British Soil Research Articles

‘The sanctuary of them all’: the politics of manpower and nationality in the armies in exile in the United Kingdom, 1940–4

Abstract Historians have long remarked upon the political significance of the Allied armies from Continental Europe which were established on British soil during the Second World War. Much less attention has been devoted to the implications of maintaining and expanding these forces amid the very particular circumstances of wartime exile. This article examines three aspects of the tension between the imperatives to secure as many men as possible for military service while maintaining the distinctly ‘national’ character of the force as a whole. The failure to mobilize emigrants and expatriates is examined in the first section, while the second section shows how soldiers could use national identities to their own advantage and pass between foreign armies. The final section examines the far-reaching political consequences of the often-obscured ethnic diversity within the ranks, focusing particularly on Jewish soldiers.

A critical discourse analysis of the representation of Ukrainian refugees across the British mainstream news media

This research investigates the dominant rhetorical/ discursive strategies in the British mainstream news media regarding their reports on Ukrainian refugees in the United Kingdom (UK). While news media have negatively constructed the non-European refugees, as previous studies have revealed, this research is unique because it specifically focuses on European refugees as its research sample. The ultimate objective was to demonstrate how the news media in the UK portrayed the incoming Ukrainian refugees on British soil. The data were 40 Ukrainian-refugee-related news reports published in four mainstream news media in the UK from March until July 2022. The data was then analysed by using Wodak’s Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA), consisting of six analytical categories: Referential, Predication, Argumentation (Topoi), Perspectivisation, Mitigation, and Intensification (Reisigl Wodak, 2008). The research found that regardless of their ideologies, all four news media consistently employed the discursive strategies of humanization and individualization and pervasively established a positive argumentative strategy on Ukrainian refugees. These dominant strategies depict a positive representation of Ukrainian refugees. Moreover, despite the overall negative picture of third-world refugees in British news media, the finding of this research is distinctive from the previous ones, showing that the British news media actively constructed the Ukrainian refugees positively and sympathetically. It is argued that the news media’s ideological stance of Eurocentrism and biased racial values played a decisive role in framing the pictures of European/Ukrainian and non-European refugees in their reports.

“The Black People’s Side of the Story”: The Historical and Transatlantic Roots of the Movement for Black Lives

Abstract: Black freedom fighters have always been at the forefront pushing the United States to accept the ideals it was founded on and were—are—unrelenting in their groundbreaking campaigns for abolition, equality, and social justice. In this article, I argue that to add nuance and a greater understanding to the philosophies developed by such freedom fighters, it is necessary to evaluate the transatlantic connections between the United States and Britain. Complicating and expanding their calls for antiracism and anti-oppression, Black activists have gained an alternative international perspective on British soil. Beginning with a discussion of the Movement for Black Lives in the US and its links with the UK, I analyze the movement’s historical and transatlantic roots.

An Alternative Macanese Public Sphere: Discussing Portuguese Macau’s Problems in British Hong Kong

ABSTRACT The first Macanese diaspora to Hong Kong in the 1840s saw not only the movement of Macau’s Luso-Asians to British territory, but also the unfolding of decades of discussion regarding the repressive rule of the Portuguese colonial administration over Macau. From establishing Portuguese-language newspapers to writing to Hong Kong’s English-language newspapers, the Macanese found a relatively liberal space in British Hong Kong to address Macau’s social and political issues and criticise the Portuguese colonial administration and Portugal away from the Portuguese empire’s strict press censorship. Through exploring the ways Macanese newspaper editors and contributors challenged Portuguese policies and maladministration on British soil, this study aims to first, analyse the experience of Hong Kong within the wider context of British press control in its Asian colonies and second, show how trans-border interaction came to be facilitated between Hong Kong and Macau by the movement and activities of a multiracial diasporic community.

Howard Jacobson’s J: A Novel and the Counterfactual Imagination

This article analyses Howard Jacobson’s 2014 novel J, which depicts the aftermath of an imagined genocide of the Jews in Britain, and explores its connections to other examples of British-set counterfactual Holocaust fiction. The representation of mass murder on British soil in Jacobson’s novel is achieved despite its omission of such crucial words as ‘Jew’, making the task of identifying these events and their victims into one shared by the novel’s protagonists and the reader. This article identifies the varied targets of J’s satire, which include that of increasing British insularity and its basis in assumptions of moral superiority in relation to the commission of wartime atrocities in Europe. Yet the novel also critiques in more general terms those aspects of contemporary life’s dependence on conformity-inducing technologies, to suggest that the figure of the Jew, and responses to the Jewish presence, offer a more vital alternative.

