Imperial Agents Research Articles

Myth and Identity in the Epic of Imperial Spain

Myth and Identity in the Epic of Imperial Spain. By Elizabeth B. Davis. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2000. 244 pages. La epics colonial. By Juan Bautista de Avalle-Arce. Anejos de Rilce 35. Pamplona: U de Navarra, 2000. 116 pages. Both studies propose a canon of epic poems encourage readers revisit a corpus that, with the exception of La Araucana, failed attract significant attention in late twentieth-century literary studies. Yet throughout the Early Modern period, the epic form retained its cultural capital; in fact, Frank Pierce's catalogue lists some 150 different Spanish poems (not counting reprints and translations) published in the seventeenth century alone (Davis 3). As her point of departure, Elizabeth Davis historicizes and theorizes the process of canon formation that marginalized Spanish-language epics, and then urges scholars and students examine anew the narrative poetry that imperial agents used to forge a sense of unity and script cultural identities during the period of expansion and conquest (10). She then provides five chapters, each of which reads a poem using historical analysis and literary theory. Specialists will want read the whole study, as Davis builds important theoretical and thematic bridges that link the different sections; at the same time, each chapter could stand alone as a case study for a graduate seminar because of the clarity with which Davis explains her methodology. The first chapter argues against David Quint's influential classification of La Araucana as an epic of the defeated, tracing Ercilla's project as it evolved from part I (1569) part III (1589); over two decades, Davis finds an increasingly panegyrical view of the Habsburg state. In this regard, she analyzes how the poet marshals a discourse of service script a relationship Philip II, drawing attention a little-known prefatory letter found in the princeps, but not reprinted in editions after 1579. Also in support of her thesis, Davis contemplates the poet's strategy of self-- positioning when he narrates the execution of Caupolican. As well, she draws connections sixteenth-century political theory argue that the poem represents the Mapuches as barbarians whom the Spanish monarchy has a providential justification subdue. One demurral with this chapter is the use of the adjective modernist classify the poet's position (59); theoretically correct, it seems so firmly associated with the past century that early-modernist might be preferable, if less wieldy. Nevertheless, the analysis of Ercilla as a contradictory subject provides a convincing demonstration of La Araucana's participation in Habsburg myth-making. The second chapter reads Juan Rufo's La Austriada through the filter of Renaissance theories on imitation. In a tour de force of explication, Davis sifts through the stock lexical items and newer, Ercillan set pieces that Rufo borrows narrate the battle of Lepanto. I would recommend this section anyone learning interpret Early Modern poetry, because it brings alive the process of writing through the imitation and emulation of authorities. The chapter also discusses how the poem interrupts its own celebration of Lepanto with a narration of the tragic aftermath of the Alpujarras rebellion. Chapter iii most explicitly confronts the problems that critics today face when reading Early Modern Spanish epics. Analyzing Cristobal de Virues's El Montserrate, Davis uses a feminist, resistant reader as a heuristic device with which interpret the foundational narrative built on rape and murder. While she validates resistance the work's reconciliation of rape and murder within a national teleology, Davis also draws attention the rhetorical and narrative elements of the hagiographies that would have framed an Early Modern reader's reception of this story. The fourth chapter contemplates Diego de Hojeda's La Christiada. Davis begins with a discussion of the theological underpinnings of the Dominican friar's epic of the Passion, discussing medieval debates about representations of the suffering messiah as they played out, first in Dominican circles in Europe, and then in Hojeda's American milieu. …

Patrons, Clients, and Empire: The Subordination of Indigenous Hierarchies in Asia and Africa

Historians of empire have frequently referred to models of mutual dependency between rulers and subordinate societies. The terminology of subordination covering "subsidiary alliances," "paramountcy," "protectorates," "indirect rule," or "collaboration" indicates a need to account for the ways in which imperial hierarchies functioned in the absence of sustained coercion at the interface between "rulers" and "ruled". The notion of modus vivendi is implicit in this equilibrium, compared with the disequilibrium of conquest. So, too, is the idea of degrees of control and supervision. 1 Others who have emphasized the notion of overt and passive resistance to account for political change within the framework of colonial government still have to explain the more usual amount of accommodation. 2 Moreover, many of the structures utilized by colonial administrations at the district level have not disappeared. Beneath the rhetoric surrounding "colonialism" and "nationalism" there still lies a broad topic concerning the interaction of imperial agents, their political successors, and local leaders in regional histories, and that can benefit from comparative treatment.

