‘Martial races’ and ‘imperial subjects’: violence and governance in colonial India, 1857–1914

This essay explores the specificity of colonial violence in India. Although imperial and military historians are familiar with several instances of such violence—notably the rebellion in 1857 and the 1919 massacre at the Jallianwalla Bagh in Amritsar—there is a broader, and arguably more significant, history that has largely escaped attention. In contrast to metropolitan European states, where sovereignty derived, at least in principle, from a covenant between subjects and government, the sovereign power of the colonial state was always predicated on the violent subjugation of ‘the natives’. However, while violence was integral to colonialism, such violence was never a purely metropolitan agency: most of those recruited to serve in the colonial military were, themselves, Indian. Exploring the history of the imperial military in South Asia after 1857, the paper outlines the complex and rather ambiguous relationship between the colonial state and its ‘native armies’. RESUME Cet article se penche sur la spe´cificite´ de la violence coloniale. Malgre´ des exemples familiers—comme la grande re´volte de 1857 en Inde ou le massacre de Jallianwalla Bagh a` Amritsar en 1919—il y a une histoire plus large et plus importante qui a e´chappe´e a` l’attention des historiens. Contrairement aux e´tats europe´ens ou la souverainete´ de´rivait en principe du moins d’un contrat social entre les acteurs sociaux, le pouvoir souverain de l’e´tat colonial restait fonde´ sur la subjugation violente des indige`nes.

Looking backwards to look forwards: the role of natural history in temperate reef ecology

Temperate reefs are superb tractable systems for testing hypotheses in ecology and evolutionary biology. Accordingly there is a rich history of research stretching back over 100 years, which has made major contributions to general ecological and evolutionary theory as well as providing better understanding of how littoral systems work by linking pattern with process. A brief resumé of the history of temperate reef ecology is provided to celebrate this rich heritage. As a community, temperate reef ecologists generally do well designed experiments and test well formulated hypotheses. Increasingly large datasets are being collected, collated and subjected to complex meta-analyses and used for modelling. These datasets do not happen spontaneously – the burgeoning subject of macroecology is possible only because of the efforts of dedicated natural historians whether it be observing birds, butterflies, or barnacles. High-quality natural history and old-fashioned field craft enable surveys or experiments to be stratified (i.e. replicates are replicates and not a random bit of rock) and lead to the generation of more insightful hypotheses. Modern molecular approaches have led to the discovery of cryptic species and provided phylogeographical insights, but natural history is still required to identify species in the field. We advocate a blend of modern approaches with old school skills and a fondness for temperate reefs in all their splendour.

Teachers' and teacher educators' lives: the role of emotion

This paper reports research which focuses on ways of enhancing understandings by teachers of the key role that emotions play in their personal professional growth. It combines the narrative, autobiographical accounts of teachers attending part-time masters degree programmes in England (Continuing Professional Development and School Improvement) and Northern Ireland (Personal and Social Development) with an interrogation of the underlying values which affect the practices of their tutors. It reveals the effects of powerful and often unacknowledged interaction between personal biography and professional and social contexts upon teachers in schools and higher education.

Tenant Right and Agrarian Society in Ulster 1600-1870

The book has been described by various Irish historians as "the definitive treatment of that most peculiar institution--the Ulster Custom--and its tangled relationship with irish land and politics" (Liam Kennedy), "a brilliantly reconceptualised sketch of the Irish land question" (David Miller). "All previous discussion," according to another reviewer, "must take second place to Dowling's exhaustive survey, which draws on the whole range of surviving estate records to examine the theory and practice of tenant right across three centuries" (Sean Connolly).

The spatial turn: geographical approaches in the history of science

Over the past decade or so a number of historians of science and historical geographers, alert to the situated nature of scientific knowledge production and reception and to the migratory patterns of science on the move, have called for more explicit treatment of the geographies of past scientific knowledge. Closely linked to work in the sociology of scientific knowledge and science studies and connected with a heightened interest in spatiality evident across the humanities and social sciences this ‹spatial turn’ has informed a wide-ranging body of work on the history of science. This discussion essay revisits some of the theoretical props supporting this turn to space and provides a number of worked examples from the history of the life sciences that demonstrate the different ways in which the spaces of science have been comprehended.

