Search

The medical writings of early medieval western Europe c. 700 – c. 1000 have often been derided for their disorganised appearance, poor Latin, nebulous conceptual framework, admixtures of magic and folklore, and general lack of those positive features that historians attribute to ancient or later medieval medicine. This paper attempts to rescue the period from its negative image. It examines a number of superficially bizarre writings so as to place them in an intellectual and sociological context, and to suggest that the presumed contrast between them and their ancient and later medieval counterparts has been wrongly drawn.

Two letters from the Vatican Registers for 1461–2, regarding funds lodged in the Bank of St George in Genoa by George Goudelis, are presented. The investment was originally intended to provide an income for the convent of St Nicholas in Constantinople but Goudelis made a proviso that if the city were to fall to the Turks, it should be used to sustain the poor. His son Manuel and granddaughter, Maria, were now petitioning the pope to have the money released to support their families. The differences between the two letters are discussed as is their significance for late Byzantine prosopography.

This thesis investigates the background, activities, and motivations of German women who provided administrative support for Nazi institutions and agencies of the Third Reich. It compares women who specifically chose to serve the Nazi cause in voluntary roles with those who took on such work as a progression of established careers. Using a variety of sources, including post-war testimony in criminal cases, it shows how much they knew about the repressive and genocidal aspects of the regime and evaluates the role that ideology, as against other factors, played in their loyalty to their employers. Secretaries, SS-Helferinnen (SS female auxiliaries) and Nachrichtenhelferinnen des Heeres (female communication auxiliaries of the army) held similar jobs: taking dictation, answering telephones, and sending telegrams. Yet their backgrounds differed markedly. While secretaries were habitually recruited on the basis of their prior experience and competencies, the Helferinnen predominantly volunteered, sometimes motivated by ideology and the opportunity to serve their country, sometimes enticed by the prospect of foreign travel or the lure of the uniform. The thesis sheds light on these women’s backgrounds: their social status, education, career patterns. It seeks to explain the situations and motives that propelled them into their positions and explores what they knew about the true nature of their work. These women often had access to information about the administration of genocide and are a relatively untapped resource. Their recollections shed light on the lives and work of their superiors, the mundane tasks that contributed to the displacement, deportation and death of millions of people across Europe, and the extent to which information about these atrocities was communicated and comprehended. Attention is paid to the specific role played by gender amongst perpetrators of the Holocaust. The question of how gender intersected with National Socialism, repression, atrocity and genocide forms the conceptual thread linking the separate chapters on these three groups of women who had varied backgrounds and degrees of initial commitment to Nazi ideology.

Lahore, Anarkali, mid-1950s. A distinguished-looking refugee is standing in front of a petition writer in the hope of getting the better of the Pakistani bureaucracy and having a property allotted. A few miles ahead, another refugee, camped in a school, is drafting a letter to the editor of the Pakistan Times. He will hide his identity through the pseudonym ‘desperate’. Both of them belonged to the throng of those muhajirs who, back in 1947, had embarked on a dreadful journey towards what they perceived to be their homeland. Historiographical trends have tended to overlook the everyday experience of the state among those middle-class Partition refugees who resettled in Pakistani Punjab. Focusing mainly on their ‘less fortunate’ fellow citizens, these explanations have reproduced that historically-unproven popular narrative that ascribes pain and sufferings only to the economically-backward sectors of the local society. Even more frequently, well-rooted argumentative patterns have superimposed historical and present-day socio-geographical mappings of refugee families onto both urban and rural Punjab. These somehow echo that government rhetoric that, up to the early 1960s, paid lip service to the notion of a ‘biraderi-friendly’ rehabilitation. This thesis challenges standard interpretations of the resettlement of Partition refugees in Pakistani Punjab between 1947 and 1962. It argues the universality of the so-called ‘exercise in human misery’, and the heterogeneity of the rehabilitation policies. As it sheds light on these latter original contributions to the current knowledge, it questions the ability of the local bureaucracy to establish its own ‘polity’, the unsuitability of patronage political systems as an autonomous politological category, and the failure of Pakistan as a state. Individual chapters pursue questions of emotional belonging to spatial and political places, social change, everyday experiences of the state through its institutions, electoral politics, and the deployment of integration/accommodation practices as nation- and state-building processes.