The Contribution of the Christian Missions to British Colonial Education

The English have traditionally encouraged the establishment and maintenance of schools based on private initiative—the so-called voluntary principle. It was this tradition coupled to the philanthropic movement of the late eighteenth, early nineteenth centuries that saw Christian mission schooling firmly established throughout India and the British colonial empire by the 1920s.In 1854, in India, and in 1925, in Africa, Christian missions were given official recognition and made eligible for government financial assistance. The ensuing partnership proved to be a mixed blessing. The Colonial Office was supportive of mission schools as long as they conformed to broad educational principles, and Colcnial administrations saw their role, at least until 1945, as supplementing rather than replacing mission schools. There were, however, frequent tensions in the partnership over matters of control and accountability, especially at the local level where governors and bishops often eyed each other suspiciously. Perhaps even more significant were the ongoing conflicts between rival Protestant denominations and the almost universal distrust of Roman Catholic missions by their Protestant neighbours.It has been claimed that mission schools had a divisive effect on colonial society because they cut across caste, race, social class and gender and produced new elites. It is certainty true that they exerted an influence on national life far in excess of their numbers. Even now, it is still difficult to make an accurate assessment of their overall contribution to colonial education. The expedient nature of mission schooling as a means to an end needs to be balanced by the fact that the missions were the first to take an active interest in the welfare of native peoples. The missionaries have been criticised as agents of cultural imperialism but it is equally true that most of them were devout people who gave them lives to what they were convinced was a worthwhile course. Whatever their shortcomings, just as they had done in England in the early nineteenth century, they laid the basis for all the education systems in Britain's diverse andfarflung colonial empire.

Shipping, Technology, and Imperialism: Papers Presented to the Third British-Dutch Maritime History Conference (review)