Three Daughters, Two Stories, One Tragedy: Ownership and Incest in William Shakespeare's King Lear and Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres

In Shakespeare's play, Lear links his daughters to British soil, making them his possessions. Seeing his daughters as owned things, Lear believes he can do what he wants to them. Subsequently, Lear crosses boundaries, namely in his "love test" where he expects competitive courtship behavior from his daughters. The father's peculiar actions and inappropriate conduct with his daughters carry incestuous resonances. These themes of ownership and incest are starker in Acres, specifically, when Larry rapes his daughters. Larry projects a wifely role onto his daughters by having sex with them. He then makes sex something daughters "owe" their fathers. This wifely role metastasizes so that, in the end, Larry's wishes transform his daughters beyond their role as surrogate wives into, collectively, a symbolic mother. With this metaphor, Smiley picks up on resonances in her Shakespearean source and extends this theme of ownership. Acres' blunt use of incest underscores the latent psychological effects suggested by Lear's possessive conception of parental roles. As a retelling, Acres posits that even the experiences of malevolent women require scrutiny through which their pernicious behavior can be understood.

Frames of violence and recent history in Simon Stephens' Motortown

British theatre is renowned for tackling topical, red-hot events pertaining to immediate history: the war in Iraq, for instance, prompted swift and diverse responses from British playwrights. The representation of recent history will be analysed in this paper through the representation of torture, and more specifically the Abu Ghraib scandal, in Simon Stephens’s Motortown (2006). Written during the 7/7 bombings in London, the play is permeated with the sense of horror associated with the war against terror and the war in Iraq: it blurs the line between the frontlines and the home front, as Danny, a former squaddie, re-enacts on British soil the acts of torture inflicted on prisoners in Abu Ghraib. This paper will show how, drawing on In-Yer-Face aesthetics, the playwright subverts the framing of torture and reflects on the anti-war movement.

Ready for Lift Off

A new generation of spaceports for launching rockets from British soil could supercharge the UK’s rapidly growing space sector. Melissa Bradshaw reports

Martial Masculinities: Experiencing and Imagining the Military in the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by Michael Brown, Anna Maria Barry, and Joanne Begiato

Reviewed by: Martial Masculinities: Experiencing and Imagining the Military in the Long Nineteenth Century ed. by Michael Brown, Anna Maria Barry and Joanne Begiato James Eli Adams (bio) Martial Masculinities: Experiencing and Imagining the Military in the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by Michael Brown, Anna Maria Barry, and Joanne Begiato; pp. xiii + 270. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019, £85.00, £25.00 paper, $130.00, $36.95 paper. The development of the internet has transformed research across the humanities by providing newly immediate and wide-ranging access to a world of archival material. At times, however, the sheer abundance of that material amplifies a long-standing scholarly challenge: does this archival wealth actually contribute to important new understandings of a field? Can it do more than confirm received wisdom, offer more than the pleasures of anecdotal detail? Martial Masculinities: Experiencing and Imagining the Military in the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by Michael Brown, Anna Maria Barry, and Joanne Begiato, brings home this challenge, contributing to burgeoning interest in the social history of military life, which rarely figures centrally in long-standing historical preoccupation with military campaigns and strategy. Attention to the individual soldier’s experience naturally foregrounds norms of masculinity, particularly as they might conflict with those governing domestic life, and as they register the psychic pressures of military service. The most rewarding contributions to the volume address popular understandings of this service, which often obscured its harsher realities. Brown and Begiato’s chapter analyzes late-Victorian recruitment material depicting young and old soldiers together as embodying [End Page 454] an array of values—national, moral, and martial—cast in familial terms as a masculine bond across generations. Barry’s study of the career of Charles Incledon, “a singing sailor on the Georgian Stage,” offers the volume’s most engaging study of “complex masculinity,” as this popular performer, who left the navy around 1783, came to be viewed as “at once a brave British Tar and a ridiculous Regency rake—a patriotic ballad singer, but also an effeminate showman” (83). Attention to soldiers’ more personal experience, however, too often reiterates commonplace views, often by contesting phantom opinions—most notably the notion that military and domestic life were radically disjunctive, both socially and psychically. Thus a chapter on “martial masculinities and family feeling” declares, “The notion that soldiers miraculously forgot family as soon as they left British soil was clearly hyperbole” (38). Indeed, but who ever thought otherwise? “Maintaining a correspondence home,” we learn, was very important to soldiers on the front—as we might have guessed, since letter-writing is a staple of nearly every popular representation of modern warfare (where would war movies be without it?). But the author puts forth this truism to “unsettle the idea that soldiering automatically entailed a denial of family life” (40). We are offered no clear sources for this “idea.” Better to begin with the obvious—“thoughts of family and home routinely intruded into military men’s consciousness”—as a prelude to examining what the archives reveal about the peculiar stresses to which these thoughts responded (45). Another chapter, “Recalling the Comforts of Home,” takes up this issue more directly, noting that “martial and civilian masculine identities were not as disparate as often supposed,” although again it would be helpful to have evidence of that supposition, since the chapter’s conclusions are unsurprising (60). Varieties of nostalgia in soldiers’ journals and correspondence “reinforced the emotional connection with his family back home” (72) and “receipt of material objects” was “an important coping mechanism” (73). This topic is richly treated in Holly Furneaux’s Military Men of Feeling: Emotion, Touch, and Masculinity in the Crimean War (2016), which deserves even more attention than it receives here. Elsewhere, neglected material derives its significance through the treacherous strategy of argument from absence. An essay devoted to the leg of Lord Uxbridge, severed at Waterloo and accorded the peculiar tribute of a separate burial, focuses on the dearth of attention devoted to this distinctive grave. One might presume that commentators simply found the nobleman’s limb a less solemn affair than the graves of the many thousands of soldiers who perished in the Napoleonic wars. But no, the...