This thesis addresses needlework between 1920 and 1970 as a window into women’s broader experiences, and also asserts it as a valid topic of historical analysis in its own right. Needlecraft was a ubiquitous part of women’s lives which has until recently been largely neglected by historians. The growing historiography of needlework has relied heavily on fashion and design history perspectives, focusing on the products of needlework and examples of creative needlewomen. Moving beyond this model, this thesis establishes the importance of process as well as product in studying needlework, revealing the meanings women found in, attached to, and created through the ephemeral moment of making. Searching for the ordinary and typical, it eschews previous preoccupations with creation, affirming re-creation and recreation as more central to amateur needlework. Drawing upon diverse sources including oral history research, objects, Mass Observation archives, and specialist needlework magazines, this thesis examines five key aspects of women’s engagement with needlework: definitions of ‘leisure’ and ‘work’; motivations of thrift in peacetime and war; emotions; the modern and the traditional and finally, the gendering of needlework. It explores needlework through three central themes of identity, obligation and pleasure. Whilst asserting the validity and importance of needlework as a subject of research in its own right, it also contributes to larger debates within women’s history. It sheds light on the chronology and significance of domestic thrift, the meanings of feminised activities, the emotional context of home front life, women’s engagement with modern design and concepts of ‘leisure’ and ‘work’ within women’s history.

This thesis is an exploration of the motives, mentalities and collective identities which lay behind acts of popular anticlerical violence and iconoclasm during the pre-war Spanish Second Republic (1931-1936) and the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). The five year period following the proclamation of the democratic Second Republic in April 1931 was marked by physical assaults upon the property and public ritual of the Spanish Catholic Church. These grassroots attacks were generally carried out by rural and urban anticlerical workers who were frustrated by the Republic’s practical inability to tackle the Church’s vast power. On 17-18 July 1936, a rightwing military rebellion divided Spain geographically, provoking the radical fragmentation of power in territory which remained under Republican authority. The coup marked the beginning of a conflict which developed into a full-scale civil war. Anticlerical protagonists, with the reconfigured structure of political opportunities working in their favour, participated in an unprecedented wave of iconoclasm and violence against the clergy. During the first six months of the conflict, innumerable religious buildings were destroyed and almost 7,000 religious personnel were killed. This thesis challenges standard interpretations which link these acts to irrationality, criminality and primitiveness. It focuses directly upon the agents of anticlerical violence, exploring the connections between the anticlerical outpouring of July 1936 and those forms of anticlericalism that were already emerging before the coup. It argues that Spanish popular anticlericalism was a phenomenon which was undergoing a radical process of reconfiguration during the first three decades of the twentieth century. During a period of rapid social, cultural and political change, anticlerical acts took on new, explicitly political meanings, becoming both a catalyst and a symptom of social change. After 17-18 July 1936, anticlerical violence became an implicitly constructive force for many of its protagonists: an instrument with which to build a new society.

This thesis examines the indigenous Christians of the Arabic Middle East from 1244-1366. During this period, the Muslim world was under external threat both from the Mongol invasions and from the latter Crusades. There were also internal developments in the area such as the rise of the Baḥrī Mamlūks and the hardening of Islamic religious and popular sentiment against Christians. The impact of these events on the various Christian Communities is analysed, paying particular attention to their diverse experiences, influence and participation in the political context. Efforts to strengthen each Community and instances of continued artistic and literary expression in the midst of adverse circumstances is also explored. The thesis argues that the situations and experiences of the different confessions varied widely according to time and place depending, for example, on whether the Christians were at the heart of power in Egypt or at the periphery in northern Syria. Overall, the thesis fills a void by addressing a neglected but important period in the demographic development of the diverse medieval Near East.