Reviewed by: Shipping, Technology, and Imperialism: Papers Presented to the Third British-Dutch Maritime History Conference * Peter J. Hugill (bio) Shipping, Technology, and Imperialism: Papers Presented to the Third British-Dutch Maritime History Conference. Edited by Gordon Jackson and David M. Williams. Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996. Pp. xiv+284; illustrations, maps, figures, tables, notes, bibliography, index. $76.95. Although not all twelve papers in this volume deal with all three themes of the title, the general focus is as advertised. For this achievement the editors are to be commended. As coeditor of two volumes, I am sympathetic to such a (usually thankless) enterprise. Not all conference volumes hang together as well as this, and several papers make significant contributions. The substantial introduction, by Gordon Jackson, is helpful to the more general reader. The basic themes that I find useful in the volume are these (in the order of their originality and with the contributing authors in parentheses): (a) that late-nineteenth-century imperialism was as strongly driven by the needs of shipowners to find work for their ships as it was by the more usual suspects of the search for markets and raw materials (Peter Davies, Joseph à Campo); (b) that the application of steam to the navy’s supply logistics and to “offensive coastal warfare” in the 1850s wrought a strategic revolution in the British navy before the ironclad era represented by Warrior (Andrew Lambert); (c) that the workings of international capitalism in the early twentieth century could seriously deflect more nationalist imperial impulses (Frank Broeze); (d) that technology diffusion accelerated within the British and Dutch shipbuilding industries after the onset of steam power (Jan Dirkzwager); and (e) that historians have neglected to study the social conditions under which various actors in the navies and merchant marines actually labored (Conrad Dixon, Peter Schuman). [End Page 799] Davies and à Campo address all three themes in the title. Davies concludes that in the case of British imperialism in West Africa “the shipowners and merchants led the way and that the flag followed their lead” and that “in areas of the globe which lacked a strategic or other incentive then market forces could well have played a decisive role” (p. 61). The agents of imperialism are, however, shipowners who, having invested in the new steamships, had to find themselves cargoes or go under. The usual crew of miners, farmers, bureaucrats, and the like, on whom historians usually blame imperialism, are not the agents of this policy. Joseph à Campo reaches a similar conclusion for the Dutch steam packet services in colonial Indonesia. He further concludes that Daniel Headrick’s argument in The Tools of Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981) leaves technology playing far too passive a role. Headrick suggests that we look at technologies as part of active sociotechnical systems (p. 94). Lambert’s paper, “The British Naval Strategic Revolution, 1815–1854,” is a fine contribution to naval history, although it contains little about imperialism per se. Lambert rehabilitates William Symonds, surveyor of the navy from 1832 to 1847, who built a fleet fast enough to force an enemy to decisive combat for the first time. Under Symonds, the navy also developed specialized coastal assault forces and proved itself capable of defeating coastal fortresses, forcing all other navies on the defensive. But Lambert’s main theme is how logistics changed with the advent of screw-driven ships. The “strategic overseas invasion” was now possible, as exemplified in the British and French ability to maintain two hundred thousand men three thousand miles from home in the Crimea (p. 155). Broeze gives an able account of the “complex international shipping crisis on the North Atlantic” of the first decade of this century. With this crisis came the formation of the Morgan Trust and its combination with Albert Ballin’s Hamburg-America Line and North German Lloyd (p. 103). The Morgan Trust’s control of the White Star Line gave this group a strong presence in Britain as well as America and Germany. Controlling the Dutch trade, even at a time of rising nationalism, reduced the ability of the Rhine ports to compete with the German North Sea and Baltic ports. There are shortcomings. I...

Domesticating ‘the heart of the wild’: female personifications of the colonies, 1886-1940[1

British imperial propaganda has generally been perceived as a male arena which ignores the female presence in the empire story. This paper argues that women were central to empire imagery, particularly when they were used as symbols of the white colonies of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa. Such female personifications represented a wide range of meaning, and depending on how they were interpreted and by whom, became ideal images for attracting both male and female emigrants. An examination of such images additionally reflects the growing national prominence of women as they evolved into imperial agents for preventing racial and moral decline.

The View from Gadshill

The View from Gadshill Francis Sparshott I I once had a furious confrontation with that learned and passionate scholar, the late Milton C. Nahm. He had been giving a paper that involved Falstaff—I forget how, but it included the familiar appeal to the fat knight as the comic spirit of untrammelled life, so that the newly crowned Hal’s final repudiation—“I know thee not, old man”—chills the audience as a denial of humanity in favor of impersonal administration. But I told Nahm that I could not see Falstaff that way. As a boy, if I cycled home from Gravesend to Rochester I had to pass over the North Downs at Gadshill. And it is at Gadshill, when we first meet him, that Falstaff’s gang is planning to waylay a band of innocent travelers. I could never take kindly to a man who made a living mugging and rolling people like me. Nahm was contemptuous of my incompetence to deal with literature: I was prevented from appreciating the portrait of the comic monster, appalling but breathtaking, by my inhibited and inhibiting moralism. But I insisted that I saw no reason why one should abandon one’s identity or one’s morality while one was watching a play or reading a book. Nahm would have been right if I had been insensitive to Falstaff’s outrageousness, his unscrupulous energy and vivacity, his wit and candor. But I think my appreciation was sharpened rather than nullified by my awareness of the real menace Falstaff represents to people who happen not to be his pals. And I think Nahm’s enthusiasm blinded him to something else that Shakespeare wrote into the part. At that very first meeting, we find Falstaff trying to negotiate for himself a position of power or privilege when the young prince shall succeed to the throne. And it is just this negotiation that Falstaff is trying to resume [End Page 398] from the sidewalk at the end, when the new king brushes him off. Nahm did not notice this because it did not occur to him that Henry V was going to be a real king with real power over real people, just as it did not occur to him that Falstaff’s robbed and brutalized pilgrim victims would be real people suffering real injury and loss. If my personal angle, the potential victim’s view, had so usurped my vision that it blinded me to whatever else the playwright had made of his character and its situation, it would have made me a bad viewer of the play. But it might have added depth to my understanding and my criticism if it gave me an angle that other viewers and readers could imaginatively share. 1 Since each of us has some sort of angle on everything, sharing perspectives can always be valuable. II I have been reminded of my encounter with Nahm by reading Edward W. Said’s Culture and Imperialism. 2 The book appears to start from the position that imperialism is the “determining political horizon of modern Western culture” (p. 60), imperialism being defined as the policy of establishing and maintaining an empire, and an empire as “a relationship . . . in which one state controls the effective political sovereignty of another political society” (p. 9). Because this is the determining horizon, the right way to think of any “Western” author is as an agent of imperialism, although of course this is most easily shown in the case of authors and works in which the imperial connection is explicit. If there is to be a uniform curriculum and canon for the teaching of English literature everywhere in the world, that canon obviously should not be based on works that assume the rightness and normality of an imperialism that defines most readers of that literature as racially and culturally inferior; such a canon is itself a tacit agent of an offensive and gratuitous imperialism. This much seems clear. But Said’s book then moves off into a hackneyed recitation of the evils that the West (or the north, or the developed world 3 ) inflicts on a world of passive victims, followed by a denunciation of the...

