The Politics of Provisioning: Feeding South Asian Prisoners During the First World War

During the First World War, the German and British Governments supplied culturally appropriate rations and secured special facilities for food preparation and consumption for South Asian prisoners of war whose loyalty both governments sought. The food provided in POW camps to South Asians serves as an index of the political status of colonial subjects at a moment when the future of European empires was far from certain. The British Government’s approach to feeding its South Asian servicemen held by the enemy thus reveals this population’s place within Britain’s wartime national and imperial imaginary and in its post-war planning.     

Towards Hume – the discourse on the liberty of the press in the age of Walpole*

The liberty of the press became one of the main topics of public debate in the 1720s and 1730s in response to Walpole’s restrictive press policy. This debate was carried on mainly in newspapers such as the Craftsman and the London Journal. Country and Court writers did not limit their discussions to legal questions, but conducted a lively debate about what press freedom actually was, and what role the press should have in political life. Among other things, they discussed to what extent it was appropriate for the press to take on an anti-governmental role. This debate is important, not least because it is a foil for one of the ‘classical’ eighteenth-century texts on the problem of press freedom, David Hume’s essay ‘Of the Liberty of the Press’. The debate reveals to what extent, and in what respects, Hume was breaking new ground in this essay.     

Lapita before Lapita: The Early Story of the Meyer/O’Reilly Watom Island Archaeological Collection

ABSTRACT

Seventeen years before the first excavation at the archaeological site of Lapita (New Caledonia) in 1952, two men of the cloth met and exchanged artefacts, notes and ideas to produce some of the earliest analyses of what later became known as Lapita pottery. Otto Meyer (1877–1937), a Sacred Heart Missionary stationed on Watom Island, described chance finds of ‘prehistoric pottery’ in 1909, following these with more systematic excavations. Patrick O’Reilly (1900–88), a Marist Father associated with the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, drew on Meyer’s work, his own extensive bibliographical knowledge and his observations during a one-year mission in the region in 1934–5 to present part of the collection in France, laying the ground for further theories. The publication, interpretation and curation of the Meyer/O’Reilly collection represents an exemplary journey through the history of Pacific archaeology and the emergence of the Lapita paradigm. We consider the context of Meyer’s encounter with O’Reilly, the ideas both men advanced in analysing the collection and the site, and how these resonated during the development of Pacific and Lapita archaeology throughout the first half of the 20th century.     

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.     

The Language of Imperialism in British Electoral Politics, 1880–1910

This article asks us to reconsider the impact of the issue of imperialism in electoral politics in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Using a corpus of around five million words of digitised campaign speeches from the years 1880–1910, it examines the language of the nine General Elections held in this period through computerised text-mining. This ‘big data’ analysis produces three conclusions, which in some cases nuance existing interpretations and in others directly challenge them. The first questions the prevailing consensus that elections in the high age of empire featured imperialism as a consistently central issue. The article argues that this interpretation relies too heavily on evidence from a minority of elections—especially the famous ‘khaki’ struggle of 1900—and that in the majority of campaigns in this period, imperialism was relatively unimportant as an election issue, including in the Unionist landslide of 1895. The second argument questions historians’ preoccupation with the ‘contested’ nature of discourses of imperialism and patriotism at elections, and contends that—insofar as the empire was an important campaign issue at all—the Conservatives were considerably more likely to champion it and connect it to politically charged and emotive appeals than were their Liberal opponents. Finally, the article maintains that the languages of imperialism and patriotism have often been unhelpfully conflated by historians, and argues that they could become politically synonymous only in the very specific circumstance of a ‘khaki’ election. In other contests, they could diverge, as is demonstrated by a case study of the campaign of 1906 when patriotism was reclaimed by the Liberals from a domestic, rather than imperial platform.     

An enduring influence on imperial defence and grand strategy: British perceptions of the Italian Navy, 1935–1943

The Mediterranean was a vital artery of the British Empire. It was a strategic corridor, linking Britain to its Middle and Far East possessions and precious resources. Its control was a central tenet of British imperial strategy, yet by the mid-1930s, this faced a new challenge from Fascist Italy. The Italian Navy was central to expansionist aspirations and forced British reappraisals of the allocation of defence resources both in the Mediterranean and elsewhere. It therefore came to exert a generally under-appreciated influence on pre-war British imperial defence policy and war planning. Although consistently viewed as vastly inferior to the Royal Navy, it was still seen as an impediment to Britain's ability to deliver imperial defence across the globe, or conduct a worldwide war against multiple enemies. This view persisted even after important defeats were inflicted on it in 1940–1941, and continued right through to 1943. Awareness of the seriousness with which the British viewed Italian naval strength adds important context to debates about British strategy in the Far East and over Winston Churchill's preference for a ‘Mediterranean first’ strategy. Italian naval power played a greater role in shaping the Allied prosecution of the Second World War than is commonly accepted.     

