Governmentality and power in politically contested space: refugee farming in Hong Kong's New Territories, 1945–1970

A small proportion of Mainland Chinese refugee flows into British Hong Kong following the 1949 Communist Revolution in the People's Republic of China were vegetable farmers, who by the late 1960s engendered a vegetable revolution in New Territories agricultural space. Heterogeneous actors and their differing modalities of power in the late-colonial government possessed an active managerial role in this vegetable revolution anchored in issues of marketing and land tenure. While post-World War Two developmentalist ontologies help explain government intervention in the post-war agricultural economy, this research focuses primarily on the disciplinary techniques deployed within the governance rationalities of the early Cold War period to cultivate pro-government loyalties among a potentially proletarianized, trans-border refugee farming population perceived by colonial authorities as being susceptible to Communist influence. As ‘experimental space’, marketing innovations were a qualified success, but progress in land reform failed because of the local geopolitical context of colonial rule in the contested space of the New Territories.     

Governmental mobility: The power effects of the movement of detained asylum seekers around Britain's detention estate

This paper explores the ways in which mobility can have governmental effects in the context of the management of asylum seekers awaiting deportation from the UK. Drawing upon the case of Campsfield House Immigration Removal Centre, a facility for the incarceration of immigration deportees near Oxford, the paper makes the case that the way asylum seekers are moved between detention centres within the UK has implications for the way they are represented to both asylum activists and asylum sector employees, causing them to choose to use their influence differently by with-holding the support that they might otherwise provide. The constant moving and repositioning of asylum seekers means that they are depicted as transitory, fleeting and depersonalised to those actors with the greatest degree of influence over them. The subjection not only of asylum seekers through forceful, blunt forms of power, but also of more powerful asylum sector actors through subtler, governmental techniques, has significant material implications for the incarcerated asylum seeking community that populates Britain's detention estate.     

Internal oxidation of cast iron artifacts from an 18th-century steel cementation furnace

Heavily corroded metal artifacts recovered from the site of an 18th-century steel cementation furnace in Trenton, New Jersey, are cast iron altered by internal oxidation. The progress of the internal oxidation process was followed by comparison with the microstructure of cast iron exposed to high temperature in a wood-burning fireplace. The graphite flake structure of the cast iron allows deep, rapid penetration of oxygen that reacts at the iron–carbon interfaces within the iron to form iron oxides that eventually replace the graphite flakes. Microprobe analyses show that the silicon in the cast iron is converted to knebelite that also serves as the host for phosphorus. Sulfur dispersed in the internal oxidation product and porosity appear to be responsible for rapid rusting of the artifacts. Internal nitriding accompanies the oxidation. The Trenton artifacts are interpreted as grate bars from the fire box of a cementation furnace.     

The Great Game in Antarctica: Britain and the 1959 Antarctic Treaty

This article is concerned with Britain's political and territorial interests in the Antarctic in the first half of the twentieth century, culminating in the signing of the 1959 Antarctic Treaty. Using in part the diaries of a Foreign Office advisor, Dr Brian Roberts, attention is given as to how successive British governments and their officials sustained a presence in the remote polar continent. Rival claimants in the form of Argentina and Chile made the task all the more difficult. Mapping and surveying were essential in maintaining British sovereignty even if the end results were at times disappointing. The article concludes by suggesting that the Antarctic Treaty, while important in promoting international scientific collaboration, did not manage to resolve the political and territorial disputes surrounding the Antarctic. Arguably, the 1982 Falklands War and its aftermath provided a vivid reminder that Britain's most southerly possessions still remain deeply contested.     

Domopolitics, governmentality and the regulation of asylum accommodation

Since the 1999 Immigration and Asylum Act, asylum seekers in the UK have been dispersed across the country to zones of accommodation on a no choice basis. This paper examines the political practices and governmental rationalities which accompany the allocation of asylum accommodation in Britain through the National Asylum Support Service (NASS). The paper draws on discussions of the UK border as a site of ‘domopolitics’, the governing of the state as a home, to suggest that domopolitics is productive of particular relations of calculation, regulation and discipline through which the lives of asylum seekers are conditioned. These entangled modes of governance, it is argued, find expression in a logic of accommodation which acts to discipline asylum seekers and to reinsert modes of arbitrary sovereign authority into a regime of governmental regulation. The rationalities of governance that accompany accommodation create an account of housing which is deliberately decoupled from feelings of security, as accommodation becomes a key space through which a relation to the border is lived for asylum seekers. Domopolitics is thus shown to be productive of a politics of discomfort for those at the limits of the nation.     

