Inconsistent,downplayed, and pathologized: How mining's gendered impacts are considered in BC environmental assessment

To what extent do mining environmental assessments in British Columbia (BC) consider gendered impacts? How are they considered? And how are these considerations shaped during the environmental assessment process? To answer these questions we undertook a systematic review of all completed BC mining environmental assessments between 1995 and 2019 (n = 37). Through a careful reading of documentation archived in the BC Environmental Assessment Office registry, we found that 60% of projects did not consider the gendered impacts of mining development; the remaining 40% of projects inconsistently assessed gendered impacts. While noting an increase in gender considerations in environmental assessments since 1995, also quantified in our results is what has not changed. Even where gender is considered, the assessments often collapse this concern into one of “women's issues,” obscuring intersectional impacts and downplaying violence along racialized and gender diverse lines, including those experienced by Indigenous women, children, two-spirit, trans, queer and non-binary people. Environmental assessment is a regulatory tool designed to adjudicate the impacts of mining projects, yet our results lead us to conclude that it is also a tool of environmental injustice, compounding and further sedimenting heteropatriarchal and racialized patterns produced through generations of settler colonial resource extraction in BC.     

FROM BREXIT TO HEGEL

British idealism has led an ambiguous existence in any overview of British historical and political thought in the twentieth century. Seen partly as an alien Continental intrusion into presumably typical British priorities of empiricism, positivism, and utilitarianism, it was badly damaged by its putative associations with the military enemy of two world wars. Admir Skodo's meticulous study of British “idealist revisionists” during the postwar period 1945–1980 repairs this damage by showing the extended influence of that idealism as funneled through the “new idealism” of the interwar period represented mainly by the philosophers R. G. Collingwood and Michael Oakeshott. Skodo demonstrates how these idealist revisionists deeply influenced postwar British historiography by underscoring qualities of humanism, pluralism, and variety not characteristically associated with idealism, reinterpreted a range of important topics in British history from the Tudors through the English civil wars to the Victorian period, and came up with political theorizing that celebrated the postwar welfare state while indicating its vulnerabilities to an increasingly technologized society. Just as Skodo's protagonists negotiated the 1970s transition in Britain's turn to Europe, so his account proves stimulating for contemporary concerns regarding a post‐Brexit Britain. The final part of the essay therefore looks at some suggested models, such as the “Anglosphere” or a “Singapore in the Atlantic” for Britain, before concluding with reflections on the importance according to a Hegelian reading of the modern “rational state” of the continued influence of Oxbridge intellectuals on the evolution of British directions and goals since the Victorian age.     

Marconi,masculinity and the heroic age of science: wireless telegraphy at the British Association meeting at Dover in 1899

Abstract

In September 1899, at the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) in Dover, Guglielmo Marconi’s wireless telegraphy system was used to transmit messages across the English Channel (and across a national border) for the first time. This achievement represented a highly effective performance of scientific masculinity and constitutes a key turning point in an important struggle between competing interpretations of invention and innovation as masculine practices within British science. The British Association tended to favor a narrative of scientific research as a collectivist, international, gentlemanly-amateur pursuit, largely confined to the laboratory. Marconi, by contrast, explained the development of wireless telegraphy as the achievement of his own genius. Appealing not only to the established scientific elite but to a range of non-traditional audiences, and stressing the possibilities or ‘imagined uses’ of his technology even more so than his actual results, he succeeded in commanding unprecedented influence.     

Shock and friction as explanations for disaster at the Battle of Amiens, 8 August 1918

The assault at Amiens was ‘the black day of the German Army’. British accounts treat the Germans as passive, of no more importance than the terrain, and victory as inevitable. Using German sources, and drawing on statistical ‘historical analysis’ of behaviour in battle, the article argues the frontline defenders panicked when thick fog left them defenceless against the British tanks. By contrast, when the fog lifted, the defence recovered. Although senior German commanders on the spot reacted well, Ludendorff fell into a state of shock, such that he convinced the Kaiser the war must be ended.     

