Official Archives Research Articles

근대 중국 都市史 연구의 시각과 전망 : 天津 도시사 연구를 兼論함

This article examines important Western and Chinese literatures on modern urban history of China since the early 20th century. The authors managed to identify main characteristics and perspectives of vast scholarly works of the field. According to the authors, the interests in urban life of China could be found in the missionaries’ and journalists’ reports on Chinese city life and its history from mid-19th century, but the urban studies, in the true meaning of the word, starts from H.B. Morse who studied treaty ports and China’s changing commercial system. <BR> The main Western works having an important influence on the studies of Chinese cities were Max Weber’s, which found no urbanism in the Chinese traditional cities. Weber’s theses continued to be influential in the Western academia, within which the notion “urban-rural continuum” of traditional China was widely accepted.<BR> Studies of Shanghai are still main stream in modern urban history of China, both in the West and in China. But the authors find some newly arising characteristics in the field: diversification of research themes, adoption of various methodologies, broadening of research interest beyond Shanghai, etc.<BR> As for Tianjin history, the research trends could be divided into three phases: the first(1949-1978), scholars focused on Communist revolutionary movement, mass movements including Boxers and labors; the second(1978-1990s), new methodologies were used, various historical materials including official archives were compiled, and local gazetteers in various administrative levels were published; the third(21st century), deepening of researches and dissemination of research achievements including popular publications.<BR> This article proposes, finally, some points for enhancing studies of Chinese urban history: creation of analytical frame and new theoretical method, combination of micro and macro approaches and expanding of material collection including about historical figures.

The Incomplete Rebellion: Mau Mau Movement in Twenty-First-Century Kenyan Popular Culture

This paper concerns the simultaneous and contradictory conceptions of Kenyan history by rereading popular representations of the Mau Mau war of Kenyan independence and its postindependence consequences. It examines twenty-first-century evocations and appropriations of Mau Mau in relation to earlier discourses in literature and politics. It discovers that contemporary artists and citizens deploy references to Mau Mau outside of its historical context to address, in highly emotive language, contemporary problems in Kenya, such as runaway corruption and police brutality. It reads emergent artists and writers against the background of more dominant and canonical work to demonstrate the evolution of popular memory and the need to consider everyday, marginal, and liminal texts in a postcolonial context where the perspectives of ordinary people are excluded from official archives.

Reading Order and Sentiment in Colonial ArchivesAlong the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Ann Laura Stoler. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008.

In Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense, Ann Laura Stoler examines the apprehensions, epistemic uncertainties, and sentiments that shaped colonial policy in the Dutch Indies. The author presents a nuanced and meticulous reading of official nineteenthand twentiethcentury Dutch colonial archives and decenters how postcolonial scholars, feminist scholars, and historians have characteristically approached colonial texts. The aim of many postcolonial scholars is to recuperate and reintroduce the voices and agency of colonized or subaltern individuals. In contrast, Stoler seeks to elucidate the epistemologies and sentiments of colonial administrators, teachers, doctors, and orphanage directors by reading Dutch colonial archives “along the grain.” She views colonial archives as fleeting configurations of epistemological and political anxieties rather than sites of pure erasure or misrepresentation. Treating archives as ethnographic data in this way illuminates the aspirations, dissentions, epistemic anxieties, and sentiments of colonial officials and draws attention to the “fault lines and ragged edges of colonialism’s archival genres” (p. 53). In discerning the ruptures and inconsistencies within colonial common sense, Stoler explores how colonial administrators sought to assess and identify politically versus privately motivated sentiments and to classify racial and social boundaries. In pursuing this task, Stoler develops the central theoretical argument that political rationalities of administrative authorities were as equally founded in managing affective states and sentiments as they were in the mastery of specific principles of reason and rationality. Systems of scientific knowledge and reasoned management may have been the foundations of colonial authority but only insofar as they were grounded in the simultaneous governance of affections and sentiments. The establishment of a “colonial order of things,” through which colonial policies arose, was founded on a European common sense, or specific epistemic habits,

