British Attempts Research Articles

The hunger strike as a biopolitical technology: re-reading the 1981 Irish republican prison protest

ABSTRACT This article uses the case of the 1981 Irish republican prison protest to show that indefinite hunger strikes can force Euromodern states to the negotiating table by undercutting their commitment to good government. Drawing on a Foucauldian analysis of biopower and political reason, I argue that these acts of willed self-starvation exert pressure on state officials by exploiting a tension between the modern state’s juridical claim to sovereignty and its biopolitical investment in fostering life. In the case of the famed IRA hunger strike on the H-Blocks, the archive shows that the Thatcher government experienced more pressure to reach a negotiated settlement than the prime minister or her top advisers publicly acknowledged. Such pressure, however, stemmed not from a moral or humanitarian investment in saving the individual hunger strikers’ lives, but instead from officials’ biopolitical concern that the protest was undermining British attempts to restore ‘life as usual’ in the conflicted region. Ultimately, Thatcher was willing to let ten of the Irish republican strikers die rather than grant them any concessions that might indicate they were political prisoners. The article closes by showing how an indefinite hunger strike’s efficacy is often foreclosed in securitized and postcolonial contexts like that of Northern Ireland, where the protesters can be framed as a ‘biopolitical remainder’ that is allowed to die so that the broader society might thrive.

Nobody is leaving! Ottoman officials, their families and the struggle over Ottoman imperial sovereignty in Yemen after the Mudros Armistice, 1918–1924

ABSTRACT This article explores the struggles over Ottoman sovereignty in Yemen from the October 1918 armistice to the proclamation of the Republic of Turkey in October 1923. The governor-general (vali), Mahmud Nedim, and Imam Yahya, the principal local ally of the Ottomans, succeeded in upholding Ottoman sovereignty over most of highland Yemen against the Armistice terms, the Treaty of Sèvres, and their local and British rivals, while receiving the political backing of the Ottoman resistance movement in Anatolia under Mustafa Kemal. Efforts of the vali, the imam, and the British to prevent ordinary Ottomans from leaving and entering Yemen were at the centre of these struggles. This changed in 1923 when Mustafa Kemal and Yahya turned to state-building projects emphasising post-Ottoman forms of sovereignty. I thus highlight several aspects of ordinariness. First, the continuation of daily governmental routines in Yemen was a key element of Ottoman efforts to resist British attempts to impose a post-Ottoman political order. Further, Yemeni Ottomans and Ottoman officials were reduced to different degrees of ordinariness because the disintegration of the Ottoman state after the war often eliminated their sources of income. Finally, struggles against the consequences of the Armistice are often reduced to a ‘Turkish War of Independence’ and the actions of policy makers in administrative centres, like Istanbul and Ankara. Studying the end of the Ottoman Empire from the vantage points of Yemen’s ‘spatial ordinariness’ as an imperial borderland and of ordinary Ottomans disrupts this ‘methodological nationalism’ and allows for a more nuanced understanding of the post-Armistice years.

Retaining Chinese Indentured Labour in Interwar British and French Pacific colonies

ABSTRACT British attempts to reform or close down the indentured labour system as it applied to Chinese labourers across the British empire were carried out on an ad hoc basis, one colony at a time. In the southwest Pacific islands indentured labour recruitment was retained into the 1930s and beyond. Between 1920 and 1953 thousands of Chinese workers suffered under penal clauses for labour offences and endured harsh conditions on contracts that often extended beyond five years. This article investigates the means by which colonial authorities in Hong Kong and the southwest Pacific were able to maintain the indentured labour system despite the British Colonial Office preference for abolition. It compares government correspondence, labour contracts and ordinances from Nauru under British-Australian mandate, Western Samoa under New Zealand mandate, and the Anglo-French Condominium of New Hebrides (Vanuatu). It demonstrates that Chinese indentured labourers were retained with only minor changes to their contracts, put in place for the most part so that colonial administrators could avoid national and international censure.