The secret life of Ian Fleming: spies,lies and social ties

This article explores the fascinating interactions and experiences of James Bond creator, Ian Fleming, with the real world of intelligence. It has long been known that Fleming worked in Naval Intelligence during the Second World War. However, accounts of his time there tend to portray him as a lowly and slightly eccentric administrator. Drawing on newly discovered archival materials, plus memoirs and histories, it is argued here that Fleming was a respected and influential figure in the great game of espionage for some three decades. During the war, he was a central cog in the machinery of naval intelligence, planning operations, working with partners in American intelligence and liaising with secret Whitehall departments, including the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park. Before and after the war, he was involved in a range of intelligence networks, often using journalistic cover to hide his clandestine connections. Throughout his life, his social circle was a ‘who’s who’ of spies and saboteurs, including CIA Director Allen Dulles. In short, he straddled the state-private divide. Taken together, these dealings with real intelligence paved the way for and gave veracity to his fiction, which continues to shape public perceptions of intelligence to this day.     

The Board of Deputies of British Jews and the initial phase of the Italian Racial Laws: reactions and strategies (1938–1940)

ABSTRACT

This article aims to reconstruct the activities of the Board of Jewish Deputies, the central representative body of British Jewry, in support of the Italian Jews affected by the Fascist Racial Laws of 1938. By analysing the institution’s documents and examining the most widely read Jewish newspaper in the U.K., the Jewish Chronicle, this research investigates how the initial phase of the Italian anti-Semitic campaign was received in Great Britain, and what measures were put in place by British Jewry in their attempts to help the Italian Jews. The Jewish historian, Cecil Roth, played an important role during this phase, in active collaboration with the leadership of the Board and the staff of the Jewish Chronicle, gathering as much information as possible on Italy and its history in order to shed light on the events that were taking place during the first years of the Racial Laws and until the entrance of Italy into WWII (1938–1940). The involvement of certain members of the Foreign Office with links to the Board, and the shared goal of helping Italian Jewry, was also fundamental in this period.     

Welshness in ‘British Wales’: negotiating national identity at the margins

Popular interpretations of national identity often focus on the unifying qualities of nationhood. However, societies frequently draw hierarchical distinctions between the people and places who are ‘most national’, and those who are ‘least national’. Little attention is paid to these marginal places within the nation and the experiences of their inhabitants. This article helps to address this by analysing the ‘less Welsh’ British Wales region of Wales, a country that has traditionally possessed a hierarchical, regionally constituted nationhood. The article studies the British Wales region both ‘from above’ – considering how some areas develop as ‘less national’ – and ‘from below’, introducing empirical ethnographic work into ‘everyday Welshness’ in this area. Whilst previous work on hierarchical nationhood focuses on how hierarchies are institutionalized by the state, this article demonstrates how people at the margins of the nation actively negotiate their place in the nation. Whilst people in this area expressed a strong Welshness, they also struggled to place themselves in the nation because they had internalized their lowly place within the national hierarchy. The article demonstrates the importance of place and social class for national identity construction and draws attention to the role of power in the discursive construction of hierarchical nationhood.     

Free Trade Empire to Commonwealth of Nations: India,Britain and Imperial Preference, 1903–1932

This article examines the dialogue between British tariff reformers and Indian nationalists over the application of imperial trade preference in India from Joseph Chamberlain's 1903 Birmingham address to the 1932 Imperial Economic Conference. For both groups, this issue was a focal point to assess India's constitutional status and national participation within an emerging British Commonwealth and international system after the First World War. Specifically, it marked a comprehensive challenge to the orthodoxy of free trade and liberal empire seen increasingly as a determent to reconciling national prosperity and imperial unity. It is argued that prominent tariff reformers’ well-studied criticism of an ‘unpatriotic’ cosmopolitan free trade made them also sympathetic to longstanding Indian grievances that this fiscal policy exacerbated economic exploitation and racial discrimination. After 1919, Indian nationalists, including ‘historical economists’, utilized metropolitan advocacy for imperial preference to demand fiscal and political autonomy from Britain and national, as well as racial, equality in collective imperial decision. At the 1932 conference in Ottawa, India's voluntary and negotiated acceptance of preferential trade with Britain, beside the white self-governing Dominions, helped transform the British Commonwealth into an egalitarian organization recognizable after 1947.