Official Mind Research Articles

Britain and Kashmir, 1948: “The Arena of the UN”

The Jammu and Kashmir dispute of 1947–1949 between India and Pakistan became the first inter-state conflict to be discussed at the United Nations Security Council. This analysis looks at the views of the government and the delegation of Great Britain, one of the five permanent members of the Security Council, on Kashmir through the year of 1948. It argues that the British attitude was determined more by Imperial and Commonwealth strategic and ideological imperatives in South and Central Asia and the Middle East and less by the merits of the cases of the disputants. Operating within the twin backdrop of decolonisation and the Cold War, the British official mind juggled Kashmir's accession to India, India's complaint of aggression against Pakistan, and Pakistan's demand for a plebiscite in Kashmir with an eye to their own hopes and fears in a region that it understood as the key vantage on Communism and Islam.

Captain Rock: The Irish Agrarian Rebellion of 1821–1824 (review)

Reviewed by: Captain Rock: The Irish Agrarian Rebellion of 1821–1824 J. Joseph Lee Captain Rock: The Irish Agrarian Rebellion of 1821–1824. By James S. Donnelly Jr. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. 2009. Pp. xiv, 508. $35.00 paperback. ISBN 978-0-299-23314-3.) James S. Donnelly Jr. has made such an extraordinary contribution over forty years to our understanding of central aspects of the Irish experience, revolving mainly around land and religion, that it is impossible to fully understand modern Irish history without immersion in his work. Captain Rock enhances his stature even further by providing an indispensable interpretation of the interrelationship between these two factors in exploring the Irish Agrarian Rebellion of 1821–24 in unprecedented detail and depth. The Rockite agrarian movement in southwest Ireland, about a quarter of the country, is particularly interesting for the issues it raises about the blend of the material, religious, and political impulses underlying relationships between and within victors and vanquished in a colonial environment, broadly represented at this time in Ireland by the Protestant and English minority landlords in ascendancy over the Catholic Irish majority farmers/peasants. Donnelly is so much the supreme master of his subject that queries have to be less about his work in particular than about the general challenge of the use of sources in the historiography of Irish protest movements. The source [End Page 379] material derives disproportionally from the world of the conqueror, looking in or looking down on the conquered. The issue is not so much that the “official mind” or even the conquest mind more broadly was hostile, as that it was so often uncomprehending. The material, evocative use though Donnelly makes of threatening Rockite notices, emanates disproportionately from the ascendancy side, despite some Catholic newspaper reporting. However rich in detail, this can often be more valuable for illuminating the mentalities of the rulers than of the ruled. Although it is unlikely that the nuances of problematical sources in these situations can be captured entirely, Donnelly penetrates them to a depth that ensures an original interpretation of the composition and chronology of agrarian protest movements, which significantly adds to our understanding of the functioning of rural society. Donnelly’s delineation allows the relationship between material and cultural factors to be addressed in a more structured manner than ever before. Nevertheless, a conundrum remains. Donnelly argues that the Rockite movement owed much of its momentum and intensity to the widespread dissemination of the millenarian prophecies of Pastorini (aka Charles Walmesley, O.S.B.) predicting the overthrow of Protestantism in 1825. But if Pastorini’s prophecies “gained a firm hold at the popular level” not only “in the affected region” but also “far beyond” (p. 4), a question then arises: Why did the areas “far beyond” remain so relatively unaffected by Rockite unrest? Donnelly traces the outbreak to a particular local agrarian dispute in west Limerick, which then spread far beyond the original source. But why did it stop spreading where it did? Insofar as the sources permit, intensive study of areas just beyond the restless counties or quieter areas within them, for counties were more administrative than socioeconomic units, might further illuminate the issue. However likely that the answer may lie in circumstances that would reinforce Donnelly’s interpretation, that remains to be demonstrated. It is churlish to hunger for more in the face of so rich a repast. No short review can do full justice to the assiduity and ingenuity of so probing an inquiry, which can have few equals in the study of agrarian protest movements anywhere. The entire work wonderfully illuminates an important field of research with implications extending far beyond the Irish experience. J. Joseph Lee New York University Copyright © 2011 The Catholic University of America Press