Ersatzstoffe im Zeitalter der Weltkriege: Geschichte, Bedeutung, Perspektiven ed. by Elisabeth Vaupel

Reviewed by: Ersatzstoffe im Zeitalter der Weltkriege: Geschichte, Bedeutung, Perspektiven ed. by Elisabeth Vaupel Rouven Janneck (bio) Ersatzstoffe im Zeitalter der Weltkriege: Geschichte, Bedeutung, Perspektiven Edited by Elisabeth Vaupel. Munich: Deutsches Museum, 2021. Pp. 348. In 2002, the German historian of technology Ulrich Wengenroth published his controversial article, "Die Flucht in den Käfig." He argued that German innovation culture was decisively shaped by the two world wars, which led German science to focus on substitute materials even during peacetime and explained the lagging behind of German science after 1945. Th is view quickly met opposition that led to numerous research projects. The critical discussion of Wengenroth's thesis is the guideline of the present compilation on substitute materials in the age of the two world wars. Asking what was the lasting effect of research on substitutes and their uses in Germany between 1871 and 1945, Ersatzstoffe im Zeitalter der Weltkriege [Substitutes in the era of the world wars] consists of three parts that are instructively introduced by the volume's editor, Elisabeth Vaupel. The first part is dedicated to substitutes for ferrous and nonferrous metals. One of the challenges for the German war economy in World War I was a lack of the strategic metal copper. As Helmut Maier shows in his article on nonferrous metals, major efforts to find a replacement resulted in useful scientific findings in the field of steel production but did not produce an [End Page 276] economic alternative in times of peace. Therefore, Maier argues, the effective innovation and modernization push should be considered a transformation of the culture of innovation. The prevailing practical experience was replaced by scientification. This interpretation is shared by Andreas Zilt, who gives an overview of the endeavors to find a replacement for manganese or at least a way to economize its use, which resulted in an accelerated scientification of materials and process engineering in industry. Addressing the aspect of synthetic rubber, Peter Morris draws a different picture. In his view, World War I was not a crucial factor for the scientific development of this field. Only British attempts to control the world's natural rubber market in the 1920s pushed chemical companies to pick up the question of synthetic rubber again, even though its success remained doubtful for a long time. The contributions of Markus Raasch on liquid propellants and lubricants and Sandor Fehr on Chile saltpeter discuss substitutes for basic chemicals and chemical products. Raasch gives a comprehensive overview of the different approaches undertaken during World War I. In the long run, this led to the foundation of societies and university institutes that were dedicated to the issues of coal research and mineral oil synthesis. Ultimately, all efforts—even under the National Socialist autarky program—remained unsuccessful, because the expansion of science and industry overstretched the financial and economic power of the German Reich. This is not the case, however, with nitrogen synthesis. After a short presentation of the different approaches to synthesis, Sandro Fehr argues that World War I became a decisive innovation driver for the final success of the Haber-Bosch process. Nonetheless, its undisputed international triumph followed only after 1945. The field of luxury food, foodstuffs, and feedstuffs is the subject of the third part of the volume. In his detailed discussion of Coffarom, Claus Priesner presents the insightful case of the hunt for a synthesis of coffee flavor. Although a successful product could not be offered due to an erroneous economic assessment of the market and of the acceptance by customers, Priesner convincingly shows the persistent secondary effects of the undertaking. The most important one was that the research undertaken expanded the methods for classical organic microanalysis, which was essential for the achievements in many other fields such as hormones. Ulrike Thoms sheds light on the topic of the utilization of animal carcasses as animal feed with emphasis on the time of the Great War. Among the different methods applied, meat-and-bone meal prevailed as the dominant one. Its use was continued after the war and underwent a breakthrough after 1945, before it was prohibited at the end of the century. In summary, the book gives an instructive insight into the history...

Remembering Sharq Al-Adna: British Radio Propaganda in the Middle East, 1941–1956

Set up covertly during the Second World War and continuing until the Suez crisis of 1956, the Near East Arab Broadcasting Station – better known as Sharq al-Adna – was for most of its life one of the most influential radio stations in the Middle East. This article draws on an unpublished memoir by a former director of the station, to tell the little-known story of a British attempt to win Arab hearts and minds during a formative period in the emergence of the modern Middle East.