Uncertainty analysis and ensemble bias-correction method for predicting nitrate leaching in tea garden soils

Pedotransfer functions were often applied to predict the soil water contents at field capacity (FC) and permanent wilting point (PWP), which are the key parameters used in the soil nitrogen (N) biogeochemical models for simulating the nitrate (NO3--N) leaching. However, the PTF prediction uncertainty was often ignored. In addition, the uncertainty of the N model structure (soil N cycling is described with a set of equations) can also be substantial. Based on the 12 classic pedotransfer functions (PTFs) (namely Baumer, Brakensiek/Rawls, British Soil Survey Topsoil, British Soil Survey Subsoil, EPIC, Hutson, Manrique, Rawls, Campbell, Mayr/Jarvis, Rawls/Brakensiek, and Vereecken) and 2 biogeochemical models (DayCent and DeNitrification-DeComposition (DNDC)), this study evaluated the PTF prediction and model structural uncertainty in soil NO3−-N leaching modelling on a tea garden hillslope in Taihu Lake Basin, China. The ensemble mean was then applied to combine the 12 outputs of each model and the 24 outputs of both models. Finally, the linear bias-correction combined with the ensemble mean, i.e., the ensemble bias-correction (EBC), was also applied for the prediction of the leachate NO3−-N concentrations. Data on basic soil properties were used to derive the FC and PWP by using the 12 PTFs. Results showed that both the PTF prediction and model structural uncertainty were equally important in soil NO3--N leaching modelling at four slope positions. The coefficients of variation of the NO3--N concentration forecasts obtained by different PTFs, representing the PTF prediction uncertainty, were positively related to the climate factors, especially when PTFs were used in DayCent. Ensemble mean was found to produce a very large bias in the prediction of the leachate NO3--N concentrations, which is due to the prediction bias of PTFs. The EBC can substantially improve the prediction of the soil NO3--N leaching, especially when the 24 outputs of both models were combined.

‘For ever England’: The figurative colonization of Flanders

During the course of the First World War, the British presence in Belgium resulted in what one can describe as a figurative colonization of Flanders, an intensely defended region in which the British Empire suffered immense casualties. This process of figuratively recreating Flanders into British soil through the employment of possessive tropes took place in propaganda and literary works alike, with such terms as acquisitive equation and idealized interventions echoing those employed in the rhetoric of the British Empire during earlier eras in its imperial history.