Prestige, Prudence and Public Opinion in the 1882 British Occupation of Egypt

This article challenges both the “gentlemanly capitalist” thesis and “official mind” interpretation of the 1882 British occupation of Egypt. The former fails to adequately consider the political character of the Anglo‐French financial Control overturned by the Urabist revolt in February 1882. The latter overstates the significance of the Suez Canal as both trigger and justification for military intervention. The article argues that the primary motivation behind the Egyptian occupation was the vindication of British prestige, vis‐à‐vis the Continental Powers, but especially in India and in the “East” by suppressing the threat to “civilised” order posed by the Urabist revolt. The protection of the Suez Canal and British financial and trade interests were secondary and derivative.

An Analysis of the British Colonialism in Southeast Asia in the 19thCentury: Based on the Theories of the “Official Mind” and “Gentlemanly Capitalism.”

An Analysis of the British Colonialism in Southeast Asia in the 19thCentury: Based on the Theories of the “Official Mind” and “Gentlemanly Capitalism.”

Decolonization and Its Impact: A Comparative Approach to the End of the Colonial Empires (review)

Reviewed by: Decolonization and Its Impact: A Comparative Approach to the End of the Colonial Empires Charles C. Kolb Decolonization and Its Impact: A Comparative Approach to the End of the Colonial Empires. By Martin Shipway. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2008. 288 pp. $86.95 (cloth); $36.95 (paper). Martin Shipway is lecturer in French studies at Birkbeck College, University of London; the author of The Road to War: France and Vietnam, 1944–1947 (1996); and has published journal articles and book chapters on French colonial policy making and decolonization [End Page 160] in Indochina, sub-Saharan Africa, Algeria, and Madagascar. In addition he has written on colonial discourse, psychology, and on postcolonial memory. His current work broadens his prior geographical foci to include the decolonization of British, Dutch, and Belgian colonies in South and Southeast Asia and Africa in the two decades following World War II. In "Introduction: Decolonization in Comparative Perspective," Shipway considers the European colonial system and seven nations that broke ties: Vietnam (1945), Indonesia (1945), the Philippines (1946), Pakistan (1947), Indonesia (1949), South Africa (1910), and Hong Kong (1997). The initial chapter, "The Colonial State: Patterns of Rule, Habits of Mind," provides background on the colonial state, patterns of rule, and the "official mind." Chapter 2, "Colonial Politics before the Flood: Challenging the State, Imagining the Nation," focuses on the limits of colonial politics, moderate versus "mendicant" politics, the uses of tradition in colonial states ("thrones and dominions"), communism and nationalism, collaboration and resistance, Indian Nationalist politics to 1935, Vietnam in the 1930s, and blocked reform in Algeria. A subsequent essay, "The Impact of the Second World War and the 'First Wave' of Decolonization," provides case studies on Africa (Madagascar and Senegal), Southern Asia (Indochina, Burma, and Vietnam), the "endgame" of the Raj (India), and distinctions between dominion states (Ceylon and Burma). In "Imperial Designs and Nationalist Realities in Southeast Asia, 1945–1955," Shipway writes about the French Union, Indochina, Chinese and Muslim influences in Malaya, the Dutch "reconquest" of Indonesia, and the eight-year French and Viet Minh war a "front in the Cold War." Chapter 5, "Shifting Frameworks for Change: The Late Colonial State in Africa," covers the period 1944–1951 and emphasizes the French and Belgian "welfare" states, British reforms in East Africa, the politics of the Gold Coast and Nigeria (Muslims and Ashanti), the Brazzaville Conference of 1944, the Ivory Coast, and the Central African Federation. "The Late Colonial State at War: Insurgency, Emergency and Terror" characterizes food shortages and famine in India, North Vietnam, and parts of Africa, origins of wars (Malagasy Insurrection, Mau Mau, Algerian War, and Cyprus Emergency), as well as "dirty wars" and policies to win hearts and minds. In "Towards Self government: Patterns of Late Colonial African Politics, 1951–1957," Shipway writes about the Gold Coast, Nigeria, the Sudan, Cameroun, and Tanganyika to illustrate the end of assimilation in French Africa and British policies. Last, in "Wind of Change: Endgame in Colonial [End Page 161] Africa, 1958–1964," he examines French policies in Algeria and Sub Saharan Africa under de Gaulle, Algeria (1958–1962), and the demise of a "platonic ideal" in the Belgian Congo. In "Conclusion: The Impact of Decolonization," Shipway reviews the endgame of decolonization and the conclusions of a variety of historiographers and experts on the subject. He notes that World War II was central to decolonization but was "multi-layered and pluri-dimensional, with some devastating immediate consequences and others that took time to work themselves out" (p. 234) and that it was an "accelerator of imperial change" (p. 235). Extreme or eccentric experiments in decolonization had catastrophic consequences and were costly to both the colony and the colonizer. Shipway's book joins approximately 260 others published during the past two decades that most often deal with specific instances of decolonization since 1940 rather than with a comparative assessment. Prasenjit Duara's edited reader, Decolonization: Perspectives from Now and Then (2004), brings together cutting edge thinking by major historians of decolonization, and writings by leaders of decolonizing countries. The essays emphasize the perspectives of the former colonies rather than a Western analysis of decolonization. The selection of writings also focuses on imperialism and...

Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain’s Covert Empire in the Middle East (review)

Reviewed by: Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain’s Covert Empire in the Middle East Michael Silvestri Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain’s Covert Empire in the Middle East. By Priya Satia. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). Evaluating the abilities of those engaged in espionage, Priya Satia observes at the outset of Spies in Arabia, is a subject that is perhaps best left to intelligence experts. The cultural assumptions guiding the actions of spies, however, can and indeed should be a subject for historians. In her wide-ranging, impressively researched and forcefully argued book, Satia demonstrates how cultural preconceptions regarding Arabia shaped the actions of agents and officials of the British Empire from the turn of the century to the beginning of the Second World War. Her analysis provides a compelling explanation of the shift from the “gentlemanly” and amateurish intelligence efforts of British agents in the region prior to the First World War to the institution of a brutal postwar air control regime in Iraq, and the debates which this engendered in the age of mass democracy in Britain. Although historians have analyzed the interwar air control regimes which the British Empire instituted in Africa and Asia, Satia relates the deployment of air power to broader cultural currents and in particular to British assumptions about Arabia. The use of air power in the Middle East did not depend solely on economic or strategic reasons; rather, it was grounded in cultural assumptions about the landscape of Arabia and its inhabitants. British agents in Arabia developed “an intuitive intelligence epistemology modeled on their understanding of the ‘Arab mind,’” an outlook that valued intuition above empiricism (5). By the early twentieth century, Arabia had become part of the Great Game, and the Middle East “offered an update on the traditional image of the solitary British officer managing a vast area by sheer force of personality,” a major reason for the appeal of T.E. Lawrence (179). Satia offers an important revision of Edward Said, and reveals the operation of a more subtle and complex Orientalism than a “saga of unremitting, European ‘othering’ of the Orient.” Satia notes, for instance, Edwardian constructions of Arabia as an ancient biblical homeland which offered a sort of homecoming to British agents. The most obvious implications of Orientalism were “not only that it empowered the British to dominate the ‘Orient,’ but that it provided them with an excuse for unscrupulous behavior in doing so” (141). Indeed, the very nature of the British intelligence project was shaped by cultural assumptions about Arabia. Experts on Arabia were valued for “their ability to see, like Arabs, beyond surface deceptions to the buried, deeper truth, to discern the real from the unreal, the mirage, the lie” (123). During the Great War, the individual heroism of agents in the Middle East such as “Lawrence of Arabia” stood out sharply in contrast to the anonymous slaughter in the trenches of the Western Front. This was also the first time, Satia argues, that the “the British freely admitted, without recourse to euphemism, that they were intriguing without scruples, and were doing so because the place they operated in provided them with a ready excuse for dishonorable and certainly ungentlemanly behavior” (141). After the First World War, Arabia took center stage in the British official mind as the nexus of Communist, Islamist and anti-colonial activity. Bolshevism and Islam were both conceptualized as secret societies on a grand scale, and fears arose of an elaborate “Moscow-Berlin-Irish-Egyptian-Persian-Indian conspiracy” (221). This in part reflected realities of postwar nationalist and anti-colonial contacts, but also the fact that those working on the Middle East relished “the opportunity to steep themselves in extraordinary fictions and romantic scenarios, to face in theory, if not in practice, the situations faced by spies of lore” (221). Cultural assumptions also helped to give rise to a postwar air control regime in Iraq. According to Satia, air power constituted the “mechanical apotheosis” of an imperial ideal of networks of British agents maintaining political control over a volatile region (243). Aerial bombing of civilians...

