Measure of Despair: the Syndicate for Commerce and Industry,the London Tribune,and German Foreign Policy, 1906–8

Based on fresh archival sources in Germany and Britain, this article offers new insight into the mindest of the German Foreign Ministry in the aftermath of the First Morocco Crisis of 1905/06. Eager to arrest the deterioration in the Anglo-German relationship and concerned about its fallout for US-German relations, the German Foreign Ministry, in league with twenty of the country's top financiers, took a radical initiative which resulted in Germany's largest expenditure, before the First World War, on influencing the press. The article closes with a transnational comparison, detailing a similar influence-buying scheme masterminded by a high-level British political wire-puller.     

The Revolt against the West: Decolonisation and its Repercussions in British International Thought, 1945–75

It has been suggested that British intellectuals were either indifferent to decolonisation or sought to downplay its impact. As a consequence, historians of international thought have overlooked the extensive debates that occurred among scholars and intellectuals concerned with British foreign policy and international relations. This article addresses those debates, examining the responses of internationalist, Whig, realist, and radical thinkers to decolonisation and to what they thought to be the changes it brought about in contemporary world politics. It argues that far from being indifferent to decolonisation, many British students of international relations were deeply worried about what some called ‘the revolt against the West’, and that those concerned helped shape the distinctive character of British international thought in the formative period of the discipline of International Relations (IR).     

Beyond ‘Parade Ground Soldiers’: French Army Assessments of the British in 1918

When the Germans launched their Spring Offensives of 1918, they placed tremendous pressure on the alliance between Britain and France. While French and British soldiers had formed strong relations through mutual cooperation at the Somme in 1916, the French experiences at Verdun and during the mutinies of 1917 had changed the way they viewed the war and, most crucially, how they would view any allied failures. When the British were forced to retreat following the beginning of Operation Michael in March 1918, the French reacted with fury. This article examines the nature of the French evaluations of the British during 1918 and the extent to which they judged their ally to have failed them. By using the collections of the Commissions de contrôle postal for the French army during the war, it will show the depths to which French opinion of the British fell in the first half of the year but also how British actions towards the war’s conclusion managed to restore some of their honour in French eyes.     

E. H. Carr,Norman Angell,and Reassessing the Realist–Utopian Debate

While the realist argument presented by E. H. Carr in The Twenty Years’ Crisis has received much attention from scholars, recent scholarship has suggested that traditional interpretations of the work and the debate in which it figured have not accurately reflected the inter-war discourse. In this article, the author provides detail to support these claims through an examination of Carr's landmark work in comparison with prominent ‘utopian’ counterparts, primarily Norman Angell but also others such as Leonard Woolf and Arnold Toynbee. The conclusion of this article calls for increased emphasis on the works of internationalist writers of the inter-war period. It also echoes other scholars in calling for renewed focus on early twentieth-century internationalist thought and a critical reappraisal of Carr's landmark work through the prism of his policy recommendations and the critique he received during the original ‘great debate’.     

Conflict and Complement: An Exploration of the Discourses Informing the Concept of the Socially Inclusive Museum in Contemporary Britain

This paper argues that there are a number of competing discourses informing debates about the idea of the ‘socially inclusive museum’ in Britain today. It identifies three major discourses present from the 19th century to the present day—the governmental, the representational, and the economic—and explores the relationships between them. It is proposed that recognition of the respective ideological and historical contexts of these different discourses will help us to understand some of the recent confusion and disagreement over the nature and merits of the ‘socially inclusive museum’. The article concludes by proposing some issues for future research.     

The social selectivity of migration flows affecting Britain's larger conurbations: An analysis of the 1991 census regional migration tables

Little is known about the social composition of migration affecting British cities, despite the currently high political salience of this issue. This is principally because of the very limited availability of reliable city‐scale data on such migrant characteristics as occupation and income. This paper uses the Regional Migration Tables from the 1991 Census to document the migration of labour force members to and from Britain's larger conurbations, distinguishing six main Social Groups defined on the basis of occupation. It is found that all eight areas were net losers of economically active people, that all six Social Groups were generally contributing to these net losses and that, in every case except London, there was a strong positive relationship between social status and the rate of net out‐migration to the rest of Britain. This latter case suggests the need for further work, which would benefit from the more detailed migration datasets that are promised from the 2001 Census.     

Max Pulver’s Himmelpfortgasse: Fictionalizing the 1920s Cocaine Craze in German-Speaking Europe

Abstract

In the years following the end of the First World War, cocaine achieved unprecedented popularity in Europe, a development reflected in the number of novels dealing with cocaine use by writers from across the Continent. One such is Max Pulver’s Himmelpfortgasse, first published in 1927, which tells of a Munich-based intellectual torn between his respectable bourgeois existence and his cocaine-fuelled passion for a young Viennese painter. After a brief interlude in Berlin, the protagonist follows his new love to Vienna, but their relationship soon deteriorates. The plot of the novel is unremarkable, but its depiction of three separate cocaine-using cliques, each based in a different city and each with a distinct social position and political orientation, vividly illustrates the extent to which recreational use of cocaine spread across geographical, socio-economic, and ideological divides in the period in question. Moreover, the narrator’s essayistic reflections on the function, effects, and social practice of cocaine use allow for productive cross-reading with contemporary toxicological sources. Pulver’s novel also occupies a curious position in literary history. As well as being one of several European cocaine novels of the inter-war period, it shows substantial thematic and stylistic links to the treatment of cocaine in the writings of Expressionist poet Gottfried Benn dating to the previous decade. Himmelpfortgasse’s Expressionist elements add to its distinctiveness, but have probably also contributed to the novel’s relative lack of commercial and critical success.     

1919年中英关于西藏问题的交涉

1919年中英就西藏问题进行了交涉。北京政府提出解决西藏问题的新建议。英国希望迅速解决西藏问题 ,交涉时在西藏与中国内地分界线问题上表现出灵活的立场 ,但北京政府突然中断谈判使其感觉受到了愚弄 ,并在外交上对中国进行了报复。日本干预西藏问题的谈判 ,遭到英国的强烈反对。北京政府采取“拖延”谈判的策略 ,对英交涉的立场也越来越强硬 ,最终挫败了英国迅速解决西藏问题、侵犯中国主权的图谋。     

论英国19世纪手工艺运动

自工业革命以后,英国文明已逐步发生根本的变化。英国19世纪手工艺运动在反思现代工业文明、反对战争、追求在信仰背景下的人性的复归和自然的生存状态,从思想和文化上形成与文艺复兴相悖互补的基本品质。这场运动是一场新文艺复兴运动,它影响了整个欧美文化与艺术的历史进程,推进了现代人信仰的重建和现代文明的健康发展。     

试析英美保守主义的异同

英美保守主义具有同源性,都维护传统,坚持宪政,反对极端主义,与自由主义共同构成其社会的主流意识形态。但二战后情况有所变化,美国保守主义者反对新政以来的自由主义,具有越来越明显的极端主义倾向,并自20世纪80年代开始左右着美国的对外政策,给世界带来了某种不稳定因素。