British Attempts Research Articles

Лаборатория империи: политическая арифметика, социальная инженерия и решение “Хайлендской проблемы” Великобритании в конце XVII – первой половине XVIII вв.

The article bridges the traditional differentiation between “overseas” and “contiguous” (landmass) empires by focusing on the typical “continental” imperial policies of the English and then British government toward the Highland region of Scotland. The author argues that many “overseas” British imperial practices were developed in the late seventeenth century through the first half of the eighteenth century in Scotland, under the direct influence of the continental political culture of Cameralism. Thus, an important instrument used toward solving the “Highland problem” (understood as the pacification and modernization of the region) was “political arithmetic”: elementary population statistics, a precursor to political economy. The author characterizes the entanglement of academic practices with pragmatics of imperial governance and colonization as conscious social engineering. This early instance of social engineering helps in understanding many aspects of British imperial policies and latter-day attempts at social engineering as part of overseas colonialism.

Great Britain and the Bulgarian‑Yugoslavian Rapprochement (Fall 1944‑Winter 1945)

Due to their geographical position in the vicinity of the eastern part of the Mediterranean Sea, where the main routes to British colonies started, the Balkans were always an important region of Europe for London. Therefore, when towards the end of World War II, Britain’s influence in Greece and Turkey was endangered by the projected union of communist Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, both within the Kremlin’s orbit, the British leadership firmly counteracted. On the one hand, Churchill made an agreement with Stalin on retaining Greece under almost exclusive influence of the Anglo‑Saxon powers. On the other hand, the Foreign Office issued a strong objection to Moscow regarding the concept of federalization of both Southern Slavic states, which, from London’s point of view, would be conducive to the the expansion of communism from those countries and with the main role of the Soviet Union. The British attempts led to breaking the Yugoslavian‑Bulgarian negotiations regarding the federation, which was, paradoxically, beneficial also for Moscow, Sofia, and even Belgrade, which initially made efforts to implement this plan without delay.

Aid Conditionality as (Partial) Answer to Antigay Legislation: An Analysis of British and American Foreign Aid Policies Designed to Protect Sexual Minorities

Abstract The past decade has seen impressive gains for human rights activists desiring greater protections for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) persons. However, it has also seen regression: concerted attempts by leaders, particularly in Africa, the Mid­dle East, and Asia, to further criminalize sexual orientation and same-sex sexual activity while vilifying and marginalizing LGBT citizens. This Article explores the recent attempt by the United States and United Kingdom to ef­fectuate a possible solution to the rapid proliferation of these antigay statutes - threats to tie portions of foreign aid disbursements to the ways in which countries treat their LGBT citizens. After examining recent attempts at antigay legislation in a number of nations, most notably Malawi and Uganda, this Article discusses the fundamental differences be­tween the newly proposed American and British foreign aid policies, and critiques the theories underlying their development and implementation. Ultimately, this Article con­cludes that the American and British attempts to protect LGBT persons through aid condi­tionality serves as a powerful signaling effect, but will ultimately fail to convince antigay leaders and legislators from further passing these dangerous laws.

Mahogany: The Costs of Luxury in Early America by Jennifer Anderson (review)