A War of Images: Russian Popular Prints, Wartime Culture, and National Identity 1812-1945 by Stephen M. Norris (review)

134 SEER, 87, I, JANUARY 200g theRusso-Japanese War in 1904-05, which caused Kuropatkin to formulate the doctrine of the 'Yellow Peril' as the greatest strategic threat to Russia (pp. 95-96), this increasing paranoia clouded the judgement of theGeneral Staff. In his conclusion Marshall shows (pp. 183-88) how in theperiod leading up to the FirstWorld War 'The Myopic Guard' was distracted from the more serious threat in Europe by their concerns over pan-Islamism and the modernization of the Japanese and Chinese armed forces, not to mention growing tensions with the British over Afghanistan which (asJennifer Siegel has shown in her Endgame, London and New York, 2002) were not resolved by theAnglo-Russian agreement of 1907.He concludes with some observa tions on the continuities of attitudes and personnel amongst military oriental ists into the early Soviet period, embodied most clearly in thefigure ofAndrei Evgenievich Snesarev, the tsaristGeneral Staffs leading expert on Afghani stan and British India, who would become the rector of the Institute of Oriental Studies in Moscow from 1921until his arrest in 1930 (p. 190). There are the usual problems with Routledge books: the copy-editing is somewhat slipshod, and in many cases entirely new errors seem to have been added. The volume is also horrendously overpriced at ?75.00. However, the book will be of interestnot only toRussianists but also to historians working on other European colonial empires. It should be essential reading not just for military historians, but for anyone who wants to further their understanding of that elusive concept, the 'official mind' in tsaristRussia. School of History Alexander Morrison UniversityofLiverpool Norris, Stephen M. A War ofImages:Russian Popular Prints,Wartime Culture,and National Identityi8i2-ig4j. Northern IllinoisUniversity Press, DeKalb, IL, 2006. xiii + 277 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $40.00. Stephen Norris seeks to demonstrate 'the visual nature of Russian nation hood before and after 1917', a subject, he suggests, that has hitherto 'been litde studied' (p. 3). 'Nationhood' is his preferred term for themore widely accepted 'national identity' and 'national consciousness' and he limits the visual side of his investigation solely to the lubok,although not to the lubokin general (which he calls a genre), but to thewar lubok (which he also confus ingly calls a genre [p. 5], when it is, ifanything, a sub-genre or theme). This initial confusion is compounded by the book's title,which mentions neither nationhood nor lubki as such, but does denote the self-recommending symmetry of the book's historical parameters, from the Patriotic War to the Great Patriotic War. Following the introductory chapter, six of the next seven chapters are devoted to the wars that were the stimulus for the mass production of lubki, beginning with 1812and proceeding via theCrimean War, theRusso-Turkish War of 1877-78, and theRusso-Japanese War, to theGreat War. The excep tion is chapter three,which traces the attitude of the government and its censors towards the lubok,principally during the last decades ofNicholas Fs REVIEWS 135 reign. Chapter eight pursues the story into the first years of the Soviet regime, when the attemptwas made initially to obliterate the lubok, beforeMaiakovskii andMoor demonstrated itspropaganda value through poster works produced as so-called ROSTA (Russian Telegraph Agency) Windows, which during World War Two were reprised as TASS Windows. An understanding of thenature and limitsof the lubokisobviously of crucial importance. The term itself was firstintroduced by Ivan Snegirev in an essay he published in 1822, entitled 'Russkaia narodnaia gallereia iii lubochnye kartinki', but proved unacceptable tomembers of the Society of theLovers of Russian Literature inwhose Trudyhe published a furtheressay in 1824 entitled 'O prostonarodnykh izobrazheniiakh vMoskovskom mire'. When he eventu ally published his book-length study in 1861, he did not hesitate to call it Lubochnye kartinki russkogonaroda v moskovskom mire. Dmitrii Rovinskii, who, togetherwith Snegirev, is the authority forNorris and for all researchers into the history of the lubok,opted for 'popular pictures' (narodnye kartinki)in his monumental four-volume study of 1881. 'Popular' prints or pictures is the most widely accepted term, certainly beyond the boundaries of Russia, but, as Anthony Griffiths noted in his Preface to Sheila O'Connell's The Popular Print inEngland 1550...

