Een‐Gonyama Gonyama!: Zulu Origins of the Boy Scout Movement and the Africanisation of Imperial Britain

British imperialists in the late 19th century denigrated non‐western cultures in rationalising the partition of Africa, but they also had to assimilate African values and traditions to make the imperial system work. The partisans of empire also romanticised non‐western cultures to convince the British public to support the imperial enterprise. In doing so, they introduced significant African and Asian elements into British popular culture, thereby refuting the assumption that the empire had little influence on the historical development of metropolitan Britain. Robert Baden‐Powell conceived of the Boy Scout movement as a cure for the social instability and potential military weakness of Edwardian Britain. Influenced profoundly by his service as a colonial military officer, Africa loomed large in Baden‐Powell's imagination. He was particularly taken with the Zulu. King Cetshwayo's crushing defeat of the British army at Isandhlawana in 1879 fixed their reputation as a ‘martial tribe’ in the imagination of the British public. Baden‐Powell romanticised the Zulus' discipline, and courage, and adapted many of their cultural institutions to scouting. Baden‐Powell's appropriation and reinterpretation of African culture illustrates the influence of subject peoples of the empire on metropolitan British politics and society. Scouting's romanticised trappings of African culture captured the imagination of tens of thousands of Edwardian boys and helped make Baden‐Powell's organisation the premier uniformed youth movement in Britain. Although confident that they were superior to their African subjects, British politicians, educators, and social reformers agreed with Baden‐Powell that ‘tribal’ Africans preserved many of the manly virtues that had been wiped by the industrial age.     

NEPALESE HISTORY IN A EUROPEAN EXPERIENCE: A CASE STUDY IN TRANSCULTURAL HISTORIOGRAPHY

In March 2013, a group of German, Nepalese, and Swiss historians, Indologists, and an architectural historian gathered for a workshop in Nepal to develop a new approach to the understanding of South Asian historiography, especially the Nepalese chronicles from the nineteenth century. The outcome is the present collaboratively written article. It is argued that, in the past, the analysis of South Asian historiography has been preoccupied by arguments based on an understanding of history that highlights facts and events. A transcultural and multidisciplinary approach, however, would overcome the common dichotomies of factuality and fictionality, history and myth, or evidence and truth. Recognizing the specificity of South Asian historiography, the article develops an approach to bridge asymmetries and entanglements in the academic use of the past in a way that also opens up a new perspective on Western historiography. By analyzing the religious, spatial, literary, and historical, and contemporary or context‐related aspects of a nineteenth‐century chronicle and by using “fieldwork” as a methodological tool for studying historiography, it is proposed to understand the framing of time and the making of sequences and historical periods as an open process that results in the constant and synchronic creation of chronological spaces.     

FROM THE ECONOMIC TO THE POLITICAL: REGIONAL PLANNING IN WEST GERMANY

The resolution of regional disparities within the Federal Republic of Germany entails a complex redistributive process. Regional assistance policies initiated as wartime relief measures have, over time, incorporated classical incentive programs and revenue-sharing. Revenue transfers among the three levels of government are dynamic, arising from changes in the socioeconomic and political environment. Much of the spatial effect of regional policies is overshadowed by more extensive sectoral benefits.
La détermination des inégalités régionales au sein de la République fédérale allemande fait appel à un procédé complexe de redistribution. Des politiques d'aide régionale, introduites comme des mesures de secours en temps de guerre, sont devenues avec le temps des programmes classiques d'incitation et de partage des reVenus. Les transferts de revenu entre les trois niveaux de gouvernement constituent un mécanisme dynamique répondant aux changements dans le milieu socioéconomique et politique. L'influence spatiale résultant des politiques régionales est en grande partie éclipsée par l'expansion des avantages sectoriels.     

Seeing Red: Liberalism, Communism, and the Black Struggle for Human Rights

Carol Anderson , Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944–1955 . New York : Cambridge University Press , 2003 . 290 pp.     

AN INVESTIGATION OF THE LIGHT-TRANSMITTING PROPERTIES OF EARLY MEDIEVAL SPLAYED WINDOWS

There is some evidence that early medieval single-light splayed windows were specifically designed for maximum optical efficiency. Some factors affecting the design of an individual window are examined from three points of view: (1) a brief theoretical consideration of the crude effects of size and angle of splay; (2) an abbreviated account of an analysis of the characteristics of actual windows surviving from the Anglo-Saxon period; (3) an account of an experiment to determine by means of a scale apparatus the relative effects of window size, angle and type of splay, and surface finish of the fabric.