Nature, the Exotic, and the Science of French Colonialism by Michael A. Osborne

192 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE the abundance of case examples the study provides, one comes away with the sense that Pyenson has only begun to identify patterns, to make connections with larger questions in the history of science, or even to sort out the meanings of all the data he has uncovered. The book contains a virtual prosopography of French colonial scientists, but Pyenson makes no attempt to discern persistent career trajectories or draw conclusions about the impact of colonial assignments on them. He includes an impressive range of case studies, but in the absence of explicit and systematic comparison one is left wondering what all the accounts of frustrated projects and bureaucratic infight­ ing contribute to our understanding of the links between colonialism and science. He makes no attempt to distinguish analytically between formal and informal colonies or, for that matter, between colonies and fully independent nations in the Americas. He provides only the sketchiest details about the broader colonial contexts, thus isolating scientific enterprise from the administrative, military, economic, and social imperatives that vitally shaped it in France overseas. As in Pyenson’s earlier work, the colonized peoples are at best mar­ ginal in Civilizing Mission, a significant omission in a work so titled. This is especially problematic because one of his central arguments is that scientists and scientific institutions were key agents of Frenchlanguage cultural imperialism in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Without considerable evidence of indigenous responses, it is not pos­ sible to know this, or to know just what the “natives” made of the observatories and experiment stations. On this and other vital issues, Civilizing Mission has little to tell us. Like so many of the colonial scientists Pyenson studies, it provides useful data, but leaves the analy­ sis of this information and its meaning for ongoing debates in the history of science and European colonialism to be worked out by other scholars. Michael Adas Dr. Adas is the author of Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989). Nature, the Exotic, and the Science of French Colonialism. By Michael A. Osborne. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. Pp- xvi + 216; illustrations, maps, tables, notes, index. $35.00. We have all been fascinated by our first visit to the zoo. The display of exotic creatures in northern latitudes goes back a long way. The menageries and Jardin du roi, for example, appeared at the French court when Europeans were discovering the natural world beyond Europe. Zoological and botanical gardens may even be said to provide standards for defining the exotic. Less obvious is the historical link between such institutions and imperialism. In this work, Michael Os­ TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 193 borne identifiesjust this link in the “essential science ofcolonization— acclimatization” (p. xiv). His focus is the history of a French scientific institution, the Société Zoologique d’Acclimatation, and his emphasis is on the acclimatizers’ utilitarian goals rather than their dispassionate interests. Osborne seeks to evaluate how Second Empire colonization af­ fected French science and technology (particularly zoology and agri­ culture) and how metropolitan zoologists took part in France’s expan­ sionist enterprise. The first two chapters take the society from its foundation under the enthusiastic leadership of Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire up to 1920. Osborne demonstrates that the acclimatiz­ ers’ ideas about colonization and agricultural development closely mirrored those of the imperial regime. The society, understood by the author as an “epistemic community,” relied on a well-defined scientific ideology—a variant of Lamarckian transformism. The soci­ ety’s work had clear implications for French colonialist policies. In the acclimatizers’ view, one set of principles governed the raising of ostriches in France and Europeans in Algeria. The fourth chapter is the most interesting, describing the early success the society achieved from a concrete and spectacular develop­ ment: the Paris Jardin zoologique d’acclimatation, a splendid zoo con­ structed in 1860 through imperial patronage. More than a public attraction, it became a center of exotic animal trading. A private cor­ poration took on the task of promoting the economic utility of applied zoology. Unusual creatures arrived from all continents, and...