Diplomatic Sigint and the British Official Mind during the Second World War: Soviet claims on Turkey, 1940–45

Historians of Soviet foreign policy have recently revisited the issue of Soviet claims against Turkey: a Stalinist objective during the period of the Nazi–Soviet Pact and in the immediate post-war era. Recently opened archives show that the British response to Soviet claims in 1945 was driven by comprehensive access to Turkish diplomatic correspondence. However, the British failed to recognize wartime decrypts that indicated continuity in Soviet ambitions in Turkey since 1940. This failure reflected the responsibility of the operational departments of the Foreign Office for the assessment of diplomatic Sigint, and the absence of a genuine political intelligence department with eyes for anything other than current lines of policy.

Why NATO Should Return Home The Case for a Twenty-First Century Alliance

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Richard Haas, ‘The Age of Non-polarity’, Foreign Affairs (Vol. 87, No. 3, May/June 2008), p. 45. 2. Fareed Zakaria, ‘The Future of American Power’, Foreign Affairs (Vol. 87, No. 3, May/June 2008), p. 40. 3. John McCain, ‘An Enduring Peace Built on Freedom’, Foreign Affairs (Vol. 86, No. 6, November/December 2007), pp. 19-35. 4. Ivo Daalder and James Goldgeier, ‘Global NATO’, Foreign Affairs (Vol. 85, No. 5, September/October 2006), pp 105-112. 5. Mikkel Rasmussen, The Risk Society At War: Terror, Technology and Strategy in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 6. P J O'Rourke, Peace Kills: America's Fun New Imperialism (London: Picador, 2005), p. 26. 7. Cited by John Kampfner, Blair's Wars (London: Free Press, 2003) p 3. 8. The Economist, 2 June 2007. 9. Alex De Waal, ‘Against Gunboat Philanthropy’, Prospect, June 2008, p 19. 10. Niall Ferguson, War of the World: History's Age of Hatred (London: Allen Lane, 2006). 11. Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000) p xix. 12. Mark Leonard, What Does China Think? (London: Fourth Estate, 2008). 13. Henry Porter, ‘The New World Order That Threatens Uncle Sam’, The Observer, 23 December 2007. 14. Dimitri Trenin, ‘Russia Leaves the West’, Foreign Affairs (Vol. 84, No. 4, July/August 2006), p 87. 15. M K Bhadrakumar, ‘The Great Game on a Razor's Edge – The Stakes Go Up In Central Asia’, Asia Times Online, 23 December 2006, < http://www.atimes.com/atimes/central_asia/hl23ag01.html> accessed 5 May 2007. 16. Ramakant Dwivedi, ‘China's Central Asia Policy in Recent Times’, China and Eurasia Forum Quarterly (Vol. 4, No. 4, 2006), pp.139-152. 17. Bates Gill, ‘China's Evolving Regional Security Strategy’ in David Shambaugh, Powershift –China and Asia's New Dynamics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 18. Andrzej Zwaniecki, ‘IMF Governance Reform Aims at Fairer Multilateral Organization’, The Washington File, 12 September 2006, < http://www.america.gov/st/washfile-english/2006/September/20060912132016SAikceinawz0.2876856.html >. 19. Daniel Drezner, ‘The New World Order’, Foreign Affairs (Vol. 86, No. 2, March/April 2007), p 43. 20. Hugh Williamson, ‘Great Powers Try To Keep It Casual’, The Financial Times, Sunday 3 June, 2007. 21. For Ann Lindberg see John Lukas, The Last European War (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976), Kishore Mahbubani, ‘The Case Against the West’, Foreign Affairs (Vol. 87, No. 3, May/June 2008), p. 111. 22. Lex Rieffel, ‘Why the new President Should Care About the World Bank and the IMF’, The Brookings Institution Research, 19 October 2007, <www.brookings.edu/opinions/2007/1019-multilateral-development-banks.aspx>. 23. Jack Gallagher/John Robinson, Africa and the Victorians: the Official Mind of Imperialism, (London: Macmillan, 1972), p 470. 24. Zakaria, op cit, p. 43. 25. Mark Leonard, Why Europe will run the Twenty-First Century, (London: Fourth Estate, 2006). 26. See Andrew Bacevich, 'Illusions of managing history: the enduring relevance of Reinhold Niebuhr’, Historically Speaking (Vol. 9, No. 3 January/February 2008), pp. 23-27. 27. Dean Acheson, ‘Real and Imagined Handicaps of our Democracy in the Conduct of Foreign Affairs’, Speech given at the HSTL, 31 March 1962. Additional informationNotes on contributorsChristopher Coker Christopher Coker is Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics. He is the author of The Twilight of the West and, Ethics and War in the 21st Century

