Empire of Scholars: Universities,Networks and the British Academic World, 1850–1939, by Tamson Pietsch

ABSTRACT

This article reconstructs the history of animal protection organisations in Palestine from the British occupation to the beginning of World War II. Although Arab and Jewish mandate state subjects consistently rejected these organisations, animal protection remained an important part of the mandate government throughout the political upheavals of the interwar period. Despite their seemingly apolitical nature, animal welfare associations enjoyed unique legal privileges and drew support from the most prominent British personnel in Palestine. Managing cruelty and compassion towards animals, I argue, was a means of making Palestine part of the British Empire. Animal protection functioned both as a tool for direct financial control over agriculture, and as an educational project that promoted an emotional ‘civilizing mission.’ In the spirit of inter-war British imperial humanitarian networks, animal welfare created civilizational hierarchies through compassion, and revised the role of the human-animal divide in imperial culture.     

Picturing Austria–Hungary. The British Perception of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1865–1870

In the late 1960s a Joint Nordic Co-operative Assistance Project was established in Tanzania. Its objective was to promote co-operative development in Tanzania based on Nordic experiences in the field. The project's effort to export Nordic co-operative ideas and traditions to Tanzania soon encountered major problems as the Government of Tanzania (GoT) launched a villagization process in the beginning of the 1970s, which sought to move the entire peasant population into ujamaa villages. The resettlement effort was implemented with the use of force and coercion and implied a dismantling of the traditional co-operative structures in Tanzania. This article finds that the Nordic countries helped facilitate GoT's compulsory policy by adjusting and restructuring the project to GoT's villagization strategy, despite the fact that the primary objective of the project was no longer present. As the article will reveal, there was a clear concern in the Nordic aid administrations that the Nordic project could be linked with the politics of coercion ingrained in the ujamaa policy.     

Forms without Substance or Synchronism? Attempts to Define Culture and Civilisation in Early Twentieth-Century Romania

This article discusses attempts to define culture and civilisation in early twentieth-century Romania on the basis of two fundamental Romanian models of development: the theory of forms without substance and the theory of synchronism. The former is studied here primarily in relation to the views of Titu Maiorescu (1840–1917) and Constantin Radulescu-Motru (1868–1957) and the latter in relation to the views of Eugen Lovinescu (1881–1943). While the theory of forms without substance asserts a would-be ‘traditional’ and ‘organic’ development of Romanian culture and civilisation, the theory of synchronism proposes a development according to the ‘spirit of the age’ and the ‘law of simulation-stimulation’. In the present study, these opposed models of development are observed in relation to the general tendencies towards a pronounced critical spirit and towards discussing cultural vs. structural changes or culture vs. power in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Europe. The Romanian models of development are also studied on the background of wider European discussions on Enlightenment and modernism, historicism, conservatism and liberalism, German vs. French influence and nationalist vs. cosmopolitan attitudes.     

论青海藏族传统文化与社会主义核心价值体系的和谐发展

青海藏族的传统文化作为中华文化的重要组成部分具有独特的文化思想基础,在价值追求、思想道德教育功能和社会文化功能方面与社会主义核心价值体系具有一致性,促进青海藏族传统文化与社会主义核心价值体系的和谐发展对于构建社会主义和谐社会具有重要意义。