ИЗ РОССИИ В ВЕЛИКОБРИТАНИЮ И ОБРАТНО ЧЕРЕЗ ЛА-МАНШ: МУЗЫКАЛЬНЫЕ ОТКРЫТИЯ ПЕРИОДА ВТОРОЙ МИРОВОЙ ВОЙНЫ И «ОТТЕПЕЛИ» (по следам архивных находок и зарубежных публикаций)

Russian music enjoyed its popularity and appreciation among British audiences throughout the twentieth century. Musical life in London during the period of World War II was infused with a good number of concert programmes. The finest works of national composers of the tsarist Russia were performed along with musical works of the Soviet period regardless of their stylistic peculiarities as well as of the approved or disapproved states of their authors with the Soviet authorities. They laid a fine foundation for an active musical interchange between musicians of both countries formed at the turn of the Khrushchev Thaw period, when the ‘crème de la crème’ of Soviet performers stepped on British soil and British performers toured Russia in the early 1950s. It was down to personal contacts of enthusiastic musicians, rather than only those signed on a governmental level known as the Soviet-British Cultural Agreement of 1959, for example, that did maintain the initiatives and musical collaborations. The concert activities and correspondence of Vadim Borisovsky with his British colleagues, which started much earlier, is the best example in this regard. The discussion of these topics relies heavily on recent archival findings from Moscow and London.

Influence of Rainfall Patterns on the Slope Stability of the Lumwana (the Malundwe) Open Pit

Malundwe open pit has experienced slope failures in the pit’s upper stack during rain-season since mining started in 2008. Laboratory and numerical model investigation methods were performed to investigate the influence of the rainfall pattern on the stability of the upper stack having saprolite domains. The saprolite soil was classified using the British soil classification system as slightly clayey, silty, sand with fine gravel which are of low plasticity. The water retention test using pressure test conducted on saprolite, reveals that the saprolite soil could not dry up completely as it contains about 9% volumetric content of water with the matric suction of 300 kPa during the most dehydrated month. The rainfall patterns at the mine site increase the groundwater level on the saprolite material. The rising of the groundwater table leads to the reduced matric suction and increased volumetric water content in saprolite domain. The reduced matric suction in the saprolite soils reduce the saprolite soil’s shear strength effectively leading to slope instability. Therefore, rainfall infiltration is the facilitator for initiating the failure of the upper slope at Malundwe open pit.

Correspondance littéraire by Friedrich Melchior Grimm Ulla KölvingMélinda Carón

MLR, .,   Gallagher argues in her introduction, the works chosen have been those oriented towards the Anglo-Saxon world. is justifies Gallagher’s translation of Hiver caraïbe,whichgivesusasenseofMorandasindefatigablecosmopolitanglobetrotter. First published in , Caribbean Winter remassages notes from two journeys to the Caribbean and America made two years before. With Morand we cross the Atlantic: ‘Flying fish. e ship slows down, inching forward in a gelatinous light that is occasionally broken by a dorsal flash of shark. e walls of my cabin creak like a stove over-filled with fuel’ (p. ). We land at Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, and very soon may be made uncomfortable by Morand’s outlook: ‘It is quite obvious that all the Negroes here have the vote. ey are wearing the stony, hostile and malevolent expressions of people set to nurse their bad humour for another four years’ (p. ). ere follow Port of Spain, Venezuela, Curaçao, Haiti, Cuba, then a magnificent coda devoted to Mexico and southern California. In his elliptical and allusive style, Morand remarks on people, politics, landscape, literature, and art. Morand is obsessed with racial and national difference, and the Caribbean crucible is a perfect environment for him to explore. What haunts him is the threat of métissage and the destruction of the racial ecology he seeks to protect: ‘Black and white are both beautiful; what’s ugly is grey’ (p. ). As Gallagher points out, in this age of trigger warnings, the world of Morand is a distinctly unsafe space. On the other hand, Paul Morand, with his brittle European arrogance and adumbrations of mass migration and global miscegenation, could be considered a postcolonial studies wet dream. Gallagher makes some very astute points. First, Morand seems attracted to a form of American Sublime, which explains why, on arriving on the islands, he immediately makes for the highlands, and devotes so many pages to Mexico and the Apache Trail, making no mention of the Deep South he travelled through in . What is also striking is how the synchronic staccato of Morand’s travelogue occludes the history of slavery. On the other hand, Gallagher suggests that, in his descriptions of the vestiges of Aztec and Maya civilizations, he is, unconsciously, making us think of other Caribbean peoples destroyed by the arrival of the white man. ere are a couple of factual errors in Gallagher’s introduction: Ouvert la nuit is not set in London—in fact, the only story touching British soil is ‘La Nuit écossaise ’; Morand wrote about the Napoleonic occupation of Spain and not the Spanish Civil War. Nevertheless, such quibbles apart, this book is beautifully written and translated, helpfully annotated, and gloriously ‘incorrect’. U  S A G B Correspondance littéraire. By F M G. Ed. by U K. Vol. : . Ed. by M C. Fernay-Voltaire: Centre International d’Étude du e Siècle. . lxxx+ pp. €. ISBN ––––. If the Correspondance littéraire for  ended with Grimm expressing his astonishment at the talent of the seven-year-old Mozart, he began , despite suffering  Reviews from a fever, by offering significant support for the Mozart family until their departure from Paris in April. While we are indebted to the editor Mélinda Caron for this information, which is not mentioned in the Correspondance itself, this almost prophetic support of the cosmopolitan music of the future provides a striking contrast to Grimm’s negative reaction to the death of Rameau in September. Grimm was, of course, never a supporter of French music, but, with hindsight, the vehemence of his reaction to the demise of the man who would now be regarded as one of the two greatest French composers of the century makes for fascinating reading. ere is important writing on the plastic arts too, and if the enthusiastic article in the second issue for August concerning Drouais’s famous portrait of Madame de Pompadour is relatively brief, the lengthy essay reviewing the criticisms of Soufflot’s design for the church of Sainte Geneviève in the second issue for October leads to further extended essays in subsequent issues, first on the history of ecclesiastical architecture, then on the history of Christianity itself. Like ,  was a relatively poor year...