The Fatal Politics of the PRC's Great Leap Famine: the preface to Tombstone

What follows is the Preface to Tombstone (), Yang Jisheng's two-volume investigative study of China's Great Famine that claimed some 36 million lives in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The book was published in Hong Kong in 2008 and was banned on the mainland. The death toll was unprecedented and remains unmatched in Chinese or world history. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has tried to cover up the terrible reality by classifying key information as secret and placing the blame elsewhere, as in the euphemism ‘the three years of natural disaster’. Yang Jisheng, an economist, journalist and Xinhua editor, has devoted more than two decades of his life to collecting data from official archives and interviewing survivors, witnesses and officials. The result is a thorough and powerful account of extraordinary inhumanity and magnificent courage that rivals Alexander Solzhenitsyn's study of the Soviet Gulag and Robert Conquest's history of Stalin's collectivization famine. Tombstone covers both diverse localities and the power center in Beijing to explain the dynamics of the catastrophe caused by CCP policies and practices under the leadership of Mao Zedong. Chief among these policies were the state monopoly of purchasing and marketing grain, the power of officials to seize grain from people's homes, compulsory collective mess halls that ‘imposed the dictatorship of the proletariat on every individual stomach’, and a full-scale collectivization that left villagers no means of saving themselves. Despite receiving reports of widespread famine and cannibalism, Mao touted alleged successes and attacked those who spoke the truth as counter-revolutionaries, thereby prolonging and intensifying the famine for another two years. On this basis Yang places the ultimate responsibility for 36 million deaths on China's political system. Tombstone is a monumental work that is also intended as a monument to Yang's own father (whose death by starvation is described in heartrending detail below) and to all the other 36 million innocent victims. At personal risk, Yang is trying to end ‘an amnesia imposed by those in power’. In the process he sheds unprecedented light on how a political system presented to the Chinese people as a ‘Road to Paradise’ instead turned into a ‘Road to Perdition’. Yang has condensed and updated the Chinese-language manuscript for foreign-language publication. The following Preface is part of an English translation currently in progress.

Review: The Constant Diplomat Robert Ford in Moscow

THE CONSTANT DIPLOMAT Robert Ford in Moscow Charles A. Ruud Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queeris, 303PP, $39.95 cloth ISBN 9780-773535855Robert Ford, diplomat and poet, retired from the Canadian embassy in Moscow in 1980. By then, notwithstanding a serious physical disability, he had survived in the Soviet capital for more than 20 years, 16 as ambassador. He had received the governor general's award for poetry and had been made a companion of the order of Canada for his public service. Among western governments, he was considered an outstanding expert on the Soviet Union.When he retired, Ford had certain ideas about how the record of his long service was to be treated. Apart from his poetry (ultimately published in seven volumes) he wrote two books. The first, Our Man in Moscow. A Diplomat's Reflections on the Soviet Union, appeared in 1989. Ford conceived of this study as falling between a diplomatic memoir and an academic work. It is serious, close to academic in tone and substance, enlivened by the occasional anecdote, but on the whole impersonal. At the same time, apart from an index, it has no scholarly apparatus. Our Man in Moscow was designed to cover the greater part of Ford's professional life. In 1995, this time with considerable editorial assistance, he published a second book. A Moscow Literary Memoir. Among the Great Artists of Russia from 1946 to ic)8o dealt with the other dimension of his life in the Soviet Union - his many contacts with Soviet intellectuals, and in particular, the poets Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Andrei Voznesensky, and the aged Lili Brik, once Mayakovsk/s mistress.Yet there remained another source of his writing he wanted published. This was contained in the dispatches and memoranda he had prepared over the years for the Department of External Affairs, on file in Ottawa. He believed these official documents would make a third book, this time in a scholarly edition prepared by a qualified historian. He pursued this project with determination during his lifetime. Now, more than 10 years after his death, it has been realized with the publication of The Constant Diplomat by Charles A. Ruud of the University of Western Ontario.Ruud is a specialist in Russian history. His book is based upon research in primary sources in both the Canadian and Russian official archives, as well as on secondary sources. In addition, he had extensive conversations with Ford and interviewed a number of the ambassador's friends. He has produced a study of over 300 pages, of which some 85 are devoted to appendices, endnotes, a bibliography, and an index. In form and style, then, Ruud's work seems to be very much what the ambassador had in mind. The author says, however, that his concept was different from his subject's. He may have concluded that an analysis of Ford's official writings alone would not have made a book. (The chapters devoted to summarizing and commenting on the dispatches run to only about 125 pages.) However that may be, Ruud has added biographical material on Robert Ford's childhood in London, Ontario, his education at Western and Cornell, and his life in retirement, as well as most of a chapter on the ambassador's wife, Thereza, a chapter on Ford's contacts with Soviet intellectuals, and a chapter on his Soviet counterpart in Ottawa, Alexander Yakovlev. These additional elements add colour and interest to the book. …

