Playing with Fire: The 4th Duke of Hamilton's Jacobite Politics and the Union

James Hamilton, duke of Hamilton and the Scots jacobites are generally linked in analyses of the final years of the Scots polity. Indeed, Hamilton is often presented as the leader of the jacobite party in the Scottish parliament. Yet both contemporaries and historians have been unsure what to make of his on-again, off-again, conduct with respect to the exiled Stuarts and France. This has fuelled an ongoing debate about Hamilton's erratic and highly enigmatic behaviour during the winter of 1706–7, when the Union was passing the Scottish parliament. Was he genuinely opposing the Union? Was he duped by the court? Or was he, ‘bought and sold for English gold ’? This essay takes a fresh look at the duke and his part in the Union crisis in the light of new and previously underused jacobite sources with a view to better understanding Hamilton's aims, objectives, and influence with this crucial group. Only the jacobites and the Cameronians were potentially willing to take their opposition to the Union to God's Acre. But neither party immediately flew to arms in response to passage of a union they both believed was a betrayal of everything they held dear, and Hamilton was a major factor in their failure to do so. This essay thus takes a close look at the duke's part in preventing a major national uprising against the Union in the winter of 1706–7 and advances a new interpretation of his conduct and significance throughout the Union crisis.     

The rise of cultural landscapes

The new interest in cultural landscapes is forcing a reappraisal of concepts of countryside heritage. First the traditional split between cultural and natural values is challenged. Second, modern landscape studies emphasise the subjectivity of landscape assessment, and this is subverting the former tendency to aspire to objectivity in evaluation. The acceptance of ‘associative’ value in landscape is an indicator of this. Modern landscape studies also emphasise the interrelationships between processes and aspects of value, and this is encouraging specialists to communicate across disciplinary frontiers. The desire by ecologists in the mid‐1980s to have cultural landscapes inscribed on the World Heritage list caused a re‐assessment of the World Heritage Criteria, and an initiative by ICOMOS brought this process to a conclusion in 1992. However the reappraisal of concepts of countryside value imply that there are many other philosophical and practical matters still to be resolved.     

Slaves, servants and wage earners: Free and unfree labour, from Grotius to Blackstone

This article provides an intellectual history of the status of wage earners as conceptualized within the natural law paradigm by European writers both on the Continent and in Britain. Historians of political discourse have mostly investigated the consequences of such a status for the political rights of labourers. This article shows that the crucial moves were made by different authors analysing the relation of servant to master either in the domestic sphere or in private contracts. The article further contends that that resulting deeply ambiguous analyses implied a far from complete personal freedom for wage earners. This had a decisive impact on different visions of commercial society in early modern times, and left a significant legacy for moderns.     

Alberta’s Great Experiment in Senatorial Democracy

In 2014, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that the unelected nature of the Senate is an inherent feature of Canadian parliamentary democracy and is a central pillar of the constitution. Members of the Upper House are appointed by the Governor General, acting on the advice of the Prime Minister. The decision taken by the Prime Minister is not subject to review by Parliament or the provincial legislative assemblies. Patronage appointments have given the Senate a reputation as a dumping ground for political friends and party insiders. In 1989, the province of Alberta enacted the Senatorial Selection Act, arguing that it would serve as a stepping stone for substantive reform to the Senate. The province has held four elections in which the people of the province have chosen senators-in-waiting. This article argues that the Court’s opinion in Reference re Senate Reform undermines the foundation upon which the provincial statute rests.     

Intimate citizenship? Rethinking the politics and experience of citizenship as emotional in Wales and Singapore

Conversations around, and conceptions of, citizenship have changed over time. Assumed initially as a mark of membership, of belonging to a political community (Marshall 1950), the essence of what it means to be a citizen and what the contractual ties of citizenship are have evolved over time. This evolution has been encouraged by processes of migration and increasing mobility. More recently, our ability to traverse geographical and political boundaries has meant that notions of borders and boundaries, of who belongs where and why, have also been subject to dramatic changes. This article investigates the impact of such mobility on the individual lived experience of migrant women who, as a group, have been traditionally excluded from more formal political arenas, and asks questions of what citizenship means for them. Though I do not contest the very political fact of citizenship as status, this article challenges the way in which the nature of this status is assumed or implied for all. This article therefore argues that citizenship itself is a much more fluid concept, incorporating the emotional and lived experience of individuals and that it is in these emotional accounts through which citizenship, and its extended rights and political capabilities, must be understood through a sense of everyday, grounded and personal politics.     

The socio-ecological fix by multi-scalar states: The development of ‘Greenways of Paradise’ in Chengdu

This paper examines the recent green turn in China by investigating a large-scale urban greenway project. Using the perspective of the socio-ecological fix, we demonstrate that multi-scalar states strive to upgrade environmental quality. Specifically, the local state seizes the opportunity for ‘ecological civilisation’ envisioned by the central state to carry out green infrastructure development. We reveal complex motivations to incorporate ecological changes into entrepreneurial urban governance instead of encroaching greenspace for economic growth. Our state-centred analysis reveals that such an environmental strategy, the making of Chinese green urbanism, is promoted like a political mission, despite its operation by the development corporation. We argue that, while the socio-ecological fix facilitates capital accumulation, its deployment must be understood through state politics and actors.     

基于环境监测和机器学习的自动化洞窟保护管理方法

科学有效的石窟环境保护与管理策略对窟内文物的安全至关重要。利用麦积山两个单开口洞窟的环境监测数据,基于机器学习等数据科学技术,建立了一种自动化洞窟保护管理方法,可依据窟内外水汽的活动来实时判别窟门的活动。先根据监测数据遴选水汽活动的三个特征参数——趋势、数值和短时波动差异,再采用机器学习分类器识别窟门的长期开闭状态,最后通过离群值进一步诊断检测人员的瞬时出入情况。评估结果表明,在筛选出最优参数的情况下,支持向量机模型具有良好的综合识别准确率,其中窟门开闭状态达97.7%,瞬时出入活动检测达94.9%,满足自动化洞窟管理的需求。为未来的保护管理方案制订提供数据参考,并为预防性保护工作提供技术支持。     

女性工作场所的身份认同与阶层生产——以某高校食堂为例

本文在劳动过程理论和女性地理学研究的理论成果上,对学校食堂进行研究,分析两种类型女工在工作场所的分工等级与认同机制。首先,劳动过程理论的意义在于解析了资本主义在发展过程中,如何制造服从的员工和稳固的分工等级关系;但是本文研究表明,当部分女工没有被完全纳入生产的中心环节时,她们进入工作场所之前的性别身份就起到了重要的预设作用。籍此,本文试图推动社会-空间作用双层机制研究,尝试推动微观空间尺度内自我身份在劳动过程中认定与生产的理论建构。