On the Theory and Practice of Compradors: The Role of ʿAbbud Pasha in the Egyptian Political Economy

One of the most resilient ideas introduced to the analysis of economic and political change under colonialism and imperialism is the “comprador” and, by extension, the “comprador bourgeoisie.” The comprador in essence embodies or internalizes the basic theoretical problem of the peripheral political economy: economic activity oriented primarily for the benefit of the other.1By strict definition, compradors are native agents or partners of foreign investors who operate in some form in the local economy. However, in the theoretical context of assessing the possibilities for local industrial development, compradors represent forces that hinder change. As “agents of foreign imperialism,” they act “against the interest of the national economy.”2

Missionaries, fanompoana and the Menalamba revolt in late nineteenth century Madagascar

ABSTRACT Historians to date have considered that the Menalamba rebels of 1895–97 were primarily inspired by political and religious grievances. Missionaries were the most overt symbol of the attack by Western civilisation on traditional virtues which they wished to restore. However, the traditional interpretation fails both to account for rank and file, rather than elite, rebel motives, and to recognise the major role played by the state‐church in fomenting the revolt. Contrary to conventional thinking, economic rather than political motives were paramount in the decision to create a state‐church in 1869. Thereafter, missionaries became imperial agents, and the chapels and schools the prime institutions for the summoning of fanompoana labour which formed the chief resource of the imperial economy. This was particularly the case from late 1870s when the strain of French aggression and deteriorating conditions of trade necessitated increased reliance upon forced labour. Missionaries gave their passive, and often their active, support to the recruitment and even the supervision of fanompoana labour. As fanompoana included any service demanded by a superior of an inferior, state‐church personnel, from missionaries to school teachers, used their official status to demand a wide variety of fanompoana services, ranging from the erection of mission buildings to the purchase of religious literature. It was the totality of state‐church fanompoana, it is argued, which accounts for the rising tide of anti‐missionary and anti‐Christian sentiment amongst the populace during the 1880s and early 1890s. Whereas resistance to the French takeover was nominal, when the French maintained the old Merina administration, at the heart of which lay the oppressive institution of the church, an uprising occurred in which church property and personnel formed the primary focus of rebel attack.

The Vote of theMillones(1590)

The efforts of Charles V (1500–58) to consolidate and defend his hereditary possessions gave a powerful boost to the development of public credit in western Europe. To meet a scale of expenditure which surpassed anything seen before, Imperial agents had recourse to an entirely new series of financial devices, necessity providing, as it normally did, the spur to invention. Charles V's servants exploited the facilities of the Antwerp Bourse to encourage the investing public to sink its money into government debt rather than commercial enterprises or speculations in commodities. Additional funds were raised on the credit-worthiness of provincial taxgatherers in the Low Countries. Thanks to the ingenuity of his financial advisers, the emperor survived the dramatic collapse of his position in Germany during the spring of 1552; and he was able shortly after to attempt the recovery of the Imperial bishoprics of Metz, Toul and Verdun, which the Lutheran princes had bartered away in their bid for French support.