The British Rainfall Organization, 1859–1919

WeatherVolume 65, Issue 5 p. 115-117 Research Article The British Rainfall Organization, 1859–1919† David E. Pedgley, Corresponding Author David E. Pedgley [email protected] Crowmarsh, Oxfordshire35 Thamesmead, Crowmarsh, Oxon. OX10 8EY, UK.Search for more papers by this author David E. Pedgley, Corresponding Author David E. Pedgley [email protected] Crowmarsh, Oxfordshire35 Thamesmead, Crowmarsh, Oxon. OX10 8EY, UK.Search for more papers by this author First published: 28 April 2010 https://doi.org/10.1002/wea.579Citations: 3 † This article is based on Pedgley (2002), supplemented by the Society's material now preserved in the Met Office Archives at the Devon Record Office. AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL No abstract is available for this article.Citing Literature Volume65, Issue5Special Issue: The 150th anniversary of the British Rainfall OrganizationMay 2010Pages 115-117 RelatedInformation

The Role of Britain in the Berlin Airlift

AbstractSince the opening of the Foreign Office archives covering the post‐Second World War period, historians have argued that the British government played a strong and decisive role in the Berlin blockade. Determined to stay in Berlin in defiance of the Soviets, the British government acted decisively to initiate the airlift and thereafter wielded significant influence over western policy due to their close relationship with the Americans and their own contribution to the airlift itself. This article will demonstrate, however, that this interpretation fails to take into consideration both British economic weakness and the attitudes of British officials in Germany who organized and supervised the airlift. Whilst the British did indeed have a strong commitment to defending Berlin, they were less confident than their American allies about the success of the airlift and more concerned about the adverse effect the blockade would have on German resilience. Analysis of British policy at this level reveals significant differences between British and American attitudes in Berlin, and shows that the British had less influence over policy than has been previously suggested.

The last Great War: British society and the First World War

What was it that the British people believed they were fighting for in 1914–18? This compelling history of the British home front during the First World War offers an entirely new account of how British society understood and endured the war. Drawing on official archives, memoirs, diaries and letters, Adrian Gregory sheds new light on the public reaction to the war, examining the role of propaganda and rumour in fostering patriotism and hatred of the enemy. He shows the importance of the ethic of volunteerism and the rhetoric of sacrifice in debates over where the burdens of war should fall as well as the influence of religious ideas on wartime culture. As the war drew to a climax and tensions about the distribution of sacrifices threatened to tear society apart, he shows how victory and the processes of commemoration helped create a fiction of a society united in grief.