Research into the British Union of Fascists (BUF) has treated antisemitism largely as an artificial addition to the party’s programme, forced upon it by various circumstances. Scholars have thus focused almost exclusively on its causes and implications, rather than the antisemitism itself: the forms that it took, the ways in which it was expressed, and its relationship to the party’s ideology. Through comprehensive analysis of the BUF’s discourse, as well as of the discussions that took place within the party, this thesis reveals that anti-Jewish sentiment was, in fact, openly expressed at the very highest levels of the movement from the outset and, moreover, that it formed an integral and authentic aspect of its doctrine. This reflected its central position in the fascist philosophy of the BUF’s founder and leader, Oswald Mosley, who was not, as is often argued, a reluctant antisemite. In fact, he played the principal role in the formulation and promulgation of this aspect of policy. More broadly, Mosley’s antisemitism is shown to be indicative of ‘generic’ fascism’s exclusionary ultranationalism, which dictates intolerance of distinctive out-groups deemed incompatible with the fascist vision of a pure, homogenous society, and whose removal is regarded as a necessary prerequisite to bring about national rebirth. This did not, however, mean that the BUF’s position on the Jewish question was at all imitative, and this study will demonstrate the extent to which it was founded upon longstanding native traditions of anti-Jewish thought. With regard to the second subject of this thesis, Jewish responses to the BUF, historical accounts have tended to focus only on the most visible forms of activity, and above all the type of confrontational anti-fascism that was favoured by many young, working-class Jews, particularly in London’s East End. By exploring a much wider range of Jewish analyses and actions, this study presents a more nuanced and variegated picture. In doing so, it demonstrates that, rather than exacerbating divisions within Britain’s heterogeneous Jewish community, the threat of fascism actually drew it closer together in its defence, bringing to the surface a shared sense of Anglo-Jewish identity. Finally, although revealing the breadth and effectiveness of Jewish opposition to British fascism, this study refutes the widely held notion that Jewish actions played any part in pushing the BUF and Mosley towards an antisemitic position.

I ricordi tratti dalla memoria sono spesso svianti. Si confondono gli avvenimenti, la loro sequenza cronologica, i protagonisti, e i loro motivi, se si ricordano cose successe da trenta a quarant’anni fa. Una versione sentita dire diviene un fatto a forza di ripetizioni e rielaborazioni fino al punto che anche i partecipanti agli avvenimenti ne sono certi. Proprio perché ho avuto un’esperienza di perdita e trasformazione di memorie sia personale che collettiva sulle origini del Medieval Pottery research Group (blake 2000), ho steso questa relazione sulla base della mia corrispondenza con gli altri partecipanti, che fu cospicua (feci copie carbone delle mie lettere). la corrispondenza ha rivelato la dialettica, che risulta appiattita nelle notizie pubblicate.

Major attempts to control the natural environment characterized government ‘developmental’ activity in twentieth-century Sind. This thesis argues that the construction of three barrage dams across the River Indus, along with a network of irrigation canals, enacted human control over nature as a political project. The Raj and its successor state in Sind, Pakistan, thereby claimed legitimacy through their capacity to benefit humans by re-modelling the landscape. These claims depended on an implied narrative of material progress, which irrigation development was expected to bring about, in a province considered technologically and socially backward. In allocating land that was newly made available for cultivation, government officials found an unprecedented opportunity to also re-shape agrarian society. As well as providing the means by which ‘ideal types’ of cultivator could be encouraged to proliferate, the development of Sind’s irrigation system was based on concepts of modernization that promoted increasing state intervention in agrarian life to render a ‘disordered’ society more easily governable. This trend was constrained, however, by successive administrations’ need to balance the lure of radical modernization against the powerful claims on new land of local magnates. The colonial belief in the agricultural, economic, and social benefits of large-scale irrigation projects was transplanted into the post-colonial state. The construction of irrigation works, the colonization of land, and their political implications before and after Independence are therefore analyzed, in order to demonstrate how and why the logic of large infrastructure schemes remained consistent. At the same time, differences in how successive administrations framed and enacted barrage projects are shown to have depended on contemporary circumstances. In the process, the thesis sheds new light on the tensions between and within the central and provincial governments, demonstrating the contested nature of concepts of Imperial governance, nation-building, and material progress.