On Foreign Soil: Immigrants and the Past in Victorian Britain

This essay examines immigrant perceptions and constructions of the past in Victorian Britain. It takes into account memorial practices and historical discourses from across a range of national, political and professional backgrounds, in order to highlight the points of conjunction between communities and cultural figures rarely, if ever, brought together in Victorian scholarship. To do this, it adopts a dual methodology, combining historical and biographical overviews drawn from different disciplinary areas with close attention to primary textual examples. Case studies of European revolutionaries such as Alexander Herzen, Peter Kropotkin and Karl Marx, and American expatriate authors such as Henry James and Mark Twain, are thus situated in a broader analysis of the production and consumption of private and public histories, inflected by considerations of ideology, degrees of integration and types of relation to the ‘host’ society. The foreigners who found themselves on British soil in the Victorian period created a web of relationships with memory and history, and only by engaging with the breadth and variety, as well as the specificity, of those relationships, can we begin to unravel the web’s complexity. The essay takes the ‘global turn’ in Victorian studies in a different direction, and may be read as the first step towards a new theory of the Victorian immigrant experience of the past, based on an interrogation of the memory/history binary itself.

Nazi camps on British soil: the excavation of Lager Wick forced labour camp in Jersey, Channel Islands

AbstractThe forced labour camp of Lager Wick in Jersey, built during the German occupation of the Channel Islands in 1942, is the first Nazi camp to be excavated on British soil. This paper presents the findings from three seasons of fieldwork (2014–16), and includes an analysis of the architecture of internment and the signposts it leaves for that which does not survive. It also draws into sharp relief the link between archaeology and oral testimony and the way that archaeology can both back up and disprove the historical record. Finally, this paper examines the important role that archaeology can play in uncovering and helping to normalize ‘taboo heritage’.

Terrorism in the Backyard: Coverage of London Attacks, 2005 by the British TV News Channels

The media-terrorism nexus needs further exploration. This article is a qualitative analysis of the coverage of London Attacks, 2005 by the British TV news channels. It aims to investigate and to empirically ascertain the veracity of the media-terrorism-symbiotic-relationship notion. The research draws a comparison with a similar study of the coverage of Mumbai attacks, 2008 and maintains that when the terrorist event happens on British soil, the symbiotic relationship theory is not verified completely. It concludes that British TV news channels, while reporting the home event of terrorism, do not overly focus on the theme of awe and terror. Instead, they are more responsible, careful, and nationalistic while covering the events of terrorism.

Retuning Imperial Intentions: The Gold Coast Police Band, West African Students, and a 1947 Tour of Great Britain

