The imaging of Samoa in illustrated magazines and serial encyclopedias in the early 20th-century

Drawing on English language sources and material relating to the colonial administrations of Western Samoa (now Samoa) and American Samoa, this examination of photographically illustrated serial encyclopaedias and magazines proposes an alternative historical analysis of the colonial imaging of Samoa, the most extensively covered field in Oceanic photographic studies. Though photographs published between 1890s and World War II were often 'recycled', without acknowledging the fact that they were taken much earlier, and despite claims in the text of illustrated publications of an unchanged, enduring, archaic tradition in Samoa, the amazing variety of photographic content often offered contradictory evidence, depicting a modern, adaptive and progressive Samoa. Contrary to orthodox historical analysis, the images of Samoa in illustrated magazines and encyclopaedias were not limited to a small repetitive gallery of partially clothed women and costumed chiefs; and the ways in which readers understood Samoa from photographs and text raises questions still to be explored.

Digitisation and Presentation of Historical Materials in a Virtual Exhibition ‘The Image of India in Bulgaria: from the late 19th to the late 20th Century’

The main contribution of this project is the study of collections of valuable documents related to the image of India in Bulgaria. Digital repositories of selected samples are constructed using modern information technologies. The results are presented in a virtual exhibition ‘The Image of India in Bulgaria: from the late 19th to the late 20th century’.

[Review of] Ivo Mijnssen, The Quest for an Ideal Youth in Putin’s Russia I. Back to Our Future! History, Modernity and Patriotism According to Nashi, 2005–2012. Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society, Stuttgart: Ibidem Verlag, 2012, 202pp., e 34.90 p/b

THE YOUTH MOVEMENT NASHI (OURS) WAS FOUNDED IN THE SPRING of 2005 against the backdrop of Ukraine’s ‘Orange Revolution’. Its aim was to stabilise Russia’s political system and take back the streets from opposition demonstrators. Personally loyal to Putin and taking its ideological orientation from Surkov’s concept of ‘sovereign democracy’, Nashi has sought to turn the tide on ‘defeatism’ and develop Russian youth into a patriotic new elite that ‘believes in the future of Russia’ (p. 15). Combining a wealth of empirical detail and the application of insights from discourse theory, Ivo Mijnssen analyses the organisation’s development between 2005 and 2012. His analysis focuses on three key moments—the organisation’s foundation, the apogee of its mobilisation around the Bronze Soldier dispute with Estonia, and the 2010 Seliger youth camp—to help understand Nashi’s organisation, purpose and ideational outlook as well as the limitations and challenges it faces. As such,the book is insightful both for those with an interest in post-Soviet Russian youth culture, and for scholars seeking a rounded understanding of the Kremlin’s initiatives to return a sense of identity and purpose to Russian national life.The first chapter, ‘Background and Context’, outlines the conceptual toolkit provided by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe to help make sense of developments on the terrain of identity politics. In their terms, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia has experienced acute dislocation of its identity. With the tangible loss of great power status, Russian realities have become unfixed from a discourse enabling national life to be constructed, albeit inherently contingently, as meaningful. The lack of a Gramscian hegemonic discourse to provide a unifying national idea was securitised as an existential threat demanding special measures. Accordingly, the identification of those who are ‘notUs’ has been a recurrent theme of Nashi’s discourse and activity. With the victory in World War II held up as a foundational moment, a constitutive other is found in the notion of ‘unusual fascists’. This notion includes not just neo-Nazis, but reflects a chain of equivalence that expands to include a range of perceived enemies of Putin’s consolidation project such as oligarchs and pro-Western liberals.The empirical background is provided by the second chapter, ‘Russia’s Youth, the Orange Revolution, and Nashi’, which traces the emergence of Nashi amid the climate of political instability of 2004 and 2005. A particularly note-worthy aspect of Mijnssen’s work is the inclusion of citations from his interviews with Nashicommissars; the youth movement’s cadres. Although relatively few in number, such insider conversations provide insight into the ethos of Nashi’s organisation and the outlook of those who have pledged their involvement. Besides the discussion of Nashi’s manifesto, the reader thus gains insight into the motivations of some participants and behind-the-scenes details of Nashi’s activities in response to the perceived threat of anti-government protests. The third chapter, ‘Nashi’s Bronze Soldier’, charts Nashi’s role in elevating the removal of a World War II monument from downtown Tallinn into an international dispute over the interpretation of history. The events subsequent to this securitisation of memory are charted in detail, concluding that Nashi’s activities were ultimately unsuccessful as their demands received little official support.The fourth chapter, ‘Seliger: The Foundry of Modernisation’, presents a distinctive feature of Mijnssen’s study, namely his ethnographic account as a participant observer in the Youth International Forum at Seliger. In the early years of the camp (2005–2007), Russian participants received extensive training, including master classes in ‘methods of forestalling mass unrest’ (p. 131), and the camp served to foster a sense of group identity and purpose among activists. After 2009 the event was no longer officially run as a Nashi camp, and its role became that of a forum for the exchange of ideas about innovation, although camp spirit remained a central feature. In 2010 the camp welcomed international attendees for the first time. As one of about 700 international participants in that year the author provides a fascinating account based on fieldwork diaries.Despite the polemical nature of the topic, Mijnssen’s analysis remains even-handed, exemplified in his balanced assessment of the Seliger experience. While he details the frustrations and disappointments of the international participants with regard to the unaccustomed strict camp discipline, organisational and communication failures, and the controlled format of many discussions,he does not neglect to note the camp’s successes in generating a gratifying collective dynamic between the participants, even among the international attendees who spent only a week there.In addition to the useful bibliography, the book is back-ended by two appendices, which provide the reader with important Russian-language primary source materials. The first is Nashi’s ‘Unusual Fascism’ (Neobyknovennyi fashizm) brochure, and the second is the booklet entitled ‘Some Uncomfortable Questions to the Russian Authorities’ (Neskol’ko neudobnykh voprosov rossiiskoivlasti) which was provided to the Seliger 2010 instructors to guide them in responding to probing questions from foreign participants. Given that these are not readily publicly available even now, they constitute a useful resource from the historical perspective.