School teachers as agents of cultural imperialism in territorial hawaii

THE COLONIZATION OF HAWAII, MARKED ESPECIALLY BY ANNEXATION OF THE islands in 1898, involved the familiar processes of economic, political and cultural domination by an external power. In this or any other episode of im perialism, and whatever processes are emphasized, the role of the system of public schooling should be taken into account; indeed, it was once thought im portant enough to warrant the title Education as Cultural Imperialism for a publication in which imperialism was defined in the broadest sense.1 To measure the significance of formal education against American policies of domination in territorial Hawaii is to examine schooling within two intertwin ing local contexts: the legitimation of 'Americanization' after 1898 and the efforts to protect the planter oligarchy interests of the region. But another, almost contrary, role has been claimed for education in that part of the world. Lawrence Fuchs posited the notion of territorial public schools as 'crucibles of democracy', contributing strongly to the ultimate political eclipse of the oligar chy after the Pacific War of the 1940s.2 To what extent can these attributed roles of schooling be sustained with respect to Hawaii? Several general histories of Hawaiian education touch upon such aspects to a certain extent,3 but the concern of this paper is rather with the teachers themselves than broadly with education as a social institution. How far, for instance, did this group of in dividuals figure as agents of American cultural imperialism and how much did they foster the political revolution of the post-War era? The period chosen for examining these questions is the 1920s and 1930s. In the earliest stages of that period chauvinistic hysteria produced principally by World War I reached its peak in the school system. In Hawaii at that time ethnocentrism found a further dimension in the authorities' fear of 'Japaniza tion' of the islands, a fear based on demographic trends and on the largely Japanese labour strikes on the plantations in 1909 and 1920. By the late 1920s and until the Pacific War another major issue with implications for formal education was the drift of rural labour from the plantations. Against the

The Egyptian nationalist movement and the Syrians in Egypt

By the end of the nineteenth century, members of the small Syrian community in Egypt had come to play a disproportionately large role in the government bureaucracy, in journalism and in business. This aroused the resentment of many educated young Egyptian nationalists, who saw the Syrian immigrants as competitors for government and professional positions. At the same time, newspapers published by Syrians were among the most outspoken supporters of the British occupation regime. Syrians were therefore the target of indiscriminate attack by nationalist leaders as agents of imperialism and enemies of Egypt's struggle for independence. But the hostility thus engendered was short‐lived, and the tolerant attitude of the nationalist movement from 1919 onward and a common language and culture made it possible for Syrians to assimilate into Egyptian society.

Early British colonial school inspectors: agents of imperialism?

Early British colonial school inspectors: agents of imperialism?

Imperialism and Multinational Corporations

In Nigeria as elsewhere, the giant multinational corporations are the basic units of imperialism in its contemporary neocolonial stage. The analysis of these monopoly sharks is critical to the understanding of the mechanisms through which Third World countries are exploited, manipulated, and perpetuated as the collective wretched of the earth. This paper is essentially an attempt to document the character and role of these multinational agents of imperialism in Nigeria. In effect, it tries to provide empirical validation for the basic Marxist thesis that the serious problems of Third World countries like Nigeria can be traced directly to the operations of imperialist forces whose most powerful catalysts are the colossal multinational enterprises. These activities are closely coordinated with such other imperialist mechanisms as foreign investment, export-import trade, and foreign aid. They have generated and perpetuated the seemingly intractable problems of mass poverty, stifling foreign domination, savage exploitation, open starvation, debilitating disease, pervasive illiteracy, widening inequality, irrational waste, cultural degradation, and political instability in Nigeria and other Third World countries within the imperialist orbit. The historical origin of this collective malaise is nineteenthand twentieth-century colonialisation of Nigeria by British

‘Agents of Imperialism: The Men Who Ruled Africa, 1880–1960’