Retuning Imperial IntentionsThe Gold Coast Police Band, West African Students, and a 1947 Tour of Great Britain Nate Plageman In December 1947, H. M. Collins of the West Africa Section of the British Colonial Office penned a letter to Tom Stenning, the bandmaster of the Gold Coast Police Band in Accra. The two-page letter, which Collins insisted was long overdue, concerned the Band's recently completed four-month tour of Great Britain. From early May until mid-September, the Band, which comprised 34 members of the colony's police force, had traveled throughout England, Wales, and Scotland, giving dozens of public performances, appearing on British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) radio and television programs, and gaining great fanfare in the British press. Stenning, who had overseen the ensemble since 1943, had joined Collins as one of the colonial officials charged with ensuring that the tour's audiences obtained an "education" about the Gold Coast and the wider merits of British imperialism. In fact, the Gold Coast government and Colonial Office crafted the Band's tour—likely the longest by a colonial ensemble on British soil—with the hope that its martial appearance and vast repertoire of military music, swing numbers, light operas, and popular tunes would rekindle audiences' enthusiasm for colonialism's ability to benefit and "civilize" African peoples.1 Collins insisted that their efforts had been remarkably successful; the Band, he proclaimed, had enraptured the British public and "made the Gold Coast a household word throughout Britain, the Empire and other parts of the world."2 [End Page 111] If Collins's letter embodies the unbridled optimism that British officials had in their ability to "anticipate and mould" Empire's future following the Second World War (Pearce, 1982, p. 162), it also reflects the challenge of using colonial records to reconstruct state-sponsored musical events not as acts of prepared propaganda, but as multifaceted and multidirectional popular musical happenings. Because the 1947 tour was an unprecedented imperial initiative, it is the subject of hundreds of administrative reports, circulars, and exchanges now contained in archival files held in the National Archives (TNA) in Kew, England, and, to some extent, the main repository of Ghana's Public Records and Archives Administration Department (PRAAD) in Accra. As I have discussed elsewhere (Plageman, 2016), this extensive paper trail—which constitutes the largest corpus of records on a single musical event in the colony's history—documents the tour British officials wanted to take place far more than that which actually did. Nearly two-thirds of their contents concerns the tour's planning and organization: an imbalance that amplifies officials' ambitions and mutes what occurred once the Band arrived on British soil. Remaining documents perpetuate additional silences, providing almost no insight into the physical or social settings of the Band's performances, the aural or visual aspects of individual concerts, or the songs it played onstage (such records do not, for instance, contain a single program from any of the group's concerts).3Outside of numerical estimates and blanket statements about their enthusiastic responses to the Band, they also say little about the tour's audiences, their demographic makeup, or their actual levels of engagement with the group and its music. Last, documentation offers practically nothing about the bandsmen, omitting basic material such as their full names.4 In short, the tour's vast archival record ignores—even works to erase—the human, sonic, and creative elements that give musical events significance and meaning. In the pages that follow, I analyze the 1947 tour not as a state-directed showcase of Empire, but as a creative act of Ghanaian popular music. As John Collins has so poignantly revealed, Ghanaian artists and audiences [End Page 112] repeatedly employed popular music as a medium of enjoyment and empowerment; a means of actively shaping, not simply reacting to, the wider transformations of the 20th century. In uncovering their actions and agency, Collins (1994, 1996b, 2005a) has unveiled remarkable insights into how otherwise invisible people decolonized imported cultural resources, recovered lost histories, and outlined imagined futures. Propelled by his groundbreaking work, others have explored how Ghanaians used popular music to define and debate modernity, claim connections to...

Gilles Roussineau, ed., Perceforest: Sixième partie, 2 vols. (Textes Littéraires Français 631.) Paris: Droz, 2015. Paper. Pp. cxxxi, 1419. €139.90. ISBN: 978-2-600-01809-8.

Gilles Roussineau, ed., <i>Perceforest: Sixième partie</i>, 2 vols. (Textes Littéraires Français 631.) Paris: Droz, 2015. Paper. Pp. cxxxi, 1419. €139.90. ISBN: 978-2-600-01809-8.

&lt;em&gt;Demonios más bien vistos que españoles&lt;/em&gt;. Guerra, catolicismo y diplomacia hispánica en la Gran Bretaña de Jacobo I Estuardo (1603-1625)

Entre los años 1605 y 1625, durante la paz entre la Monarquía Hispánica y la Gran Bretaña de Jacobo Estuardo, se produjeron diferentes incidentes y enfrentamientos navales en las costas y puertos británicos entre galeones hispánicos y holandeses. Ello ocasionó siempre incidentes diplomáticos porque tanto los embajadores españoles como los holandeses presionaron a las autoridades inglesas, neutrales, para inclinarse o no en la ayuda a alguno de ambos contendientes. Ello dejaba en evidencia la falta de colaboración de la Corona inglesa en el cumplimiento de las cláusulas del tratado de paz de 1604 que la obligaban a ello ante la Monarquía. Por su parte, los soldados y tripulaciones hispánicas de esos navíos sufrieron todo tipo de penurias en un país nominalmente neutral, pero de hecho anti-español y pro-holandés por causas religiosas, políticas y económicas. Muy pocos, aparte de la propia embajada, se aventuraron a socorrer a estos hombres.