Population and Government in Colonial Buenos Aires. An Approach to the Study of the Tensions Generated by Demographic Growth in the City (1740-1776)

The relationship between population and government in the City of Buenos Aires is analyzed, focusing on the tensions generated by the arrival of new individuals, a local elite with great interests in commerce and in charge of community affairs, and Spanish functionaries that progressively adopted the ideals of the Bourbon Dynasty, despite also being implicated in local logics. It interests us to observe the governors’ perspectives with respect to everyday developments in the city, their preoccupations and interests, and how they would vary the mechanisms to which they resorted in order to organize daily life, in the period defined between 1740 and 1776.

Digitizing dissent: cyborg politics and fluid networks in contemporary Cuban activism

Communication technologies shape how political activist networks are produced and maintain themselves. In Cuba, despite ideologically and physically oppressive practices by the state, a severe lack of Internet access, and extensive government surveillance, a small network of bloggers and cyberactivists has achieved international visibility and recognition for its critiques of the Cuban government. This qualitative study examines the blogger collective known as Voces Cubanas in Havana, Cuba in 2012, advancing a new approach to the study of transnational activism and the role of technology in the construction of political narrative. Voces Cubanas is analyzed as a network of connections between human and non-human actors that produces and sustains powerful political alliances. Voces Cubanas and its allies work collectively to co-produce contentious political discourses, confronting the dominant ideologies and knowledges produced by the Cuban state. Transnational alliances, the act of translation, and a host of unexpected and improvised technologies play central roles in the production of these narratives, indicating new breed of cyborg sociopolitical action reliant upon fluid and flexible networks and the act of writing. 

Progress and the Lack of Progress in Addressing Infant Health and Infant Health Inequalities in Ireland during the 20th Century

There is a growing literature which documents the importance of early life environment for outcomes across the life cycle. Research, including studies based on Irish data, demonstrates that those who experience better childhood conditions go on to be wealthier and healthier adults. Therefore, inequalities at birth and in childhood shape inequality in wellbeing in later life, and the historical evolution of the mortality and morbidity of children born in Ireland is important for understanding the current status of the Irish population. In this paper, I describe these patterns by reviewing the existing literature on infant health in Ireland over the course of the 20th century. Up to the 1950s, infant mortality in Ireland (both North and South) was substantially higher than in other developed countries, with a large penalty for those born in urban areas. The subsequent reduction in this penalty, and the sustained decline in infant death rates, occurred later than would be expected from the experience in other contexts. Using records from the Rotunda Lying-in Hospital in Dublin, I discuss sources of disparities in stillbirth in the early 1900s. Despite impressive improvements in death rates since that time, a comparison with those born at the end of the century reveals that Irish children continue to be born unequal. Evidence from studies which track people across the life course, for example research on the returns to birthweight, suggests that the economic cost of this early life inequality is substantial.

Presence and possible cause of periodicities in 20th-century extreme coastal surge: Belfast Harbour, Northern Ireland.

Identifying 20th-century periodic coastal surge variation is strategic for the 21st-century coastal surge estimates, as surge periodicities may amplify/reduce future MSL enhanced surge forecasts. Extreme coastal surge data from Belfast Harbour (UK) tide gauges are available for 1901–2010 and provide the potential for decadal-plus periodic coastal surge analysis. Annual extreme surge-elevation distributions (sampled every 10-min) are analysed using PCA and cluster analysis to decompose variation within- and between-years to assess similarity of years in terms of Surge Climate Types, and to establish significance of any transitions in Type occurrence over time using non-parametric Markov analysis. Annual extreme surge variation is shown to be periodically organised across the 20th century. Extreme surge magnitude and distribution show a number of significant cyclonic induced multi-annual (2, 3, 5 & 6 years) cycles, as well as dominant multi-decadal (15–25 years) cycles of variation superimposed on an 80 year fluctuation in atmospheric–oceanic variation across the North Atlantic (relative to NAO/AMO interaction). The top 30 extreme surge events show some relationship with NAO per se, given that 80% are associated with westerly dominant atmospheric flows (+ NAO), but there are 20% of the events associated with blocking air massess (− NAO). Although 20% of the top 30 ranked positive surges occurred within the last twenty years, there is no unequivocal evidence of recent acceleration in extreme surge magnitude related to other than the scale of natural periodic variation.

