Alan Wilson – contributions to research on population and migration

ABSTRACT

This article reviews Alan Wilson's research on population and migration in the 1970s and the 2010s, which supplements his principal contribution - mathematical modelling of urban and regional systems. In the 1970s, drawing on input-output models of economies and working with Philip Rees, Wilson established the accounting basis for Andrei Rogers' multi-regional projection model, adding international migration. Innovative methods were developed to complete demographic accounts, where there were data gaps. In the 2010s, working with Adam Dennett, Wilson systematized methods for estimating migration flows between regions in Europe, employing his family of spatial interaction models. The key aim of both research strands was to ensure that no information was ignored to ensure consistency in population and migration models. The influence of Wilson's contributions to research on population and migration is traced through a survey of subsequent research.     

Covering up spying in the ‘Buster’ Crabb Affair: A note

Abstract

F EWER COLD WAR myths are more enduring in the United Kingdom than that of ‘Buster’ Crabb. In April 1956, Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) coaxed Commander Lionel ‘Buster’ Crabb, a naval frogman from the Second World War, out of retirement to dive under the Soviet cruiser Ordzhonikidze, while it was docked in Portsmouth. It had brought the Soviet Premier Nikolai Bulganin and the First Secretary of the Communist Party, Nikita S. Khrushchev, to the United Kingdom on a state visit. The operation, routine by all accounts, ended in both personal and diplomatic failure. Fourteen months later, the decomposed body of a frogman washed up in Chichester harbour. Despite the British government’s hope that the discovery might be the end of the affair, it fired up the conspiracy theorists, who alleged that the body could not be Crabb’s; that, in fact, he had been kidnapped, taken to the Soviet Union, and renamed Korablev.¹ The government did little to dispel such myths. A few days after Crabb’s disappearance, The Times succinctly summed up the situation: ‘official reticence about the activities which led to the death of Commander Crabb has caused much speculation.’² Curiosity was further piqued a few days later when the prime minister, Sir Anthony Eden, stated m the house of commons on 9 May that ‘it would not be in the public interest to disclose the circumstances in which Commander Crabb is presumed to have met his death.’³     

Sacred,but not surveyed: Nineteenth‐century surveys of Palestine

Abstract

Nineteenth‐century Palestine mapping projects based on systematic land surveying reached a peak with the Ordnance Survey of Western Palestine between 1871 and 1877, conducted on behalf of the Palestine Exploration Fund by officers of the British Royal Engineering Corps. Various other nineteenth‐century proposals for an organized survey of the country—some of which bore partial results while others were never implemented—are also presented. The surveying of one region, Mesopotamia, during the 1830s and 1840s, forms the basis for the discussion of the reasons for the relative lateness of the topographical survey. The sacredness of the region seems not to have been a sufficiently convincing motive for entrepreneurs to organize and finance such a survey. The main reason for the delay in mapping the country as a whole was that it was not especially important, either strategically or geo‐politically, for the European nations engaged in the international struggles in the Middle East until the last quarter of the nineteenth century.     

The Rebel Chief Whip: The Role of Leslie Wilson in the Fall of the Lloyd George Coalition, 1922

This article explores the crisis within the Conservative Party in 1922 over the continuation of the coalition with Lloyd George's section of the Liberal Party, focusing on the actions of the Conservative chief whip, Leslie Wilson. Previously unused papers relating to Wilson's career shed new light on his role in the fall of the coalition. Wilson co‐ordinated opposition to the continuation of the coalition in its existing form, helping to solidify the group of junior ministers opposed to Lloyd George into a cohesive and powerful faction, which then forced the Conservative Party leader, Austen Chamberlain, into making concessions. Above all, Wilson was influential in forcing Chamberlain to agree to a meeting of MPs at the Carlton Club on 19 October 1922, at which the rebels won a decisive victory, causing the resignation of Chamberlain as party leader and Lloyd George as prime minister, in one of the most important events in modern British political history.     

威尔逊国际政治思想探源

长老派家庭的宗教背景是构成威尔逊国际政治思想的哲学来源。威尔逊的国际政治思想深深根植于他对英美民主政治的信奉。威尔逊对美国独特性的理解(美国例外论)和对边疆学说的接受影响着他对美国在世界事务中作用的看法。威尔逊国际社会改造的思想是美国国内进步主义改革思潮向国际关系领域的一次延伸。