Mahogany: The Costs of Luxury in Early America By Jennifer Anderson. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012. Pp. 398. Cloth, $35.00.)This is a thoughtful, well-researched, and beautifully written study. It is not mere commodity history and will surely appear on graduate read- ing lists. Anderson's examination of Caribbean environmental history fits into the growing body of literature on forestry and empire. As social history of Anglophone Caribbean labor it complements standard histor- ies of sugar slavery. And as cultural history of the American consumption revolutions, it thoughtfully probes the fluid relationship between high and middling tastes as American society urbanized and industrialized in the nineteenth century.Anderson first considers the emergence of mahogany as a symbol of eighteenth-century refinement and high-culture polish. Mahogany was indeed a status symbol, so much so that angry mobs attacked mahogany furnishings hoping to take their human targets down a peg, whether those targets were Loyalists in the 1770s or free blacks in later decades. Next, the author considers the harvesting of mahogany, often a byproduct of sugar cultivation, on Jamaica. Mahogany trees were stores of value felled by planters in bad sugar years and a living for traveling woodcutters who pursued the tree into the undeveloped uplands.Bermuda, the Bahamas, the Cayman Islands, and the Ceded Islands receive excellent treatment. Their inclusion is a model for a more holistic approach to the British Empire. Anderson connects Jamaican and Bay of Hondouras (present-day Belize) mahogany as waves in the same phenomenon. In the Bay, slaves with knowledge of mahogany locations had, as the Jamaican woodcutters did, considerable agency. The master-slave relationship remained continuously up for negotiation-as it seemed was Britain's very presence on the Central American coast.We learn, too, that North American merchants peddled British Caribbean mahogany across the Atlantic as part of their traffic in rum, sugar, slaves, and sundry. After U.S. independence, mahogany from the French and Spanish Caribbean, a newly specialized timber distribution system within the United States, and the adoption of mahogany veneers (thin layers of mahogany laid over a cheaper wood), made mahogany furnishings more accessible to American buyers even as the tree became rarer in the wild.Eighteenth-century British attempts to propagate mahogany were checkered. The massive tree took centuries to reach full size: not a time scale in which humans can measure financial profit and loss well (and perhaps not even ecological loss). Nevertheless, as veneers came into wider use, full-size trees were no longer necessary. Profit and an infant interest in forestry coalesced around trees expected to grow a few decades before harvesting. Both Honduran and West Indian varieties of mahogany were transplanted within the Caribbean in the late eighteenth century. Mahogany was subsequently propagated globally, but rarely without destructive borers far behind. Anderson reminds us that in the case of mahogany man could not always unlock nature's secrets (249).In Jacksonian and antebellum America, steam power allowed a more thorough exploitation of mahogany wood: Steam-cut veneers were thinner, and railroads allowed lumber to be more thoroughly extracted from forests. The illusion of abundance continued even as the resource dwindled further. And it was indeed sometimes an illusion: Poor workmanship and materials became an increasing problem with thin veneers. The well off had solid wood and the masses their veneers, but veneers were sometimes suspect. …

The Failure of Restored British Rule in Revolutionary Charleston, South Carolina

The two-year occupation of Charleston, South Carolina, during the American Revolution demonstrates that umbrages suffered under military rule played a significant role in turning civilians in the 13 colonies against the British Empire. Despite British attempts to encourage loyalty by giving loyalists a say in government, stabilising the economy and guaranteeing the safety of slave property, Charleston's occupation regime failed to win local hearts and minds due to inconsistent and arbitrary policies, conflicts between military and civilian authorities and the unwillingness of imperial officials to restore full civil government to the province. As a result, South Carolinians lost faith in Charleston's restored royal administration long before British defeat on the battlefield secured American independence.

Role of Ethnic Statistics in Indian Anti-Discrimination Policies

This article focuses on an aspect of discrimination peculiar to India, caste-based discrimination, using the debate on caste-based census to illustrate the relationship between affirmative action policy and statistics. We begin by describing how discriminatory practices are set within the history of power relations between caste-groups; and the development of India’s anti-discrimination policy through caste-based reservation and the quota system. The interface of statistics and anti-discrimination policy is analyzed against this background using caste-based census as illustrative. While Indian census has a long history, comprehensive caste-census was undertaken first in 2011. Being relatively new, this allows us to study the political, socio-economic and practical issues such a statistical exercise throws up in social policy. Many nations are characterized by social inequalities but in India these inequalities were highly structured in the caste-system. Affirmative action in India takes the form of positive discrimination operationalised through reservations, as against non-discrimination of western democracies. However redistribution is unevenly spread and timely data is scarce. The key motivation behind caste-counting was to identify which castes are backward or improved their socio-economic status. Debates surrounding the current exercise illustrate the politics of caste. Due to its socio-economic and political consequences, it elicits intense discussions in the media and political parties. Major political parties affirm the need for caste-enumeration. Critics express anxiety about heightening divisiveness with vested interests making political capital of caste loyalties. The socio-political and ideological criticality of the census is not to be found in academic discussions; rather it is traceable more accurately in people’s reactions. During the colonial census various ambitious castes quickly perceived chances of raising their status. The contours of caste-politics are refashioned and renegotiated in response to the current census just as in the British attempt. The outpouring of caste-based demands, gatherings and statements shows caste being politicized and animated by head-counts. The fact that notionally rigid categories can be renegotiated to secure political influence reminds us that caste has always been pliable to political influence. For now it provides multiple organizations a powerful means of mobilizing support and an emotional card to play. Central to these machinations is the fact that the survey is perceived as more than a collection of numbers; and as a means of classifying and categorizing the social universe into groups entitled or not entitled to certain benefits. Incorporating caste as an enumerative criterion is likely to have major social ramifications. In a country living with the reality of caste and striving to offset disadvantages based on social hierarchy, holding a caste-census has wide appeal. The new data should enabling new policy criteria for recognizing intra-and inter-group socio-economic inequalities and discharging social-justice commitments. Caste-enumeration is undertaken with Below Poverty Line census so there is simultaneous mapping of the economic, caste, and religious backgrounds. The strongest point for caste-census was that it would help devise evidence-based social policy. The census raises procedural and practical issues. The first is data availability. Enumerative methodology requires consideration. Even more scientifically challenging is integrating the headcount with the socio-economic profile and deriving a caste’s state of backwardness. It was concluded that the Census Commission of India was equipped to handle such procedural and methodological requirements. The stand that caste-consciousness is best obliterated over time by neglect would be tenable but for the resurgence of quota-consciousness. People are familiar with categories like scheduled, backward and general; the census will just be a more factual version of information they are accustomed to providing. Aside from yielding a database, knowing caste-shares will enable a fair operation of the reservation. For now, the caste-census is already a reality. It requires a vigilant watch to see its repercussions on the fabric of Indian society.

