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.     

青海都兰县哇沿水库古代墓葬2014年发掘简报

哇沿水库坝址位于青海省都兰县热水乡扎麻日村东南约2公里处,为配合哇沿水库的建设,2014年4～9月,青海省文物考古研究所与陕西省考古研究院合作,发掘了库区内的25座墓葬、5座殉马坑。这批墓葬虽盗扰严重,但出土文物依然丰富。墓葬形制、葬俗、殉牲方式及随葬品特点均体现出吐蕃文化因素的特征,为研究这一时期都兰地区的历史、吐蕃王国疆域变迁及唐、蕃文化的交流提供了重要实物资料。     

Briefly remembering Rosario Villari (1925–2017)

Umberto Gentiloni Silveri reflects briefly on the life and career of the Italian historian Rosario Villari who died in October 2017.     

Nation‐building policies in the Balkans: an Ottoman or a manufactured legacy?

Are post‐Ottoman nation‐building policies in the Balkans a legacy of the millet system? Some contend that the discriminatory nation‐building policies along religious lines employed by Balkan nations ruling elites are a legacy of the Ottoman era millet system (administration by religious affiliation); others argue that the Ottoman legacy is palpable in the millet‐like features preserved in the minority rights protection system resulting from World War I, and yet other scholars see the millet system as a critical antecedent. Studying closely the policies towards non‐core groups in the post‐Ottoman Balkans, one finds that the ‘Ottoman legacy’ is much more differentiated than is commonly assumed and that effects vary widely from place to place. Moreover, I argue that the persistence of certain features from one period to another may be an actual legacy in some cases, but there is also a possibility that we are dealing with a manufactured legacy, where elites choose to intervene and perpetuate an institution or a particular feature of it. I empirically demonstrate this distinction in a crucial case using archival sources.     

The Policy of Serbian Expansionism,with Specific Reference to Albanians in the Decade Preceding the Balkan Wars

The Balkans at the end of the nineteenth century was in flux. The Eastern Crisis, the Treaty of San Stefano and the Congress of Berlin had established a new political geography in the region that was fated not to hold for long. Here were intertwined the interests of the Great Powers and the newly established Balkan states. The Ottoman Empire which had controlled the region for centuries was in terminal decline. The newly established states supported by the Great Powers very quickly established expansionist policies cloaked in the guise of ‘liberation’ for the remaining Balkan lands from the Ottoman Empire. The question of the Albanian population of the region was largely ignored in European diplomacy. Serbia became fixated on expansion towards the Adriatic and the occupation of Albanian lands. After tracing the historical context of Serbian expansionism and its codification in Na?ertanije, this article makes full use of (chiefly Serbian) diplomatic sources in order to survey the practical implementation of this policy especially with regard to the Albanian population of the Ottoman territories in Europe in the decade before 1912.     

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.     

Morphometric Variability of Roman Dogs in Hispania Tarraconensis: The Case Study of the Vila de Madrid Necropolis

The size, body conformation and skull shape of Roman dogs from the ‘Vila de Madrid necropolis’ site, where 1480 dog remains were recovered, are described in this paper to provide evidence of the morphometric variability of Roman dogs in Hispania Tarraconensis. The individualized and detailed morphometric analysis of 10 individuals shows that the proliferation and explosion of the morphological variability already documented in different regions of the Roman Empire (Italia, Gallia, Britannia, Pannonia) are also noted here. The presence of very different individuals in terms of their shape and size, similar to the differences that can at present be noted between Pekingese and Doberman dogs, has been documented at the site. The reasons for the appearance of this morphological variability within those territories that were part of the Roman Empire are also discussed. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

From the “Good Tradition” to Religion on Some Basic Aspects of Religious Conversion in Early Medieval Tibet and the Comparative Central Eurasian Context