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The Sino-Soviet Tangle

The emergence of an open and serious quarrel between the U.S.S.R. and the People's Republic of China is very likely the most important new in world affairs in the last ten years, and it may therefore be considered a prime challenge to the science of international relations. How well have the numerous and sometimes well-financed experts in this branch of knowledge responded to the challenge? First it may be observed that the international affairs specialists in the Communist world have been and remain almost totally paralyzed in the face of this new phenomenon. Despite the sources of information that are available to official Communist scholarly institutions, Communist writers have been almost wholly unable to analyze the conflict. This is partly a question of security requirements and the need to work out an official line in each party before discussion within the framework of that line can be permitted. But it is also a matter of conceptual limitations traditional in Marxism-Leninism. As the constant reiteration of the adjective fraternal suggests, Marxist-Leninists are committed to the assumption that international relations within the Communist community are essentially different than those within Without a brutally competitive and exploitive economic system, international conflicts are not supposed to reach major proportions, and the current quarrel presumably should never have happened. Apparently this very assumption of fraternity has aggravated the Sino-Soviet dispute, because both sides tend to see this quarrel not as something more or less normal in the context of national interest and great power rivalry, but instead as some kind of weird perversion of natural law, explicable only as wilful nastiness on the part of the opponent. Of course, it is not impossible for Marxist-Leninists to adapt their methods of analysis to the new situation. In his book Socialism and War1 the Yugoslav Communist Edvard Kardelj asserts that the errors of the Chinese regime stems from the law of uneven development, by which he means that the Chinese are at a low state of development and are affected by the residuum of the old order and state-administrative methods. But to suggest that such disparities among Communist countries must lead to sharp international disagreement is too discomfitting a line for even the Yugoslav Communists to advance much less the Soviets, who for years recognized that Communist was uneven among various countries, but never concluded that political conflict would be the expected result. Another theoretical explanation of the rift is suggested in the Chinese and Soviet charges that, respectively, Yugoslavia and Albania have become agents of imperialism. If this ultimate anathema is pronounced between the great powers themselves, recalling Stalin's theoretical characterization of his opponents, the disputants would be able

The Peace Corps and the University

T NHE Peace Corps is the most imaginative and possibly the most successful New Frontier idea-become-reality. Despite the skeptics' predictions and a continuing bombardment of biting cartoons, volunteers have gone overseas, performed their tasks effectively, and managed to escape identification with the more controversial issues of the Cold War. True, Moscow has called the volunteers agents of imperialism; the Nigerian postal-card incident shocked many Americans into an awareness of the high stakes involved;1 and a few volunteers proved inefficient or delinquent and returned home involuntarily. But these instances have been rare. The Peace Corps has become a viable American institution. The forty-six nations receiving assistance have asked for second, third, and fourth contingents, and the prospects for continued demand seem promising. Congressional support has been bipartisan. In general, press coverage has been both extensive and kindly. American colleges and universities have been deeply involved in the Peace Corps experiment. They have borne the brunt of the training responsibilities, using their reservoirs of skilled man power, university facilities, and extensive experience to prepare the volunteers for teaching, nursing, road-surveying, and nearly three hundred other kinds of overseas tasks. Since the trainees work at least six, ten-hour days a week, the teaching and administrative staffs also drive themselves the proverbial twenty-five-hour day. Inasmuch as a host of trained specialists, both native and foreign, bring to the project their insights and experience in many basic fields (area studies, language, world affairs, communism, health and medical training, physical training and recreation), the training program adheres to no staid academic schedule of class attendance at nine, ten, and one o'clock on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. The volunteers live in suspense, since they do not know whether they are going to be selected or rejected at the end of the program. Instructors, selection officers (who are usually clinical psychologists), psychiatrists

Hu Feng's Conflict with the Communist Literary Authorities

Hu Feng was a Marxist literary critic who for almost thirty years allied himself closely with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and left-wing groups. In 1955 the Chinese Communists launched an intensive nationwide campaign against him in which he was branded as everything from an exponent of bourgeois idealism to an agent of imperialism and of Chiang Kai-shek.