Hindrance or Helping Hand?: Hong Kong and Sino-British Railway Commercial Diplomacy, 1974–84

This article examines the commercial diplomacy between Britain and the People’s Republic of China during the 1970s and early 1980s, especially in relation to the British colony of Hong Kong. Recent historiography has focused on the negotiations over the transfer of Hong Kong’s sovereignty, agreed in 1984, and tends to argue that Hong Kong’s status as a colony was a hindrance to British attempts at improving relations with China during the 1970s and 1980s. Using two related case studies of British attempts to sell railway equipment to Hong Kong and China, this article addresses this debate before and in the immediate aftermath of China’s opening up in the late 1970s. It argues that whilst Hong Kong was a subsidised market for British-made rolling stock, its value as a ‘shop window’ for facilitating Sino-British trade was limited. Hong Kong was not a hindrance to British railway manufacturers exporting to China; but neither was it much of a help.

Imperial Incarceration: Detention without Trial in the Making of British Colonial Africa by Michael Lobban

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a British imperial agent with ambitions of conquest, must be in need of a law. Jane Austen’s version has potential wives calculating their attachments with remarkable ingenuity, but they have nothing over the legal acrobatics conducted in the colonies. Lobban’s Imperial Incarceration provides an exhaustive account of the different methods of sanitizing the detainment and deportation of African leaders who threatened British conquest during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Court records overflow with public statements regarding the clear inferiority of the subjects to be pacified, so it is difficult to comprehend why there was such a strong impulse to shine up imperial conquest in the armor of legality. Freudian analysis would suggest a need for collective delusion and/or denial about the sheer amount of suffering and violence involved in spreading British dominion around the world. Or it could be understood as a massive public relations campaign of “lawwashing,” akin to the “greenwashing” of today.In this comprehensive volume, which will serve scholars of colonial legalities for years to come, Lobban has meticulously pieced together archival evidence from the Foreign Office, the Privy Council, and the Colonial Office (among other sources) that displays British attempts to couch the neutralization of indigenous leaders within the terms of “the rule of law.” He recounts the evolving efforts to present the British Empire as beholden to the rule of law even as the records show that so-called courts met without judges, lawyers, or jurisdictional authority.Lobban uses Dicey’s complex notions of the rule of law to establish the presumed—or advertised—principles guiding the actions of the judiciary, the Colonial Office, the Foreign Office, and colonial administrators on the ground. Dicey assigned a crucial role to the public as a safety net, which was to insist upon a common sense of justice when institutions faltered. To balance Dicey’s vision, Lobban also uses the Comaroff’s notion of “lawfare,” that is, law as a tool of conquest and violence in itself.1The book contains rich accounts of the nearly farcical lengths taken to uphold the image of proper procedure and legal authority. An example is seen in the description of a British agent who was sent to Sierra Leone to review the confinement of seven different local leaders to ensure that their sentencing was proper. However, the recommendations for release or continued confinement were based upon his best estimate of how damaging or beneficial each leader might be to British ambitions in the area as opposed to the rectitude of the proceedings.I kept wanting to know what those subjected to these legalities thought of them. Lobban’s account shows the mutual incomprehensibility that these proceedings must have caused. In one example, the court records did not contain any account of the self-defense offered in a case on the Niger Delta, offering only this assessment: “I found it quite impossible to take minutes as is usual at a Court of Inquiry, the vernacular of the natives being so peculiar” (211). I would have loved to hear the natives’ account of the different versions of the Foreign Jurisdiction Act; what peculiar vernacular it was! Alas, these judgments are lost from the archival evidence.I also wanted to hear more about Lobban’s aims in making this remarkable archival excavation. In his conclusion he asks, “Why did an imperial power committed to bringing the rule of law to its wider empire resort to detention without trial so frequently?” (419) He parses through the different situations and unclear jurisdictional authority to find the answers. Another question might be, “Why did they feel the need to pass ad hominem laws to legalize the detention of African leaders?”Lobban gives pride of place to the archives themselves, often letting the records and actors therein speak for themselves. The book is organized both geographically and historically, so it is clear how the different edges of the Empire were wrestled into submission at different junctures in distinct ways. Lobban does not try to assert a grand theory from all of these details, but registers the subtle changes of legality that came with shifts in administrators, the time period, and the local political and social contexts.Surprisingly, even after the thick accounting of “lawfare” in the conquest of Africa throughout the book, Dicey’s version of the rule of law appears triumphant. Cases that grabbed headlines back in London usually received a different treatment than those that did not. The public does indeed matter as the last resort in upholding the rule of law—but only the British public.