Rethinking Britain's Foreign Policy and the Occupation Zone in Germany 1945–1947: Questions of Structural and Functional Continuity in British Foreign Policy-Making

This article uses a detailed examination of British policy towards the occupation zone in Germany after World War II as a lens through which to illuminate enduring elements of structural and functional continuity in British foreign policy-making. Many of the problems facing British policy-makers in the post-World War II era replicated those relating to the occupation of the Rhineland and Ruhr in the early 1920s. Analysing the response of British policy-making to these resonances highlights underlying thematic trends in overall British foreign policy. The areas of continuity revealed challenge traditional historiographical views that foreign policy was shaped by elite group thinking in the Foreign Office. This article also evaluates British foreign policy in the light of recent developments in the historiography of the Cold War. Recent scholarship emphasises the multi-faceted and organic nature of the Cold War and highlights the difficulties involved in approaching issues such as ideology when the states involved were varied and had different infrastructures, cultures and foreign policy traditions and systems. By drawing out deeper resonances in foreign policy-making, this article contributes to a deeper understanding of the culture and tensions through which British policy was generated in the post-World War II period.     

‘A Hazardous Task’: Britain and the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations

In 2014, the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations celebrated its fiftieth anniversary since its coming into force in 1964. Setting out the privileges and immunities accorded to diplomats and diplomatic missions, the negotiations of this convention were part of the United Nations' plan to strengthen the international rule of law. This article analyses the role of Britain, one of the major actors in the negotiation process. It explores how Britain's negotiation position was shaped by diplomatic realities of the 1950s, and the strategies used to ensure Britain's interests being reflected in the final convention. The focus will be on the overall political pressure that underlined Britain's negotiation position, in order to reveal the general UK position on the codification of diplomatic privileges and immunities. Despite the remarkably friendly atmosphere at the 1961 Vienna conference, Britain could not press through all its amendments which, through the concluding legislation process, protracted Britain's ratification process. The article shows while London was supporting the codification of international law, codification by convention was not its ultimate choice. Therefore, the subsequent legislation process was marked by an inter-departmental dispute between the Foreign Office and Treasury, inter alia, on the exemption of Scotch whisky from excise duties.     

The invention of the basset hound: breed,blood and the late Victorian dog fancy, 1865–1900

In this article the authors explore the practices and conceptualisations of British dog breeding and the showing of pedigree dogs by the ‘the dog fancy’, focusing specifically on the story of a single breed: the basset hound. This was not simply a story of British dog fanciers appropriating a French dog breed; indeed, this was impossible because the very notion of a dog ‘breed’, defined by conformation and legitimated by pedigree, was in the process of invention. They show how the British dog-show fancy chose one, from many and varied types of French hound, to be the basset hound, and how this choice was legitimated by reference to an imagined history, where the British dog fancy rescued a noble animal from French indifference to breed and blood. The chosen physical form was standardised to arbitrary ideal, but was by means no static. In the spirit of the times, it was ‘improved’, first by the empirical methods of animal breeders, using pedigrees to secure good and pure ‘blood’, and then by the application of science, particularly artificial insemination and hereditarian theories.     

Radiocarbon evidence indicates that migrants introduced farming to Britain

Archaeologists disagree about how farming began in Britain. Some argue it was a result of indigenous groups adopting domesticates and cultigens via trade and exchange. Others contend it was the consequence of a migration of farmers from mainland Europe. To shed light on this debate, we used radiocarbon dates to estimate changes in population density between 8000 and 4000 cal BP. We found evidence for a marked and rapid increase in population density coincident with the appearance of cultigens around 6000 cal BP. We also found evidence that this increase occurred first in southern England and shortly afterwards in central Scotland. These findings are best explained by groups of farmers from the Continent independently colonizing England and Scotland, and therefore strongly support the migrant farmers hypothesis.