Official Responses to Foreign Travel at the British Foreign and India Offices before 1914

Before 1914 several government departments dealt on a routine basis with Britons travelling worldwide. The contexts were extremely varied and ranged from royal travel to scientific discovery, to espionage and affected those undertaking private travel as well as those on official business. This study focuses particularly on the consular tour, on outrages committed against British travellers, and on the issue of travellers bearing arms, often for sporting purposes. By examining the administrative arrangements of the Foreign and India Offices for dealing with such issues it seeks to illuminate the way in which officials from these departments perceived the overseas. The shared assumptions that existed were, in part, inculcated in the leading public schools and universities and were reinforced in the gentlemen's clubs of London's West End and in various learned societies. This article explores a neglected aspect of the official mind at a time when assumptions of British pre-eminence were beginning to be challenged.

Perception and Posture in Anglo-American Relations: The War Debt Controversy in the ’Official Mind‘, 1919–1940

Churchill's captivating vision of a 'special relationship' between the British Commonwealth and the United States, based on the supposedly 'fraternal association of the Englishspeaking peoples', has fascinated scholars of Anglo-American interaction.1 It survives in spite of evidence that suggests that, even at its wartime zenith, this was an 'ambiguous partnership' between 'allies of a kind' and even more evidence that in the period since 1945 it became 'special no more'.2 Yet, in spite of the frequency with which the 'special relationship' has been consigned to the dustbin of history, the idea continues to display what Steve Marsh and John Baylis describe as 'something of a Lazarus-like quality'.3 In the period before the Second World War, however, the evidence suggests the existence of a more ambivalent relationship. Some historians dismiss the entire 'British fantasy' of its supposedly 'special' nature, claiming that, beneath the patina of a sentimentalized 'myth of cousinhood and common interest', there was nothing but a Realpolitik pursuit of national self-interest.4 Others, more common, echo Coral Bell's view that there was already something 'special' about the Anglo-American relationship before the close of the nineteenth century; a new amity progressively reinforced by 'the Great Rapprochement' during the early years of the twentieth century, as policy-makers on both sides of the Atlantic came to recognize the mutual advantages of co-operation in pursuit of a shared

Africans Do Not Live By Bread Alone: Against Greed, Not Grievance

Scholars, NGO activists, and journalists have fed the official mind and popular imagination with a particular kind of explanation of conflict that privileges the economic. Civil war is about resources: rebels are motivated by greed, not grievance. Rebels mine diamonds to buy arms. Diamonds are the heart of the matter. A robust campaign against “blood diamonds” - diamond coming from conflict areas- is one way of depriving rebels of funds to make war. Devoid of historical context,explanations such as these remain captivating but unhelpful.

A Responsibility to Dream1

In actually existing Ireland, nearly 80 years after independence, ‘deeper challenges [than self‐government and wealth creation] remain’.2 Cultural policy is a reliable indicator of actual state pri...