Brexit Sovereignty and its Dead Ends

AbstractIn more ways than one, the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) concluded by the EU and the UK is a typical trade agreement. Its commitments are international in nature; its provisions create no directly effective rights and obligations for private parties to enforce under domestic law. The TCA thus turns from the central innovation of EU law, an innovation, which also lies at the heart of the Single Market. It is a price the UK is willing to pay for throwing off what it considers the yoke of EU law. This is not out of tune, perhaps, with a wider popular pushback against globalisation and the institutions perceived to represent it. But has Brexit truly returned control of its own laws to the UK, in both a formal and a practical sense? This article analyses the TCA as a balancing act between the parties’ ‘right to regulate’ and the EU’s demand of a level playing field, the ‘Brussels effect’ likely to constrain British attempts in the direction of regulatory divergence, and what has become of the formal effect of EU law in the laws of the UK.

Colonial control of firearms in the Sokoto Province 1897-1950s

This paper is a historical investigation into colonial control of firearms in the Sokoto Province. The role and use of firearms in colonial Nigeria have gained currency in the last five decades. The European interest in the commercial expedition of Africa facilitated the movement of firearms as an item of trade in exchange for African slaves. The increasing access to firearms, from European traders, provided the opportunity for the emirates of the Sokoto Caliphate to acquire a considerable number of these weapons. However, the vast majority of the literature focuses on their role in warfare and conquest. Despite the important role of the defunct Sokoto Caliphate in the import of firearms, it scarcely received scholarly attention. Deploying the historical method of inquiry, this paper argues that the British attempt to maintain law and order after the conquest of the Sokoto Caliphate instituted several measures to control possession of firearms by the natives. The study concludes that ownership of firearms was seen as a potential threat to the stability of both the colonial administration and the Native Authority.

Faux Histoire of the Right to Bear Arms: Young v. Hawaii (9th Cir. 2021)

Young v. Hawaii, 992 F.3d 765 (9th Cir. 2021) (en banc), purports to find that the right to bear arms is outside the historical scope of the Second Amendment, which protects that very right to bear arms. The actual text of the Second Amendment is AWOL in the Ninth Circuit’s holding that Hawaii may ban the carrying of firearms, whether openly or concealed. The court’s lengthy account of the history of prohibition on bearing arms is a faux histoire. Young begins by tracing Hawaii’s ban on carrying a pistol to 1852, when Hawaii was a monarchy. Hawaii’s Constitution recognized no right to bear arms, and instead the law declared that only persons in government were “authorized to bear arms.” When the monarchy was overthrown and a republic created, a law was enacted allowing anyone to carry a pistol by paying a license fee. The court simply ignores that period and highlights restrictions imposed after annexation by the United States. And it disregards how the “good cause” exemption, which allowed carrying without a license, was enforced. Next Young finds precedent for the carry ban in the decrees of medieval English kings, who prohibited subjects from “going armed.” However, the context concerned knights in armor fighting and creating turmoil, not lowly peasants carrying a bow or dagger for self-defense. At any rate, our Founders would have held in disdain the idea that they needed “the king’s license” to bear arms. The court also misrepresents various English statutes, such as the prohibition on going armed to rob, murder, and kidnap, terms that the court snips out to claim that the law simply banned the carrying of concealed weapons. The Statute of Northampton of 1328, with its convoluted language on coming armed before the King’s Justices or going or riding armed, is held up by Young as the holy grail to justify carry bans. But the court butchers the definitive holding in Rex v. Sir John Knight (1686), reflected in treaties thereafter, that the Statute only applied if a person went armed with evil intent in a manner to terrorize the subjects. And it underrates the scope of the Declaration of Rights of 1689, protecting the right of Protestants to “have Arms for their Defence.” Young’s “history” goes further downhill when it crosses the Atlantic. Carry bans in the American colonies were somehow seen as normal because the backwater East New Jersey had a temporary carry restriction and the other colonies required settlers to carry arms to church and other public places. The court skips over the history of the British attempts to disarm the Americans, the demands that the proposed Constitution have a bill of rights, and public discussion leading to the ratification of the Second Amendment. Instead, the court jumps to antebellum laws that prohibited going armed offensively to the terror of the people, which were irrelevant to the peaceable carrying of arms. It muddies the waters about nineteenth-century judicial decisions, which generally upheld the right to bear arms except for an outlier Texas case from 1871. The antebellum slave codes and judicial decisions upholding them, based on the premise that slaves and even free persons of color had no right to bear arms because they were not citizens, warrants no notice in Young. And it is silent on the purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment to overturn black code provisions requiring African Americans to obtain a carry license that could be issued or denied in the discretion of the government. The Ninth Circuit in Young paints a faux histoire of the right to bear arms. It relies on medieval decrees that would have been anathema to the Founders, deletes key passage from historical sources, leaps over crucial stages of American history such as the coming of the Revolution and of Reconstruction, and otherwise distorts the past to demonstrate that the right to bear arms is actually beyond the historical scope of the right to bear arms.