Cartographic veracity in medieval mapping: analyzing geographical variation in the Gough Map of Great Britain

This article explores statistical approaches for assessing the relative accuracy of medieval mapping. It focuses on one particular map, the Gough Map of Great Britain. This is an early and remarkable example of a medieval “national” map covering Plantagenet Britain. Conventionally dated to c. 1360, the map shows the position of places in and coastal outline of Great Britain to a considerable degree of spatial accuracy. In this article, aspects of the map's content are subjected to a systematic analysis to identify geographical variations in the map's veracity, or truthfulness. It thus contributes to debates among historical geographers and cartographic historians on the nature of medieval maps and mapping and, in particular, questions of their distortion of geographic space. Based on a newly developed digital version of the Gough Map, several regression-based approaches are used here to explore the degree and nature of spatial distortion in the Gough Map. This demonstrates that not only are there marked variations in the positional accuracy of places shown on the map between regions (i.e., England, Scotland, and Wales), but there are also fine-scale geographical variations in the spatial accuracy of the map within these regions. The article concludes by suggesting that the map was constructed using a range of sources, and that the Gough Map is a composite of multiscale representations of places in Great Britain. The article details a set of approaches that could be transferred to other contexts and add value to historic maps by enhancing understanding of their contents.

No Easy Way Through: Black Workers and Race Leadership at the Nadir

It is difficult, even excruciating, to imagine the staggering descent from high optimism to despondency experienced by many African Americans who lived between emancipation and the dawn of the twentieth century. For historians living in the post–civil rights era, recapturing the scale, velocity, and brutality of that dramatic fall has been hampered by two conceptual problems. The first of these, undergirded by prominent trends in the formerly “new” social history, is a widely shared enthusiasm for illuminating those hidden corners of daily life where men and women on the receiving end of Jim Crow continued to wield a degree of control. “Agency” has been the buzzword for a generation of scholarship that emphasizes the staying power and persistence of black Southerners in the face of relentless assaults on their social and economic status, their civil rights, and even, at times, their collective existence. This is, in many ways, an understandable reaction to an earlier consensus that relegated black historical initiative to the margins of a national fable cleansed of unseemly violence and sharp social conflict, but it can also be problematic.

Presbyterian Religion, Historiography and Ulster Scots Identity, c. 1800 to 1914

The links between Presbyterians in Scotland and the north of Ireland are obvious but have been largely ignored by historians of the nineteenth century. This article addresses this gap by showing how Ulster Presbyterians considered their relationship with their Scottish co-religionists and how they used the interplay of religious and ethnic considerations this entailed to articulate an Ulster Scots identity. For Presbyterians in Ireland, their Scottish origins and identity represented a collection of ideas that could be deployed at certain times for specific reasons – theological orthodoxy, civil and religious liberty, and certain character traits such as hard work, courage, and soberness. Ideas about the Scottish identity of Presbyterianism were reawakened for a more general audience in the first half of the nineteenth century, during the campaign for religious reform and revival within the Irish church, and were expressed through a distinctive denominational historiography inaugurated by James Seaton Reid. The formulation of a coherent narrative of Presbyterian religion and the improvement of Ulster laid the religious foundations of a distinct Ulster Scots identity and its utilization by unionist opponents of Home Rule between 1885 and 1914.

Leopoldo Panero and his antology of the Spanish American Poetry. A “personal” reading of America

El presente artículo trata de ofrecer una lectura estética y política de la Antología de la poesía hispanoamericana que publicara Leopoldo Panero entre 1944 y 1945 bajo protección gubernamental. Para ello se parte de la particular biografía del escritor astorgano, su relación en los años treinta con los poetas hispanoamericanos –especialmente Vallejo y Neruda– y su gira por América ya como supuesto prohombre del régimen franquista en 1949 y 1954. La lectura sistemática de sus prólogos y selección de poetas revela la particular visión de Panero sobre Hispanoamérica, mediatizada por el concepto imperial de Falange pero formulada bajo su propia visión de lo que la lírica americana representa para la lengua castellana. Se sostiene así en estas líneas la tesis de que los postulados de Panero representan, a pesar de todo, una opción mucho más compleja de lo que se suele considerar.