Aleksei Kurbatov, Vasilii Tatishchev and the Testament of Ivan the Terrible of 1572

AbstractThe only surviving copy of a Testament of Ivan the Terrible stems from the beginning of the 19th century with a watermark from 1805. In January 1822 the director of the Foreign Office's archive, Aleksei Malinovskii, sent the testament to the historian and novelist Nikolai Karamzin, who was working on his History of the Russian State, and who published it in the commentary to the ninth volume of the History. An analysis of Aleksei Kurbatov's and Vasilii Tatishchev's alledged authorship of the testament's preface and commentary leads to the conclusion that the testament displays the literary devices of a fictional text. The preface presents a story complete with the grammatically ambiguous signature ,,A. Kurbatova“, a host of conflicting dates and several lost copies of a lost original. The argument for Tatishchev's authorship rests solely on some peculiarities concerning the publications of his personal copy of the Sudebnik of 1550. The questions surrounding the testament are resolved easily when one takes into account the literary hints and regards the text as an early 19th-century mystification.

Pierre Elliott Trudeau's Peace Initiative

It's useful to express non-conventional truths about non-conventional subjects. - Pierre Elliott Trudeau1From politicians with the gifts necessary to inspire and mobilize others behind causes, much is expected. In return, they receive little patience and little understanding when, almost inevitably, results fall short. Former United States Vice President Al Gore, not known for such gifts while in office, was co-awarded the 2007 Nobel peace prize for his ability to draw attention to the inconvenient truth of climate change. If only, some critics said, he had demonstrated such leadership on this issue while in office. During his last term as prime minister of Canada from 1980 to 1984, Pierre Elliott vowed not to be a politician who waited until he was out office, as if planning a retirement project, to speak out and act on what he deemed nonconventional, inconvenient truths. With Quebec's sovereigntists in disarray following a referendum and a charter of rights and freedoms enshrined but also with significant national economic woes and tumbling popularity, turned the waning political capital of his last months in office to the non-conventional: a personal international in scope, focused on nuclear nonproliferation.The Trudeau peace initiative, as it came to be known, saw the prime minister tour capitals, including Washington, London, and Moscow, to encourage east- west dialogue when the threat of nuclear war seemed great. In the history of Canadian foreign relations it made little splash, and it been treated - in the media and the history books alike - as an insignificant and unimportant episode. That the protagonist - a man with a reputation for demonstrating sporadic interest in foreign affairs, whom pundits suggested was either grasping at legacy narratives while nearing retirement or hoping for another term - was sinking in the polls had something to do with the treatment, then and now.According to one senior official who helped craft them, Trudeau' s five disarmament proposals were a dog's breakfast that muddied his message and created a public checklist that was impossible to complete,2 and the man who wrote Trudeau's house of commons speech said the mission went on past its best-by date.3 But Robert Fowler, who was Trudeau's Privy Council Office foreign and defence policy advisor, a different perspective:You know the old story of the Lunenburg fisherman who's coming up from the dock with two pails of lobsters, and he meets his buddy on the way down, and they walk by each other and the buddy looks down and shouts, 'Hey, watch it! Your lobsters are crawling out... escaping!' And the guy doesn't even turn around - he just shouts over his shoulder, 'Don't you worry about that, they're Canadian lobsters, and as soon as one gets part way up, the other guy will pull him back down.4Fowler suggests that the legacy ofthe peace initiative is a victim ofthe Canadian complex that discourages lofty goals. The he said, has got rather historical short shrift, and a little unfairly. The events of 1983-84 were chronicled extensively in the media and in numerous scholarly works, the vast majority written in the decade following the events. Trudeau's alleged disdain for the Department of External Affairs; the reaction of officials in the United States and their labelling of Trudeau's behaviour as that of a marijuana-consuming leftist; and revelations about the motivations behind, and results of, the initiative occupy many pages.Twenty-five years later, through access to official archives, interviews with key players, and the benefits of distance and much collective national reflection on Trudeau's legacy, one can discern more enduring themes. The initiative reflected a personalized style of diplomacy seeking to escape the constraints of traditional diplomacy, layers of bureaucracy, domestic politics, and the national press in an age of summit diplomacy and an insatiable demand for news. …