Building for Life: A Recent British Attempt to Raise the Quality of Housing

Building for Life: A Recent British Attempt to Raise the Quality of Housing

Queering Natal

The media coverage of President Jacob Zuma and the “problem” of his foreign and potentially threatening polygamy reveals the long-extant gendered and raced fault lines of the presumably postcolonial relationship between Britain and South Africa. The discourses in the British press that marked Zuma as a “buffoon,” “barbaric,” and less civilized than his “distinctly monogamous” hosts can be traced to nineteenth-century settler colonial regimes and their violent attempts at reordering the lands and peoples they sought to occupy and replace. The arrival of British settlers in the nineteenth-century colony of Natal brought them into conflict with the Zulu peoples they sought to supplant and exploit. A reading of emigrant letters, missionary pamphlets, and newspaper correspondence reveals that the persistence of the practice of isithembu (polygamy) and ilobolo (the ritual exchange of cattle upon marriage) among Zulus in the face of British attempts to control their social and political formations challenged the very heart of the settler project. As British settlers sought to create and define a “modern” sexuality predicated on a heteronormative family unit, polygamy became the flashpoint in a biopolitical battle between colonists and indigenous peoples in Natal. For settlers, polygamy failed at being properly heteronormative, instead indicating an overweening hyper-heterosexuality in Zulu men. As a result, to white observers, polygamy presented a dangerous and disruptive challenge to the gendered, raced, and sexual order they wished to construct — in short, it became queer. The destabilizing queer potential of indigenous polygamy to the settler project reveals the assumptions about sexuality, civilization, and conjugality that underwrite colonial aspiration and postimperial anxieties.

‘Must Will Peace’: The British Brokering of ‘Central European’ and ‘Balkan Locarno’, 1925–9

This article examines the British attempt to use the momentum created after the conclusion of the Locarno Agreements of October 1925 to promote a similar settlement in Central Europe among the Little Entente countries and Hungary, and in the Balkans, where Bulgaria had to be reconciled with her neighbours, particularly with Yugoslavia (Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes), with each region being dealt with in a separate settlement. The approach of the Foreign Secretary, Sir Austen Chamberlain, was to induce the leaders of the countries in question to come into personal contact and tackle their mutual antagonisms, while at the same time securing that Britain, France and Italy maintained a common stance and spoke with one voice to all the concerned governments. The article outlines the main lines of diplomatic intercourse and analyses the reasons for the ultimate failure of both ‘Central European’ and ‘Balkan Locarno’. It is argued here that Chamberlain’s policy, his distorted perceptions, delusive premises and fallacious judgement accounted for the inevitable breakdown of his Locarno-like scheme. This failure became apparent towards the end of the period studied here and its consequences heralded difficult times in the years to come.