What Western academic literature described as ethnic or cultural Tibet in fact implies something composite and processually constructed: Tibet then often appears as a typical example for explanations of collective identity (and ethnicity). Such approaches increasingly are applied in present-day anthropology and historical studies, highlighting the historical conditions and the politically, socially and ideationally constructed features of identity. In Tibet, identity-building was strongly related to the spread of Buddhism. The new religion was introduced in the time of the Tibetan Empire (seventh to ninth century), but it was only its later spread (from the eleventh century) that led to the effective, all-embracing establishment of Buddhism in the Highlands. It was interlinked with regionally different forms of political manifestations—the founding of Buddhist kingdoms at the periphery and the emergence of monastic hegemonies in the central regions. These developments correlated with processes of conversion, which in its narrative model is described as an act of conquest, taming and civilizing the physical universe and which in theory actually never ends. Apart from considering current anthropological discussions of the phenomenon of religious conversion, this paper will include a comparative view of the history of Christianization in early medieval Europe (especially in Western Europe—the Frankish kingdom and the barbarian zones North of the Rhine and the Danube, fifth to tenth century). Inter alia this also raises questions about the initial social forces and interests promoting the new religion's adoption, and to what extent formal similarities with the Tibetan case are ascertainable in Europe.     

A MOST MODERN SUBJECT: THE DISCIPLINE OF HISTORY AND THE FASHIONING OF NATIONALIST AND OTHER MODERN SUBJECTIVITIES

This book takes an ethnographic approach to its topic by endeavoring to observe how social and disciplinary subjects shaped by modernity go on to constitute modern worlds. Specifically, it attempts to “explore modernity as a contradictory and checkered historical-cultural entity and category as well as a contingent and contended process and condition” (1). Most of the subjects considered are intellectuals and academic disciplines (specifically history and anthropology), although the argument occasionally focuses on artists as well. The book particularly recognizes and analyzes the ambiguities, ambivalences, and contradictions generated within modernity not as mistakes or gaps like so many potholes to be fixed over time, but as constitutive of the modern landscape itself. This accepting acknowledgment, in turn, stands central to the book's endeavor to resist the teleological paradigms inherent in many modern metaphors regarding roads that must be traveled to move from what is backward to what is forward, from a superseded past to a promising future. Central to the volume—and its most original contribution—are various deliberations on the productions of time and space by various subjects. To be clear, by “time” the book means history and temporality whereas “space” suggests tradition and culture. It resists the naturalization of modern constructs such as secularized time and cultural traditions, and forces them under an analytic lens. Critical to these investigations is Saurabh Dube's appropriately insistent claim that these temporal and spatial regimes can exist in tandem and coevally, even when they are seemingly in contradiction. Among other outcomes, the volume prompts further reflection on the manner in which historiography plays a role in the formation of nationalist and modern subjectivities among nonhistorians. This essay seeks to think through the history of history as a discipline emerging during the coalescence of a hegemonic European episteme and the emergence of a popularly embraced scientism. Despite its roots in Europe long preceding modernity and its parallels in South Asia preceding British rule, history underwent a transformation when inflected through European modernity, especially the influence of empirical science paradigms. Although its emergence as a discipline promoted and employed by both the empire and the nation-state created professional historians, an expanding public sphere has meant that research into its role in fashioning modern subjectivities (including nationalist ones) must consider its reshaping and redeployment by those resisting European-originated modernity and promoting alternative modernities.     

The Science of Empire: Darwinism,Human Diversity,and Russian Physical Anthropology

Summary : The article explores deployment of the Darwinian narrative of the “natural history of humanity” in Russian physical anthropology in the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. It traces two narratives developed by the leading Russian school of physical anthropology: one narrative advanced a universalist vision of collective scholarly enterprise working toward clarifying the missing links in the a priori accepted developmental evolutionary model. The other constructed a new language that undermined the idea of species/subspecies/races/nations/ as stable, externally bounded, and internally homogeneous units and attempted to rationalize imperial hybridity. The article's main focus is on the latter classificatory narrative, its relational methodology, and the protostructuralist units of comparison that it produced.