The journal has survived its teenage years

Having served on the Editorial Board of the Journal of SolGel Science and Technology since 1993, I am extremely grateful for having been part of its successful launch. I have watched the Journal grow from being Sumio Sakka’s inspired creation to being the official voice of the sol-gel community. Over the course of the 16 years, the reputation of the journal has risen to one of the top journals in the materials field, emphasizing glass and ceramics. So, it is safe to say that it has survived its teenage years. As with children who grow up to adults, one breathes a sigh of relief when they reach that point when they graduate high school. Early on, it was necessary to solicit articles for the journal, and topical issues were organized to have a critical mass of content. However, the need for soliciting articles soon disappeared, once a self-sustaining flow of submissions developed. Clearly, the journal caught on. The Journal now serves as the official archives of the International Sol-Gel Society, a truly interdisciplinary society, bridging the sciences and engineering, from fundamental studies to commercial developments. My thanks go to the professional staff at Kluwer– Springer for all the help they have provided over the years. I recall the smooth transition from paper-based reviewing to on-line reviewing. The publisher and their staff handled this without a moment of hesitation. I have found their dedication to this Journal to be exceptional. As the community of sol-gel science has become global, the volume of papers has increased in all parts of the world. To reflect this expansion, the Editorial Board is gaining some new faces and losing some old faces. I am leaving the Editorial Board with the confidence that the Journal of SolGel Science and Technology is in good hands and that it will endure. I am proud to have been a part of the history of this Journal, and I hope in some small way I have contributed to its success.

German Documents in the United States

At the end of World War II, vast quantities of German documents had fallen into the hands of the Allies either during hostilities or in the immediately following weeks. Something will be said near the end of this report about the archives captured or seized by the Soviet Union; the emphasis here will be on those that came into the possession of the Western Allies. The United States and Great Britain made agreements for joint control and exploitation, of which the most important was the Bissell-Sinclair agreement named for the intelligence chiefs who signed it. The German naval, foreign office, and chancellery archives were to be physically located in England, while the military, Nazi Party, and related files were to come to the United States. Each of the two countries was to be represented at the site of the other's holdings, have access to the files, and play a role in decisions about their fate. The bulk of those German records that came to the United States were deposited in a section of a World War I torpedo factory in Alexandria, Virginia, which had been made into the temporary holding center for the World War II records of the American army and American theater commands. In accordance with the admonition to turn swords into plowshares, the building is now an artists' boutique.

Producing La Grande Vitesse Civic Symbolism, Vernacular Archives, and Public Sculpture in Grand Rapids, Michigan

La Grande Vitesse (1969) by Alexander Calder has adorned the civic center in Grand Rapids, Michigan for nearly forty years. What does this sculpture mean to its publics? Drawing upon interdisciplinary insights from visual culture studies, this article argues that official archives combined with collections of vernacular imagery may assist with research into the meanings, values, and uses that citizens ascribe to public art. Understanding the local significance of public sculpture requires investigating how diverse publics creatively produce individual understandings, which are often expressed visually. As people produce logos, miniatures, and artistic responses to La Grande Vitesse, they contribute counter-images that elaborate their relationships to the original sculpture. These counter-images both produce and problematize established accounts of the sculpture's relevance to local publics.

On a Lecture Trip to Spain: the Scientific Relations Between Germany and Spain During the Entente Boycott (1919–1926)

Summary The aim of this paper is to analyse the scientific relations between Germany and Spain during the Entente Boycott (1919–1926) and the German academic policy that fostered it. The study of the international relations of German science during the 1920s has been carried out using as a basis the archives of scientific institutions. Personal initiatives by individual scientists to establish relations have therefore not been taken into account. The relations between the scientific communities of Germany and Spain during the 1920s indicate the importance of such personal relationships and from their transcendence at a political level. They also offer an example of how political strategies could dictate the politics of academic recognition. This paper is based on the analysis of sources found at the Foreign Office Archives in Berlin. It gives us a clear idea about the role of scientific relationships between the two countries in shaping their scientific policies.