Interpreting an Architectural Past

T he process of modern knowledge-making in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century South Asia was closely connected to the experience of British colonialism.1 Driven by an interest to control and comprehend their emerging empire in the subcontinent, British colonial administrators and military officers set about collecting physical vestiges of the country’s past and categorizing information on its geography, history, and culture.2 Their efforts were mediated and supported by the efforts of Indian informants and assistants, and existing contexts, relationships, and connections were irrevocably altered. While the British might have been highly critical of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century South Asian life, the activities and publications of organizations such as the Asiatic (formerly Asiatick) Society held that “the arts and sciences of ancient India were of the highest standard.”3 For the orientalists who held this view, the source of such knowledge resided in so-called ancient texts.4 As an extension of this idea, architectural treatises written in the Sanskrit language came to be viewed as critical sources of knowledge. Apart from their intrinsic value as texts, treatises could provide evidence that the design and ornamentation of buildings (particularly Hindu temples), was an intellectual exercise rooted in the subcontinent’s unadulterated “classical,” and more significantly, “Hindu” past. A desire to elevate architecture to the rarefied realm of philosophy also drove the effort to closely align building practices and treatises. As an Enlightenment preoccupation with classification extended to British attempts at comprehending all aspects of South Asian society, it resulted in the region being perceived primarily in terms of divisions along boundaries of religion and caste.5 Within this scheme, Hindus and Muslims occupied different social realms and were presumed to have inherited different histories. More specifically, Hindus were supposedly privy to a pre-Islamic religious, cultural, and Sanskrit linguistic heritage that the orientalists …

The Nordic Network Shows its Weakness as the Cold War sets in: The Visit of the Rev. A. Cotter to the Nordic Lutheran Churches of Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden, 1946

The Second World War afforded a major test of the strength of international ecclesial networks in war-ridden Europe. Most of the existing links between hostile countries and their churches were cut during the war and had to be rebuilt after the hostilities had ceased. Among the most complicated tasks was the re-establishing of relations with the German churches, whose position was further complicated with the onset of the Cold War. This essay discusses the British attempt to re-establish official relations between the German and Nordic Lutheran churches in 1946.

A ‘New Deal’ for the Kurds: Britain's Kurdish Policy in Iraq, 1941–45

The Mulla Mustafa revolt of 1943–45 threatened to undermine the authority of the already vulnerable Iraqi government. In formulating a response, both the Iraqi prime minister and the British embassy wanted to prevent Kurdish nationalists from appropriating the revolt for their own ends. Sir Kinahan Cornwallis, the British Ambassador to Iraq, called for a ‘New Deal’ for the Kurds, encouraging development and investment in Kurdish areas as a means of drawing them under the control of central government authority. Iraqi Minister Majid Mustafa offered similar suggestions for infrastructure projects. In this instance, British and Iraqi priorities aligned and both hoped that reform would appease the Kurds and strengthen the Iraqi state. Britain's Kurdish policy during the Second World War demonstrates the continuing tension, dating back to the Mandate period, between its commitment to a united Iraq and the paternalistic sense of responsibility for the Kurds felt by many of its officials, in particular, the political advisers posted in the northern provinces. Despite British and Iraqi attempts to dismiss the Mulla Mustafa revolt as an ‘isolated tribal uprising’, it has entered the Kurdish narrative as a transformative moment in the Iraqi Kurdish national movement.

Developmental biology and human evolution

The Evolutionary or Modern Evolutionary Synthesis (here identified as the Synthesis) has been portrayed as providing the foundation for uniting a supposed disarray of biological disciplines through the lens of Darwinism fused with population genetics. Rarely acknowledged is that the Synthesis’s success was also largely due to its architects’ effectiveness in submerging British and German attempts at a synthesis by uniting the biological sciences through shared evolutionary concerns. Dobzhansky and Mayr imposed their bias toward population genetics, population (as supposedly opposed to typological) thinking, and Morgan’s conception of specific genes for specific features (here abbreviated as genes for) on human evolutionary studies. Dobzhansky declared that culture buffered humans from the whims of selection. Mayr argued that as variable as humans are now, their extinct relatives were even more variable; thus the human fossil did not present taxic diversity and all known fossils could be assembled into a gradually changing lineage of time-successive species. When Washburn centralized these biases in the new physical anthropology the fate of paleoanthropology as a non-contributor to evolutionary theory was sealed. Molecular anthropology followed suit in embracing Zuckerkandl and Pauling’s assumption that molecular change was gradual and perhaps more importantly continual. Lost in translation was and still is an appreciation of organismal development. Here I will summarize the history of these ideas and their alternatives in order to demonstrate assumptions that still need to be addressed before human evolutionary studies can more fully participate in what is a paradigm shift-in-the-making in evolutionary biology.