Enigma: the spoils of Gustave Bertrand, or “par où tout a commencé”

As early as 1931, Gustave Bertrand of the French intelligence services received from the traitor Hans Thilo Schmidt documents concerning the Enigma cipher machine. This machine was intended to equip all the German military forces. This is the beginning of an epic that has probably changed the History. The main documents collected by Bertrand have not been destroyed and are available in the archives of the French Army (SHD). This article describes and analyzes each of these documents, including the evolution of the Enigma and its procedures related in these documents. In conclusion, the article lists the findings that come from reading these originals and first and foremost the impact of having a cipher message with its plaintext on the British attempt to recover Enigma rotors wiring. Oddly enough, it seems that this message was not used by the Poles to break the Enigma.

Enterprising Empires: Russia and Britain in Eighteenth-Century Eurasia by Matthew P. Romaniello

Reviewed by: Enterprising Empires: Russia and Britain in Eighteenth-Century Eurasia by Matthew P. Romaniello Eugene Miakinkov Matthew P. Romaniello, Enterprising Empires: Russia and Britain in Eighteenth-Century Eurasia (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2019). Pp. 304; 7 b/w illus., 3 maps, 7 tables. $99.99 cloth. Enterprising Empires: Russia and Britain in Eighteenth-Century Eurasia by Matthew P. Romaniello convincingly challenges the traditional narratives of eighteenth-century Russian economic backwardness, showing that the Russian economy and its trading strategy was as sophisticated and successful as other European states. In the process, this revisionist book makes a significant contribution to our understanding of both the activities of the British Russia Company and the British attempts to break into the Eurasian markets, and, to a lesser extent, the calculus of Russian commerce and trade in the eighteenth century. The interdisciplinarity of this work is commendable: it stands at the intersection of economic history, transnational history, imperial history, and the history of information. It is also exceptionally readable, thanks to the methodological focus on qualitative evidence, which anchors the skillful deployment of lived history through various episodes and characters that move the analysis forward. Along the way, we meet vivid characters including the disaster that was John Elton; the suave Charles Whitworth; Claudius Rondeau; James and Katherine Harris; John Hobart; the [End Page 306] enterprising Peter Dobell; and the merchant family Shairp. In this emphasis on individuals rather than governments, the author follows the approach of the late Arcadius Kahan. The book is organized chronologically. Chapter 1 sets out the seventeenth-century background to Russia's emergence as a dominant supplier of raw materials for England and to the challenges that this new economic position brought to British diplomats and merchants. Chapter 2 covers the period of Peter I's reign. The first decades of the eighteenth century were spent by the British merchants and diplomats trying to secure from Russia a privileged trading treaty with a guarantee of lower customs duties for the British subjects than for other European states. They encountered little success in these negotiations, as there was not much that the British could offer to the young empire, while the Russian raw materials were still in great demand, due to Royal Navy's voracious appetite for pitch, hemp, and tar. It was at this time that the balance of trade began to turn in Russia's favor. Chapter 3 covers the middle decades of the century, including the Seven Years' War. It was a time when the Russian Empire took firmer control of its economy and trade, and as the author writes, was "far more developed than the British had recognized" (108). During this time, Russia moved adroitly to negotiate new contracts with China and Iran. Chapter 4 focuses on the long reign of Catherine II, describing the endless jockeying of French, Dutch, and British diplomats in this period for favorable trade contracts with the Russian empire. This chapter's account on the experiences of a Scottish merchant family engaged in this pursuit clarifies the book's larger argument that personal relationships and interactions carried more weight than international agreements and institutions in the daily lives of members of the merchant community. In this period, the Russian Empire also successfully expanded its trade in the Pacific and in Asia, at the expense of the British, and made advances in regulating its Baltic and Black Sea trade. Chapter 5 extends the previous chapters' focus on British-Russian trade negotiations and practices, discussing the significant challenge posed during the Napoleonic Wars by the United States to British trade interests. However, Chapter 6, the final chapter, shifts our attention quite abruptly from trade between Russia and Britain to trade between Russia and the United States and trade in the Pacific. This chapter is especially insightful, both in its assessment of the operations and struggles of the Russian American Company as it tried to enter new markets in the Pacific and its argument that it a later stage of these struggles would cause the 1867 sale of Alaska. In the Afterword, the author considers the end of the favorable balance of trade that eighteenth-century Russia had enjoyed with Britain. With the...

