Identity,Gender, and the History of European Nations and Nationalisms

Abstract. The distinction between cultural and political nationalisms has become a commonplace in writings on nations and nationalism. In this article I analyse the relation of culture to politics in the history of modem European nationalist thought from a gender perspective. I argue that gendered forms of national identification and masculinist definitions of the body politic and the national citizen were mutually reinforcing. The article has three main sections. First, I draw on feminist historio–graphy to show that the central event of modem European nationalism, the French Revolution, involved a differentiation of masculine from feminine forms of national citizenship. Second, I use nineteenth-century sources to argue that the ‘separation of spheres’ and an image of the bourgeois family effectively diminished the role of women in relation to the nation. In the final section I show that the history of changing perceptions of the sexed human body is implicit in the imagining of national communities and in the political legitimation of national boundaries and national identities.     

Turning International: Foundations of Modern International Thought and New Paradigms for Intellectual History

Summary

This essay provides an overview of the disciplinary and analytical significance of David Armitage's Foundations of Modern International Thought in the context of the new international history, and the so-called ‘international turn’. It then goes on to discuss the significance of the absence of women in this new sub-field of intellectual history.     

Investigating Identity and Life Histories: Isotopic Analysis and Historical Documentation of Slave Skeletons Found on the Cape Town Foreshore, South Africa

Isotopic analysis of skeletons excavated during the 1950s has confirmed that they are the remains of shipwreck victims: slaves on board the Portuguese slaving brig Pacquet Real when it sank on 18 May 1818. Twenty-five slaves drowned and the remaining 133 became Prize Negroes at the Cape. The isotopic signatures are consistent with values expected for people living in an African village eating a terrestrially based diet. Analyses of different skeletal elements, i.e., teeth, long bone, and rib, are shown to be a valuable tool in tracing change or consistency in diet during a person's life, because different skeletal elements form at different stages of life and, subsequently, remodel at different rates. A comparison of isotope ratios from different skeletal elements indicates a change in diet in all these individuals, probably coincident with their enslavement. Variation between individuals in the isotopic composition of diets eaten early in life is sufficiently large to deduce heterogeneous origins for the group.     

Female and National Self‐Determination: A Gender Re‐reading of ‘The Apogee of Nationalism’

Abstract. This article offers a gender re‐reading of the international history of the post‐First World War peace process, a period when nationalism is said to have reached its ‘apogee’, when national self‐determination and mutual cooperation between nations in the form of a League of Nations defined liberal aspirations for a democratic new world order. It was also a period when international women's organisations emphasised female self‐determination as both a national and international issue. Juxtaposed, these two aspects of the history of the peace of 1919 shed light on the importance of sex difference to the idea of national self‐determination and to the overlapping constitution of the national and the international as spheres of political agency and influence in the early twentieth century.     

Does Institutional Location Protect from Political Influence? The Case of a Minimum Labour Standards Enforcement Agency in Australia

Among the many factors that influence enforcement agencies, this article examines the role of the institutional location (and independence) of agencies, and an incumbent government's ideology. It is argued that institutional location affects the level of political influence on the agency's operations, while government ideology affects its willingness to resource enforcement agencies and approve regulatory activities. Evidence from the agency regulating minimum labour standards in the Australian federal industrial relations jurisdiction (currently the Fair Work Ombudsman) highlights two divergences from the regulatory enforcement literature generally. First, notions of independence from political interference offered by institutional location are more illusory than real and, second, political need motivates political action to a greater extent than political ideology.     

Narrating Difference and Defining the Nation in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century 'Western' Europe

This article examines the influence of Orientalist representations of Eastern Europe on definitions and theories of the nation, and their impact on normative interpretations of the nature of nations and national identity in Western Europe. It focuses on the history of the development of these normative interpretations in the decades leading up to and including the First World War. During this period European progressives--whether intellectuals, social scientists or politicians--residing in Britain and France, definitively 'Western European' states, were keen to discuss the future application of the principle of nationality, its necessity and its obstacles. With the outbreak of war in 1914, such progressive interest in the status of nations and national identities helped shape the anticipated democratic 'new world order' and the mental map of Eastern and Western Europe. I argue that their attempts to explain and represent the nature and significance of nationhood and national identity iterated Orientalist versions of Eastern Europe, and, at the same time, their definitions and theorisations of nations were replete with anomalies that defy any simply categorisation of the nature of Western Europe or the status of its nations.     

Leprosy at the Lazaretto on St Eustatius,Netherlands Antilles

Leprosaria established in the Americas during the Colonial period bear many similarities with those found in medieval Europe. They are comparable in terms of isolation, the objectification of leprosy sufferers and their association with religious charities. The Lazaretto on St Eustatius was operated from 1866 to 1923. The site was investigated to recover palaeopathological evidence of leprosy at a leprosarium in the Americas. Five burials were excavated; three individuals showed evidence of bone modifications consistent with those caused by leprosy, including aspects of ‘rhinomaxillary syndrome’ and the bilaterally symmetrical post‐cranial changes that have been described in leprosy examples from medieval Europe. An exceptional find was the presence of potentially leprous bone changes to the hyoid, thyroid and 3^rd–6^th cervical vertebrae. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.