Excavating Official Archives: The Separation of Powers and Policy Advice from Judges

Journal of Law and SocietyVolume 35, Issue s1 p. 167-182 Excavating Official Archives: The Separation of Powers and Policy Advice from Judges Maureen Spencer, Maureen Spencer Principal Lecturer in Law at Middlesex University, London. M.Spencer@mdx.ac.ukSearch for more papers by this author Maureen Spencer, Maureen Spencer Principal Lecturer in Law at Middlesex University, London. M.Spencer@mdx.ac.ukSearch for more papers by this author First published: 08 May 2008 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6478.2008.00431.x The author thanks the British Academy and the Hewett Driver Education Trust for grants to support the research. Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Volume35, Issues1Special Issue: Law's Reality: Case Studies in Empirical Research on LawJune 2008Pages 167-182 RelatedInformation

Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860-1920, by Thomas R. Metcalf

Reviewed by: Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860–1920 Antoinette Burton (bio) Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860–1920, by Thomas R. Metcalf; pp. ix + 264. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2007, $39.95, £23.95. The Raj remains one of the chief preoccupations of both British imperial history and postcolonial studies, yet we lack histories both broad and deep that capture the historical reasons for its centrality. Imperial Connections offers an erudite account of how India functioned as a sub-imperial power and how Indians made their way across the variegated landscapes of the British Empire in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By re-centering the history of British India in the larger context of the “ocean arena,” Thomas Metcalf offers one model of how to transnationalize the study of the Raj, illuminating new domains of future research and raising critical questions about the relationship of empire to the regional, the global, and the intra-colonial as well. Metcalf focuses on the period between the aftermath of the Mutiny and the beginning of the end of British imperial fortunes worldwide in the 1920s. His emphasis is on subjects available mainly in official archives, and his main objects of inquiry are the influence of Indian models and practices on other administrative systems and the movement of people from India into other parts of the Empire. But what a lot of ground he manages to cover. Chapters 1, 3, and 4 examine the Indian legal system, the military, and the police to make the case that in the web of empire, India was more than simply one of its many spokes, constituting instead a nodal point for the transmission of imperial power. So, for example, parts of India’s legal and administrative apparatus were exported to other parts of the Empire, which took to them more or less well depending on their distance from Calcutta and the tenacity of other imperial regimes of law and bureaucracy (like the Ottoman and the French). Just as significantly in a century shot through with “little” imperial wars, Indian soldiers were at the front lines of a host of inter- and intra-imperial conflicts. While the use of Indian regiments to quell the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 is among the best-known of these examples, Metcalf demonstrates how central such troop movement was to the long- and short-term security of the Empire tout court—and how controversial the question of which colonial governor should pay for it was as well. Of great interest in the current moment will be his account of how “the subjugation of Iraq was the work of the Indian army” (xii) in the context of the struggle for Mesopotamia during the Great War. Here Metcalf comes up against the temporal and even structural limits of Indian influence—for due to a host of geopolitical rationales, Iraq was not to be Indian. Metcalf is less sure-footed on the subject of identity, as in chapter 2 where he uses such disparate examples as “notions of ‘indolence’ to land tenures to architecture” (47) to illustrate the impact of the Raj in the production of colonial forms of knowledge in Malaya. While he is cognizant of and interested in how categories like race and gender enter into his story, he misses opportunities to show us how critical they were to [End Page 477] the ideas about and practices of imperial power for which British India and Indians were carriers in this period. Also, despite the freshness of the Indian Ocean world material, the notion of cross-relay (as between India and Malaya) is familiar from scholarly work on India and Ireland or India and the antipodes—work which suggests that the exceptionality of the spatial configuration he insists on may be overemphasized. Chapters 5 and 6, on the influence the Raj in Natal and East Africa respectively, follow similar lines of argumentation, excavating the deep history of “coolie” migration from India and the schemes for colonization generated by the pull of imperial capital and Indian entrepreneurship along the fin-de-siècle continental coast. Here Metcalf is at his narrative best...