РОЛЬ АНГЛИИ В ФОРМИРОВАНИИ ПРОТОГОСУДАРСТВЕННОСТИ ИРАКСКИХ КУРДОВ ПОСЛЕ ПЕРВОЙ МИРОВОЙ ВОЙНЫ (1918–1920 ГГ.) В ФОРМЕ МАНДАТНЫХ ТЕРРИТОРИЙ

The article develops the stadial formation thesis of the proto-statehood among the Iraqi Kurds. The concept of national identity of the Iraqi Kurds remains the subject of a complex and long-lasting discussion. The main obstacle for the emergence of the Kurdish integral nationalism is still the fact that the Kurds speak different dialects of Kurdish language, and still maintain political and inter-clan conflicts over the distribution of power (not to mention the futility of any attempts to define political boundaries of Iraqi Kurdistan). Ironically, Great Britain faced practically the same contradictions during its occupation of Mesopotamia at the end of the WWI (following the Mudros armistice in October 1918), when British attempts to create an independent Kurdish state failed for a number of reasons, which are discussed in the article. In our opinion, this period was responsible for the formation of proto-statehood in Kurdish area (Kingdom of Kurdistan, for example, obtained classic characteristics of a chiefdom, but at the same time had a vivid anti-colonial, anti-imperialist orientation). The phenomenology of the British government’s political relations with such ‘quasi-states’ presents the subject for this article’s analysis.

Poor Man's Crop: Evading opium monopoly

AbstractResearch on opium in colonial India has so far mainly focused on the competing Malwa and Bengal opium currents under the control of the Sindia and Holkar families and of the British East India Company, respectively. The historical trajectory has tended to emphasize the implementation of a draconian and all-encompassing British monopoly. This study joins the emerging efforts to search the regional histories on the margins of the strongest players’ actions on the global scene. It aims at nuancing the narratives by focusing on a region away from such centres. The study investigates the local cultivation and usage of opium in Rangpore district—a region in north Bengal that had recently been badly affected by a severe flood. Here, the drug was extensively used and the lucrative trade with neighbouring states gave small-scale cultivators an income also under hard environmental conditions. The fact that production and trade were small-scale, fragmented, and made use of markets in Cooch Bihar, Assam, and Bhutan impeded British attempts at getting in control of production and trade.

Reconstruction of a Nation: British Attempts at Cross-Cutting Researches in Colonial India

Reconstruction of a Nation: British Attempts at Cross-Cutting Researches in Colonial India

Meeting Hauteur with Tact, Imperturbability, and Resolution: British Diplomacy and Russia, 1856–1865

ABSTRACTThis article takes a broad view of Anglo–Russian relations in the years between the Peace of Paris, 1856, and the death of Viscount Palmerston, 1865, examining the shifts within that period in an essentially high-political diplomatic history. It traces a number of strands in geopolitics, offering a sense of the competing strategies of the European Great Powers, particularly the roles of British diplomats: the private and public communication amongst prime ministers, foreign secretaries, ambassadors, ministers-plenipotentiaries and consular officials concerning British policy towards Russia in the post-Crimean War period. It outlines the principles that underlay that policy and the ways in which the diplomatic network observed the tsar and his advisors and agents, assessed the developing situation in Russia, Central Asia, and the Ottoman Balkans, made decisions, and implemented policy. It focusses on the diplomatists’ attitudes and perceptions—how they thought about Russia and British interests and how they worked to protect them. It also analyses British policy in light of the European dimension. The years 1856 to 1865 not only witnessed Russian attempts to undermine the Crimean settlement, they also saw revisionist Bonapartist France work to destroy the constraining Vienna system of 1815—primarily in northern Italy. These policies complicated British attempts to maintain the status-quo and defend their interests in the East. The evolving situation was highly complex.