‘A Festering Sore on the Body of Society’: The wolfenden committee and Female Prostitution in Mid-Twentieth-Century Scotland

The proceedings and report of the Wolfenden Committee on Prostitution and Homosexual Offences (1954–7) figure prominently in the historiography of the sexual politics of late twentieth-century Britain. In terms of female prostitution, three broad but inter-related strands of interpretation may be detected within the literature. First, a largely narrative approach has located the Committee and subsequent legislation within the broader story of changing sexual mores and associated moral panic in 1950s Britain. Secondly, many social historians and sociologists have focused upon the coercive and regulatory implications of the report and the Street Offences Act of 1959,often within a Foucauldian framework of analysis. For commentators such as Jeffrey Weeks, the Wolfenden Report, by redefining the relationship of the law to the private moral terrain of the citizen, enabled a reaffirmation of the policing of public space in the interests of order and decency. Similarly, for Frank Mort, one of its most significant features was its codification of a ‘new geography of sexuality’ which both made the ‘troublesome and dangerous sexualities of prostitution’ more visible to the official mind and furnished a new ‘topography of regulation’. Meanwhile, other commentators have advanced a more specifically feminist interpretation of events. Thus, Carol Smart views the central thrust of the Wolfenden Committee’s deliberations on

Sir Glyn Jones: A Proconsul in Africa (review)

Reviewed by: Sir Glyn Jones: A Proconsul in Africa Bryan Callahan By Colin Baker., Sir Glyn Jones: A Proconsul in Africa. (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2000.) Baker’s biography of Glyn Jones, the last British governor of Nyasaland (Malawi), provides many rich details on the inner workings of the “official mind” during the waning days of empire in central Africa. The book is not for a generalist audience, however, given that it provides very little background information on the broader social, cultural, and economic developments in Nyasaland that influenced Jones’ decision-making as a representative of the Crown in the early 1960s.Baker’s study commends itself to Malawi experts with an interest in examining a political insider’s perspective on the country’s violent transition to independence.It also provides a number of intriguing anecdotes about the volatile personality of Malawi’s first leader, Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda, and the troubling moral concessions that Jones made as he gradually surrendered power to a man who displayed an eagerness to redirect the authoritarian machinery of the colonial state toward the arrest, imprisonment, torture, and public execution of his rivals. The book is structured around a standard chronological narrative.The first chapter traces Jones’ origins as the son of a lower-middle-class Welsh grocer from Chester and his rise to respectability through a program of careful breeding and education sponsored by his mother.Baker notes that Jones’ parents attended a Calvinist Methodist Church that conducted its services in Welsh, but they made a strategic choice to send their child to a nearby English-speaking congregation in an effort to train his accent for a higher social position.Family sacrifices secured the young Jones enrollment at a prominent day school and participation in the Duke of York’s youth camps.His academic and athletic successes subsequently opened a backdoor to Oxford – admission to a “non-collegiate” program in teacher training that was specifically geared toward men of humble upbringing. As a university student, Jones let his studies suffer at the hands of a schedule largely structured around football matches, and he finished with only a third-class degree.As Baker notes, however, Jones’ lack of scholarly achievement did not hold him back from a career in colonial service.In 1931, when Jones was first appointed to the Native Affairs Department of Northern Rhodesia, recruiters still tended to regard “character” as a stronger indicator than demonstrated intelligence of an applicant's suitability for the tough conditions of a rural African posting. Chapters two and three outline Jones’s career in Northern Rhodesia and summarize his postings to numerous outlying distrincts, including Gwembe, Mwinilunga, Balovale, Mongu, Ndola, and Petauke.While these pages occasionally offer engaging details about daily life as an isolated district officer – one memorable passage describes Jones trading bawdy jokes with a group of Catholic priests over bottles of mead – an Africanist will find them fairly sparse and disappointing. It is unfortunate that Baker relies almost completely on Jones’ personal diaries to reconstruct these years because it renders his portrait of his subject two-dimensional. Supplementary documentation collected from the National Archives of Zambia about the local events and conditions that shaped Jones’ administrative career might have allowed for a more textured analysis.For example, Baker notes that Jones developed into an ardent advocate of indirect rule, but he fails to examine how specific experiences, like Jones’ participation in the Balovale 1938 inquiry into inter-ethnic violence, shaped his perspective on traditional rule. In chapters four through seven, Baker analyzes the difficult years that Jones faced following his promotion to governor of Nyasaland in 1960.Banda’s Malawi Congress Party (MCP) had recently organized massive popular protests against Nyasaland’s subordinate status within a territorial federation dominated by Southern Rhodesia’s racist white settler regime, and Jones was called in to manage a smooth transition to African self-rule. While these chapters provide some interesting details on the process of decolonization, Baker’s lack of attention to social, cultural, and economic background details once again places limits on his narrative.Baker does not discuss the potent issues of ethnicity and church allegiance that divided Nyasaland’s nationalist movement into competing...