THE THREE BRITISH OCCUPATIONS OF POTCHEFSTROOM DURING THE ANGLOBOER WAR 1899-1902

In the course of 1900, the second year of the Anglo-Boer War, Potchefstroomwas occupied three times by British forces and twice evacuated, all in the space offive months. This article focuses on the circumstances leading to these events, theirsignificance for the effective British occupation of south-western Transvaal and onthe effects of the occupations on the civilian population of the town.Possession of Potchefstroom, next to Pretoria and Johannesburg, the mostpopulous town in the Transvaal, was a pre-requisite for British occupation of all ofthe south-western quarter of the Transvaal. The main consideration being that theWestern Railway line ran through Potchefstroom terminating in Klerksdorp. Its usewas indispensable as a supply route for all garrison towns to be established southand west of Krugersdorp. The expectations that all would be accomplished with easewere dashed by the advent of the guerrilla phase of the war by mid-1900. Critical inthis regard was the activation of renewed Boer hostilities securely based in theGatsrand from where all rail and road communication between Potchefstroom andits supply base in Krugersdorp was disrupted. These factors and other considerationsresulted in six months of failed British attempts to secure Potchefstroom.Alternating Boer and British control of the town had interesting repercussionsfor the civilian population with its considerable British element leading to a divisionof loyalty toward the combatants.

The Tiwi and the British: an ill-fated outpost

Much has been published about the early nineteenth century settlement of Fort Dundas on Melville Island, the largest of the Tiwi Islands. In the main, the authors have argued about the reason for the British attempt to colonise this part of Northern Australia, the political or economic aspects of the settlement’s disastrous history or the circumstances of convict labour around the fort. 1 The relationship between the Indigenous people of the islands and the Europeans in the settlement has attracted less historical research and what has been written is somewhat limited. 2 This paper aims to explore, on the available evidence, the attempts to bring about peace between the Tiwi and the colonisers. Ultimately the result of those attempts was one of the factors contributing to the demise of the settlement. It must be emphasised that while the British presence in the islands remains in the Tiwi memory, in my observation that memory is limited to specific incidents and matters relating to that era. The evidence about the relationship between the British and the Tiwi is therefore overwhelmingly restricted to European sources. The people of the Tiwi Islands experienced an intermittent exposure to foreign cultures from Asia and Europe, possibly from the seventeenth century. By the early 1820s these contacts had little impact on the Islanders. Apart from a desire for metal tools, the Tiwi developed an awareness of the material possessions of the visitors, a limited understanding of firearms, and had acquired a vocabulary of a few Portuguese words. Possibly by the 1820s, also, the Islanders had incorporated a small number of Indonesian words into their language. 3 On the whole, however, the indigenous culture remained undisturbed, with the Tiwi displaying a mixture of fear and aggression towards the strange visitors who spent brief periods in the island. 4 Aggression was displayed towards the expedition of Phillip Parker King, the first Australian-born naval officer, as he conducted a survey of the islands in 1818. For the first time, some knowledge of the Tiwi Islands, located off the north west coast of the Northern Territory, came to the notice of the British and New South Wales governments. Within a few years the expansion of Dutch commercial and military interests in East India Archipelago led to a British interest in the northern coast of New Holland

MANAGING PLURALITY: THE POLITICS OF THE PERIPHERY IN EARLY COLD WAR SINGAPORE

Mainstream histories of the Cold War have tended to reduce the events surrounding Southeast Asian decolonization and nationalism to the universal notions of ideological confrontation, bipolarity, and the global division between a capitalist and communist camp. This obscures how multiple entities – the former colonial powers, different classes and ethnic groups, and local elites of different ideological and political persuasion – come into contention as they negotiate for a place in postcolonial society. Thus this article examines the case of Singapore in the 1950s and 1960s and argues that these forms of contention provincialize experiences with nationalism, communalism, and communism and by so doing disconnect them from the dominant narratives of the Cold War. I examine various texts by British colonial officials, communist and non-communist political figures, and university students that show how British attempts at managing a decolonizing entity were offset by the local intelligentsia's ambivalence in coming to terms with nationalism and communism.

Magic Tricks? Shadow Play in British Expanded Cinema

In an analysis of the use of shadow in the film performances of British film-makers Malcolm Le Grice and Gill Eatherly, Lucy Reynolds relates British Expanded Cinema's attempt for a 'cinema without illusion' to the experiences of the uncanny and outmoded raised by pre-cinematic spectacles.

Caught in the middle of the transatlantic security dilemma. Great Britain, the United States and Western European security, 1970–1973

The article investigates British attitudes towards transatlantic security through the analysis of the British approach to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, the Prevention of Nuclear War agreement, the debate on the burden-sharing question and the ill-fated ‘Year of Europe’ initiative. In a period of American disengagement from Western Europe and superpower condominium London attempted to play the role of the bridge between the United States and the European allies in order to defuse doubts and uncertainties which risked of undermining the very pillars of the transatlantic security structure. The British attempts achieved mixed results and eventually left London caught in the middle of the European and Atlantic dimension of its foreign policy.