Territorial origins of center-seeking and self-determination claims in Africa

Why doesn't Africa have more self-determination movements? Given the prevalence of weak states, artificial borders, and high ethnic diversity, one might expect that the majority of African rebel groups would pursue self-determination outcomes. Yet, the data indicate that most rebel groups have attempted to capture the state in center-seeking conflicts rather than to break off a piece of it. Why? In this study, we argue that the exogenously determined territorial size of the country in which new groups emerge shapes whether groups pursue center-seeking or self-determination outcomes. We argue that the size of the territory determines the overall cohesion of the state, which then shapes the political imagination of the group, affecting how an emerging rebel group conceives of itself and its constituents relative to the state. We also argue that the size of the territory shapes the perceived feasibility of either center-seeking or self-determination outcomes. Drawing from a recent dataset on rebel group emergence, we find support that rebel groups emerging in large states are more likely to seek self-determination than rebel groups in small states. We test multiple alternative arguments and find that our results are robust to them as well as additional testing specifications.     

The history men. The historical profession in England since the Renaissance

This study of port cities, focusing on those on the Atlantic facade of France, argues that their economic significance cannot be understood within the canons of an insular French, or even European history. They were often case studies of the more general phenomenon of the early globalisation of Europe. In particular, navigation, fishing, trade, and colonisation, depended not only on the seas and the port but also on the agrarian hinterlands. They were often determinative of national imperial expansion. Thus, the success of exports and imports were not necessarily judged on Atlantic crossings but rather on the supply and demand of national or European economies. Commerce did not end on the seashore, in a port, or even in a contraband network, but often deep within a nation's hinterlands.     

Civilized Colonizers and Barbaric Colonized: Reclaiming Naga Identity by Demythologizing Colonial Portraits

In this paper, I address a prominent colonial representation known as “headhunting”, because this term has been in use almost synonymously with Nagas and continues to exert negative psychological ramifications on contemporary Nagas. Due to a lack of work revising the exaggerated representation, the colonial portrayal is being sustained by the frequent and continued use of terms such as “former headhunters” and “once headhunters”. Therefore, this work is in part to represent the Nagas not as “barbaric headhunters” but as “normal” human beings both in the past as well as in the present. To do so, first, I will outline traditional Naga warfare, the context in which decapitation occurred. Second, I will examine the subject as it is being presented in the literature of Euro-Americans. Finally, the paper will end with the argument that the term “headhunting” was simply an invention of the colonizers and briefly note the ramifications of colonial stereotypes on contemporary Nagas.     

W. W. deLacy's 1865 map of the territory of Montana

Abstract

The Topographical Survey of the Orange Free State, executed by the British War Office between 1905 and 1911, was not only one of the first but also one of the finest topographical surveys to be undertaken in British colonial Africa. The motivation for this undertaking stemmed from three sources: the personal interest of Sir David Gill (H.M. Astronomer at the Cape) in the measurement of the arc of the 30th meridian; Britain's imperialistic intervention in South Africa which resulted in the South African War (1899–1902) against the Boer Republics and which stressed the need for reliable military maps for warfare as well as for the general defence of the new colonies; and the need for accurate maps for purposes of colonial administration and land tenure. The survey took five and a half years to complete, and the 1: 125,000 series (G.S.G.S. 2230) that was compiled represented the only accurate maps of this part of the continent for almost seven decades.     

Identity and Place: the testament of designated heritage in Hong Kong

This paper examines the extent to which the identity of Hong Kong as a place, and of the Hong Kong Chinese as people, is expressed by the official heritage locations (the seventy-five Declared Monuments) designated by Hong Kong's Antiquities and Monuments Office. The discussion takes account of other heritage initiatives, in particular two recent monuments that commemorate the 1997 Handover of Hong Kong to China. Conclusions are that designated heritage in Hong Kong, more by chance than by deliberate strategy, reflects significant elements of the identities of the Hong Kong people and of Hong Kong as a place. However, more important to the Hong Kong Chinese person's sense of identity than built heritage are the bonds of kin and associated social events.