“Anti-Slave Trade Cruzader”: Lord Holland’s Contribution to the Abolition of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and its Impact on the Anglo-Portuguese Political and Diplomatic Relations

This article investigates the role of Lord Holland in the abolition of the Slave Trade and in the enforcement of abolition on other nations. Holland, nephew of Charles James Fox, was the embodiment of Whig idealism, yet there was ambiguity in his position. In the frst place much of Holland’s income came from a sugar plantation in Jamaica so that his support for the abolition of slavery itself was highly qualifed. Secondly, Holland was an ardent lusophile and British attempts to suppress the Portuguese Slave Trade produced strains in an alliance that had lasted since the fourteenth century.

COERCION AND CONCILIATION AT THE EDGE OF EMPIRE: STATE-BUILDING AND ITS LIMITS IN WAZIRISTAN, 1849–1914

AbstractSince 2001, the geo-strategic priorities of the ‘War on Terror’ have prompted renewed attention to the historically significant region of Waziristan. Ironically, given the apparent failure of British attempts to pacify the region in the century after 1849, Waziristan’s colonial history has been picked over by policy-makers, commentators, and scholars for lessons which might be applied to current projects of state-building and counter-insurgency. Unabashedly instrumentalist, these works have reproduced the reductive stereotypes of the colonial sources and helped to entrench partial understandings of the frontier which obscure the dynamic and contingent nature of imperial state-building. This article offers an alternate frame for writing the history of the colonial frontier by re-examining how British officials attempted to constitute colonial authority through their engagements with one of the region’s most powerful groups: the Mahsud Wazirs. Challenging historiographical emphases on oscillating metropolitan strategies, this article maps crucial and largely overlooked continuities in British attempts to pacify the Mahsuds, providing new insights into state-building at the edge of empire and a more nuanced account of how imperial power was engaged, resisted, and deflected by those it sought to control.

Contested Foreignness: Indian Migrants and the Politics of Exclusion in Early Colonial Zimbabwe, 1890 to 1923

AbstractThe British South Africa Company’s conquest of Zimbabwe in the 1890s opened the country to settlement by immigrants from Europe, South Africa, India and other regions. Using their position as benefactors of the emerging colony, the British-born settlers deployed various notions of foreignness to marginalize the indigenous populations and other groups. Focusing on thirty-three years of company rule in Zimbabwe, this article examines how Indian immigrants contested the British attempts toforeignizethem in the emerging colony. Rather than presenting Indian migrants as passive victims of discrimination and marginalization, the study emphasizes their creativity and determination to establish their own destiny, against all odds. It also shows that foreignness in colonial Zimbabwe was a key factor in the politics of power, identity formation and nation-state building. In that respect, the article explores the constructed-ness as well as the malleability of foreignness in processes of nation-state formation in Africa.

Evidence from Norwegian Archives of British Attempts to Remove Franco in 1946

The decision of the British Labour Government in 1945 to maintain the policy of its predecessor, declining to intervene in Spain to bring about the removal of the government of General Franco, caused disappointment to many in labour movements both in Britain and elsewhere across Europe. It has hitherto been thought that this policy was consistently maintained throughout the period when Labour was in power, until 1951. This article draws mainly on Norwegian archival material to show that in 1946, despite its public assertions to the contrary, the British government was actually working both inside and outside Spain to try to remove Franco. It describes how the Norwegians approached their British counterparts to explore the possibility of concerted government action to remove Franco– and how they obtained information about Britain’s undisclosed Spanish policy. It provides a context permitting a fresh interpretation of Foreign Office documents dealing with the consequences of a Labour Party indiscretion in D...