The Branches of Large Electricity Companies in Portugal: From Trade to the Transfer and Adaptation of Technology (20th Century)

In the last decade of the 19th and first decades of the 20th century there was a movement of capital and engineers from the central and northern Europe to the countries of southern Europe and other continents. Large companies sought to obtain concessions and establish branches in Portugal, favouring the circulation of technical knowledge and transfer of technology for Portuguese industry. Among the various examples of the representatives of foreign companies in Portugal we find Jayme da Costa Ltd. established in 1916 in Lisbon, which was a branch of the Swedish company ASEA, as well as STAAL, ATLAS DIESEL (Sweden), Landis & GYR (Switzerland), Electro Helios, etc.. Another example is EFACEC a company founded in 1948 in Porto, that was a partnership between the Portuguese company CUF – Companhia União Fabril, and ACEC – Ateliers de Constructions Électriques de Charleroi and a small entreprise Electro-Moderna Ldª. This enterprise started the industrial production of electric motors and transformers, and later on acquired a substantial share of the national production of electrical equipment. Using Estatística das Instalações Elétricas em Portugal (Statistics on Electrical Installations in Portugal) from 1928 until 1950 we can identify the foreign enterprises acting in the Portuguese market: Siemens, B.B.C, ASEA, Oerlikon, etc. We can also establish a relationship between the development of the electric network and the growth of production and consumption of electricity in the principal urban centres. Finally we see how foreign firms were a stimulus to the creation of national enterprises, especially those of small scale, in Portugal.

The aftermath of the Lehman Brothers collapse in Hong Kong : the saga, regulatory deficiencies and government responses

The paper examines the fallout of the Lehman Brothers collapse in Hong Kong. As an international financial hub in Asia, Hong Kong was profoundly affected by the collapse of this company. As a result, it impacted negatively on the public’s confidence in the Hong Kong’s banking sector. Furthermore, this event has exposed a number of regulatory deficiencies in Hong Kong. In response to this financial crisis, the Hong Kong government had made an unprecedented move to negotiate with local banks to refund the investors. In addition, the government has also sought public consultation on proposal to enhance the regulation of the sale of financial products. This paper argues that there needs to be amendments to the prevailing laws and the inclusions of legal rules to back up those proposed measures so that the disclosed information from the financial institution will not mislead the investors or misrepresent the products offered.

Politics and school education in Australia : a case of shifting purposes

Purpose – The paper aims to argue that there has been a privileging of the private (social mobility) and economic (social efficiency) purposes of schooling at the expense of the public (democratic equality) purposes of schooling. Design/methodology/approach – The paper employs a literature review, policy and document analysis. Findings – Since the late 1980s, the schooling agenda in Australia has been narrowed to one that gives primacy to purposes of schooling that highlight economic orientations (social efficiency) and private purposes (social mobility). Practical implications – The findings have wider relevance beyond Australia, as similar policy agendas are evident in many other countries raising the question as to how the shift in purposes of education in those countries might mirror those in Australia. Originality/value – While earlier writers have examined schooling policies in Australia and noted the implications of managerialism in relation to these policies, no study has analysed these policies from the perspective of the purposes of schooling. Conceptualising schooling, and its purposes in particular, in this way refocuses attention on how societies use their educational systems to promote (or otherwise) the public good.

Deviant knowledge : criminology, politics and policy

The “political” dynamics and the details of conducting criminological research on a day-to-day basis are examined. The role of government and commercial contracts in contemporary criminological scholarship are explored, as well as the various obstacles that criminologists must negotiate during the completion of a research project. The criminological implications of the ways in which academic environments are changing under new managerialist philosophies are examined. The ways in which notions of “critique” have become subordinate to the politics of existing governing rationalities are also examined. Chapter 1 details the questions, contours, and methods of “deviant knowledge.” Chapter 2 discusses the contours of criminological knowledge, including early criminological developments, international reconstruction and developments in criminological research following World War II, the United Nations, and the rise of critical genres. Chapter 3 explores criminology, government, and public policy, including the policies of the Home Office of England and Wales; the National Institute of Justice in Washington, DC; and the Australian Institute of Criminology in Canberra. The politics and control of criminological knowledge are discussed in chapter 4, along with ethical and legal issues, gathering and accessing data, and publishing results of research. Chapter 5 describes the “War on Terror” and government intolerance and suppression of free speech. Chapter 6 examines the new modes of governance and the commercialization of criminological knowledge. Chapter 7 discusses intellectual independence and collective concern, and the value of critique. 3 appendices, 546 references, index