Post-colonial Syria and Lebanon: the decline of Arab nationalism and the triumph of the state

The complex relationship between Syria and Lebanon is the political fulcrum of the Middle East, and has dominated headlines since the withdrawal of French colonial forces from the Levant in 1943. One of the great paradoxes of this relationship is how two such very different political systems emerged in what many Syrian and Lebanese people see as one society. At the time of independence, it was assumed that only the divide-and-rule strategies of foreign powers kept the Arab peoples artificially separated. In this major new book, Youssef Chaitani examines how, despite the prevalence of Arab nationalism and the regression of imperial interference, Syria and Lebanon became more divided, rather than more integrated in the post-independence period. Drawing on untapped sources from the archives of Western foreign offices and the local press, Chaitani uncovers the strategies and motivations of both countries' elites during this period, and produces conclusions which have major implications for our understanding of Arab nationalism, as well as the complexities of the Syrian-Lebanese relationship.

Natural hazards in the Bavarian Alps: a historical approach to risk assessment

The Bavarian Alps region is strongly affected by various natural hazards, mainly hydrological events (floods, debris flows), geomorphic/geological events (landslides, rock falls), and avalanches. Extraordinary floods, like in 2002 or in the summer of 2005 in south Bavaria, have again posed the question of the possible extent and frequency of recurrence of catastrophic events. To put risk assessment on a broader basis historical data about all kinds of past natural hazards were detected in the archives of local authorities and administrative offices for water management. More than 10,000 sources (written accounts, maps, and photographs) were collated in a database. The majority of this information reaches back to the middle of the 19th century. In addition, many documents referring to events dating back even as far as the middle age were found. The Historische Analyse von NaturGefahren (HANG, historical analysis of natural hazards) project at the University of Eichstaett mainly focuses on a small-scale examination of the data. Initial results of the data analysis show that most catastrophic events in the Bavarian Alps only affect parts of the area, but not the whole region. Therefore it is necessary to assess the risk potential on a local scale like valleys, the catchment areas of mountain streams, or even single streams. Firstly the presented data is aimed to help engineers in future planning of hazard-protection measures. Secondly the information can form a vital component to enhance our knowledge of hydrological and geomorphic/geological dynamics in the Alps.

Methodologies: silences, secrets, fragments

The idea of archive crucially informs my thesis on images of Islam in South African media and culture. In repositories of authoritative texts the thesis tracked the dynamics that render Islam visible in South Africa. I examined official and parallel archives, finding images of Islam in overlooked and insignificant places such as cookbooks, jokes and stories and, through them, explored interior and resistant meanings. In the thesis I analysed novels, paintings, plays and poetry, and examined the patterns and emphases in the visual repositories on Islam in the South African National Library and the catalogue of the Museum Africa in Johannesburg. I looked also at what is lacking from such archives, conducting what Martin Hall called an ‘archaeology of absences’. I pointed to the existence of alternative archives of Islam in South Africa generated through forms of self-organization such as mosques that developed parallel and in opposition to official colonial institutions. Beyond documents, I accessed through interviews more evanescent occurrences such as jokes, visiting customs and burial rituals. Through interviews as well as analyses of recipe books I explored practices surrounding food. I offered these different ways of speaking about Islam not as the ‘true story’ but to show what lies beyond the view of Islam as picturesque and exotic.

Towards a History of Medical Missions

Scholars concerned with the European colonial period have been able to draw on a vast body of primary sources preserved in official archives. While the military may have been the ultimate arbitrators of their power, the colonial states were highly bureaucratic. They generated, and indeed depended upon, an unending flow of information that was collected, collated and archived as an organized body of knowledge. That knowledge was obviously shaped by particular perspectives, interests and power complexes.1