The West African Medical Staff and the Administration of Imperial Tropical Medicine, 1902–14

The reaction of British business to the decolonisation of the Empire has been the focus of much recent research, but few studies have shed light on the continued presence of commercial activities after independence. Barclays Bank DCO in Nigeria began indigenising its staff during decolonisation, but this process was far from complete at independence. African managers at Barclays were supposed to continue British banking traditions, while the post-colonial state hoped to gain more influence on foreign investment through the Nigerianisation of management. By the time the Nigerian civil war effectively ended in 1969 Barclays was only just beginning to come to terms with the ability and ‘character’ of its Nigerian managers, while the Nigerian state was moving towards more radical policies to control foreign business. This article aims to highlight the importance of Africanisation programmes for the structure and control of a major British bank trying to adapt first to the end of Empire and then to the post-colonial world.     

Varieties of nationalism in the political discourses of Habsburg Austria

Nationalism in the Habsburg Empire is traditionally viewed through an ethnic lens. Despite a growing literature on ‘national indifference’ that studies nationalism in Habsburg central Europe from a constructivist perspective and advances our knowledge concerning variations in national identifications, the nationalism implied in these works remains largely limited to an exclusionary ethnic type. This reductionist view of central European nationalism mirrors the traditional dichotomy of ethnic ‘Eastern’ versus civic ‘Western’ nationalism. In order to avoid this reduction, this article approaches nationalism as a thin-centred ideology and explores varieties of nationalism in Habsburg Austria during the long 19th century. Although certain ideational paths made ethno-nationalism appear, retrospectively, as a quasi-natural feature of central Europe, the findings show that there developed rival discursive traditions of nationalism and competing representations of nation.     

The psychiatric works of Emil Kraepelin: a many-faceted story of modern medicine

A new English language edition of some of the major works of Emil Kraepelin (1856-1926), the famous German psychiatrist, appeared in 2002. This essay has been written to mark the occasion. Kraepelin is famous for his psychiatric nosology, specifically the demarcation of dementia praecox (schizophrenia) and manic-depressive insanity (bi-polar disorder). This essay deals not only with these topics but with many other aspects of Kraepelin's psychiatry: his talents as a writer and teacher; his unusual and intense concern with volition; his lack of psychological empathy with his patients, on the one hand, and on the other, his humane care for their physical well-being; his tangled involvement with psychoanalysis; his war on alcohol; his tradition-bound treatment of hysteria; his reflective attempt to understand paranoia; some criticisms of his work; the debate over the role played by his famous diagnostic cards (Z?hlkarten); his misuse of his psychiatric beliefs in the public arena. A conclusion addresses both his shortcomings and his assets.     

Between two cities: Jewish women and exogamous marriage in medieval Catalonia

In the marriage strategies of medieval Catalan Jews, the economic security of women came second to the economic goals of families. Exogamous marriages – marriages between the Jewish communities of two different cities – exacerbated the vulnerability of Jewish wives, widows and divorcées, due in large part to restrictions on women’s travel. Women who moved in order to marry experienced greater difficulty in managing financial resources and lost access to kinship networks. When women married men from other cities, at best they found themselves unable to take advantage of the connections created by their marriages. At worst, they risked financial loss if their husbands absconded to other cities with their dowries. Five case studies drawn from thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Catalan notarial registers reveal some of the ways in which exogamous marriages disadvantaged Jewish women. The extreme case of exogamy delineates the boundaries of possibility for Jewish women in the medieval Western Mediterranean.