270 sexed adults and 190 subadult individuals for evidence of ante mortem fractures and surgical practice in Dorset, during the Iron Age (5th century BC to 1st century AD) and Romano‐British period (1st century to the end of the 4th century AD), in order to understand medical treatment in both periods and determine the extent to which these practices changed post conquest (43 AD). As treatment during these periods is not well understood, a conservative approach to fracture analysis was employed, which attempted to minimise the influence of fracture type and location on results by excluding bones in which fracture deformities may only be corrected by surgery. The study also excluded fractures resulting from bone mineralisation diseases or neoplasms. Skeletal evidence for surgical treatment was identified using funerary, taphonomic and osteological criterion to determine when the surgery took place, and to establish that changes were not caused by post mortem activity. The analysis of fracture treatment demonstrated that in both periods, adult fractures were well set with few secondary changes; a result also influenced by the stable nature of the fracture types. No evidence for sex‐differences in treatment was observed. Evidence for surgery was identified in two Romano‐British individuals: an unsuccessful limb amputation, and an embryotomy procedure that was most likely carried out in an attempt to save the mother. This regional assessment of medical treatment has shown that in both periods, highly skilled practitioners were able to successfully treat a range of fractures and by doing so, minimised the patient's risk of impairment. The study also supplements the very limited archaeological evidence for medical practice and surgery in Iron Age and Roman Britain, and suggests that post conquest, surgical knowledge rapidly increased in association with wider socio‐cultural developments in education, pharmacology and sanitation. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.