Canton, 1857

Canton, 1857 May Caroline Chan (bio) January 1857 opened with a bang, if not four of them: thanks to two overzealous colonial administrators, Sir John Bowring and Consul Harry Parkes, four Chinese forts lay in ruins in Canton Province. Britain had been at war with China since October 1856 because these two men had contested the registration of the Arrow, a lorcha sailing vessel registered in Hong Kong with a British captain, Thomas Kennedy (Wong 3). While this vessel was docked in Canton Harbour on the morning of 8 October 1856, Chinese officials boarded it and arrested the Chinese crew because it contained two suspected pirates. The Chinese marine police also allegedly pulled down the British ensign during this arrest. This act of aggression resulted in a general election and what historians now refer to as the Arrow War. Though Prime Minister Palmerston viewed it as only a "quarrel," Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels labelled it the "Second Opium War" (Marx). As this name suggests, they suspected that the excessive military response to the Arrow episode was really a British attempt to seize more territory and to open markets for Indian opium sales—in other words, to extend the largest drug trade in world history. Records of parliamentary debates in January and February of 1857 show liberal politicians were similarly wary about using military force in a thinly veiled endeavour to pressure the Chinese into concessions that they had refused to accept at the end of the First Opium War (1838-42). In the meantime, Parkes and Bowring bided their time, waiting for the right moment to unleash British firepower on what they saw as a recalcitrant Chinese government, unbowed after the Opium War. China's Arrow War is often eclipsed by the horror and drama played out in India's Sepoy Mutiny, but the two events are tied together by shared military resources and Britain's opium profits. Britain was growing wealthy from Indian-produced opium, which was in turn sold illegally in China, redressing Britain's earlier trade deficit with China. Even after the Opium War, China restricted British trade to a handful of treaty ports and continued to ban opium. [End Page 31] Parkes and Bowring worked tirelessly to get Canton opened to British trade, to fulfill the last concession in the Treaty of Nanking, but to no avail—until the moment of the Arrow conflict. China had been the original destination of British imperial troops before the Sepoy Mutiny started on 10 May 1857. The mutiny grabbed Britain's imagination with terrifying tales of innocents slaughtered and natives running wild.1 In the British imagination, the mutiny's suppression became a moral imperative. The public debate over using excessive military force to bend the Chinese will to Britain's economic agenda disappeared in the shock and revulsion over the Sepoy Uprising. Troops were quickly diverted to India, leaving Parkes and Bowring simmering in China, with their plans for retaliation on hold. Unlike Parkes and Bowring, historians and politicians would describe Britain's war with China from October 1856 to October 1860 as "causeless" and "sordid" (Maxwell 124; Innes 218). The contested registry of the Arrow gave the pretext for the conflict and was soon forgotten for political expediency. Technically, the vessel was British only because of its captain and its registry at Hong Kong. Botanist Robert Fortune wrote in 1857 how lorchas had no clear identity: Lorchas are not English vessels, as some people appear to imagine, and are rarely owned or sailed by Englishmen. They are Portuguese vessels .... They are manned, almost without exception, by Chinese .... These vessels, whether in convoying or in simple trading, do not confine themselves to the five ports at which foreigners are permitted by treaty to trade, and are well known both to the Chinese government and to foreigners as inveterate smugglers. (424-25) Fortune knew that British smugglers routinely bypassed the legal trading ports designated by the 1842 Treaty of Nanking, as he was the official smuggler of Chinese tea plants for the British tea plantations in Northern India and would therefore have been familiar with the technicalities of boat registry as exploited on all sides. British officials on...

Oleaginous Diplomacy: Oil, Anglo–American Relations and the Lausanne Conference, 1922–23

There has been considerable controversy as to the significance of oil in the Lausanne Conference of 1922–1923, in particular British attempts to retain Mosul as part of Iraq. However, as this article explores, the conference also had important implications for the composition of the British-registered Turkish Petroleum Company, which was expected to win the Iraqi oil concession. In the first phase of the conference, the United States observer delegation's stance persuaded the British Government to put pressure upon the British companies involved in the TPC to admit American companies upon the latter's terms. Despite this, in the second phase, the Americans supported the Turkish delegation in its opposition to clauses in the proposed Treaty, which would have guaranteed the rights of the TPC, and forced a British compromise on the issue. The Lausanne Conference played a significant role in the Anglo–American “oil war” of the inter-war period.