The State in the Field: Official Knowledge and Truant Practices

ONE OF THE MORE HOPELESS TARGETS of Jeremy Bentham's utilitarian zeal was the confusion prevailed in eighteenth-century England. It is to be regretted, he wrote in his Principles of Penal Law, that the proper names of individuals are upon so irregular footing. Those distinctions, invented in the infancy of society to provide for the wants of hamlet, only imperfectly accomplish their object in great nation.1 His remedy was to propose a new nomenclature ... so arranged, that, in whole nation, every individual should have proper name, which should belong to him alone. Bentham recognized it would be more trouble than it was worth to try to impose such rationalized system of uniquely proper names on England. Still, he recommended it to new states, offered them standardized three-part nominal system (in which he incorporated an anticipation of the ID number), and even speculated on the advantages of adopting the common custom among English sailors, of printing their family and christian names upon their wrists, in well-formed and indelible characters.2 In other words, Bentham wanted us to tattoo our names on our bodies as the ultimate identity card, ensuring we would never leave home without it. If no great nations or new states have in fact adopted such scrupulous system, it may not be for want of motive or effort, and indeed some have come pretty close, as James C. Scott explains in his deeply absorbing and imaginative new book, Seeing Like State: How Certain Schemnes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. For some two hundred years after the revolution, for example, the French state limited its citizens' choices of officially recognized names and made it extraordinarily difficult for people to change their names once registered.3 Similar systems have prevailed in many German states since the nineteenth century. In SachsenWeimar, for example, the tidy official mind took first step in the Benthamite direction in 1876 by declaring no one could be registered with the same name as anyone else in the district-a rule might well impugn local family naming

Neville Chamberlain, the British official mind and the Munich crisis

(1999). Neville Chamberlain, the British official mind and the Munich crisis. Diplomacy & Statecraft: Vol. 10, The Munich Crisis, 1938 Prelude to World War II, pp. 276-292.

Wm. Roger Louis and the official mind of decolonization

(1999). Wm. Roger Louis and the official mind of decolonization. The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History: Vol. 27, The Statecraft of British Imperialism, pp. 1-12.

The British official mind and Europe

The British official mind and Europe

The Dreyfus Affair: 'J'accuse' and other writings

In September 1894 the French authorities intercepted a letter which they claimed emanated from a Jewish army captain, Alfred Dreyfus, which they claimed to be proof of espionage on behalf of Germany. Dreyfus was subsequently court-martialed and imprisoned on Devil's Island, and the efforts of his family to have him released provoked an anti-Semitic controversy that split the French intellectual world down the center. Most famous among the participants was France's greatest living novelist, Emile Zola. This book is the first to provide, in English translation, the full extent of Zola's writings on the Dreyfus affair. It represents, in its polemical entirety, a classic defense of human rights and a searing denunciation of fanaticism and prejudice. The book opens with the complete text of J'Accuse, Zola's public letter to the French authorities. It also includes impassioned open to leading French newspapers, interviews with Zola at his home, intimate letters to his wife and friends written during his year-long exile in England (a direct result of three trials and a prison sentence for his part in the defense of Dreyfus), and his final articles, written when Dreyfus was close to being pardoned. Zola's texts constitute a unique and outstandingly eloquent primary source that is essential for a complete understanding of the Dreyfus affair. They shed brilliant new light on the official mind of France and were crucial in reversing public opinion, securing a retrial, and ensuring Dreyfus's rehabilitation. The significance of Zola's cause-and his scathing and passionate prose-resonate from his time to ours.