Since his death in 1607, Abraham Fleming has never been completely forgotten about. This thesis covers all aspects of Fleming’s life. It begins with his time at Cambridge and the relationships he forged there. It studies his varied and sometimes groundbreaking contributions to the books associated with him (with a focus on his English texts and translations). It also covers his ordination into the Church of England and subsequent career as a chaplain to Charles Howard, earl of Nottingham. It also elucidates his previously unknown life as a curate in the parish of St Nicholas, Deptford and as a deacon and priest St Pancras, Soper Lane, and finally his sermons at Paul’s Cross in the grounds of St Paul’s Cathedral. Fleming’s legacy of at least 52 printed books, which includes original godly protestant treatises, English translations of Latin and Greek classical works, and books commemorating unusual occasions, have ensured that his name lived on in bibliographic catalogues. Since the 1950s a few scholars have considered Fleming’s work on Holinshed’s Chronicles as significant contributions to the text. However, the subsequent articles that have been written about him have been narrow in scope and at times unreliable. Recent studies of Fleming have considered him only as a minor writer, yet this thesis demonstrates that he was a literary figure of considerable significance. Fleming made an important contribution to the emerging public sphere, as foregrounded by Jurgen Habermas, that was lauded by his contemporaries but he has largely slipped from view. Before this doctoral research little was known about Fleming’s career as a preacher in the Church of England, a career in which he proved just as diligent as when he was a “learned corrector” of books. The aim of this thesis has been to throw fresh light on the multi-faceted career of Abraham Fleming and establish him as a leading figure in late-Sixteenth century political and print culture.

This thesis examines the interaction between the conflicting ideologies of crusade and commerce, during the period when the Turkish maritime emirates of Anatolia became the primary target of western crusading endeavour. Through the close study of papal documents and archival evidence from the Italian mercantile republics, two principal areas are focussed on: firstly, the extent to which the temporal and spiritual mechanisms (e.g. trade licences and indulgences) introduced by the popes of the fourteenth century encouraged the Italian mercantile republics to participate in a crusade; secondly, the analysis of the policies of commercial exchange and military opposition adopted by the Latin states with regard to the Turks in the Aegean. The crusades in the Aegean are discussed in six chapters which broadly reflect the activities of the principal participants: 1) crusade negotiations during the pontificates of Clement V and John XXII: distractions to an Aegean crusade under Clement V; extrication from French influence under John XXII; gradual replacement of Byzantium as a target of the Aegean crusades during the 1320s; and the temporal and spiritual concessions granted by the popes to those Latin resisting the Turks in the Aegean; 2) the Zaccaria of Chios: their defence of the Aegean from Turkish attacks and the privileges they received from the papacy for this; 3) Venetian commercial activities in the Aegean: their alliances with and activities against the various Turkish emirates; 4) the 1334 naval league: the first anti-Turkish coalition; 5) the neglect of the Aegean crusades under Pope Benedict XII (1335-1342); 6) the Crusade of Smyrna and the climax of Latin efforts against the Turks in the first half of the fourteenth century (1343-1351). Although trade and crusade have often been regarded as incompatible by historians of the crusades (such as Stephen Runciman and Aziz Atiya), they both formed an integral, and inseparable, aspect of crusade policy and of western perceptions of the Turks.

The thesis looks at a previously unstudied topic: non-partisan humanitarian relief by international agencies during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). It defines these agencies as those offering aid independently of governments and to both sides in the conflict. Thus the thesis covers: the British and American Quakers; the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC); the Save the Children Fund, Britain (SCF) and the Save the Children International Union, Switzerland (SCIU); together with Service Civil International, Switzerland (SCI) and. later in the conflict, one ad-hoc co-ordinating agency, the International Commission for the Assistance of Child Refugees in Spain (IC). This study constitutes the first fully documented history of the humanitarian work of these agencies in the conflict. It covers the conduct of the agencies; their interactions, diversities and similarities; the problems, successes and failures in their work at the start, during and at the end of the Spanish Civil War; and the way they interacted with the political authorities on both sides of the conflict. It offers an analysis of cases and situations not addressed before, while also offering its own reassessment of other controversial topics: for example, Franco’s attitude towards foreign humanitarian aid; the work of the American Quakers and the SCIU in Francoist Spain; and the question of the “safe zone” in the North as an alternative to the evacuation of refugee children. The contribution of this thesis lies in its coverage of a number of different agencies and their interaction. It discusses the different approaches of British and American Quakers, shedding light on the respective histories of these two branches of Quakerism, and on the workings of humanitarian relief in the two zones of wartime Spain (Republican and Francoist). It also describes personalities such as Mme Frederique Small of the SCIU and Rodolfo Olgiati of SCI, so important for the relief effort in Spain, whose activities have been virtually omitted by other historical works. As an initiatory study, it also offers an archival “map” of primary material that can assist future researchers.

This thesis examines the evidence for the buildings and precincts of the five friaries of late medieval London: Black Friars, Grey Friars, White Friars, Austin Friars and Crossed (or Crutched) Friars. Virtually nothing survives, at least above ground, of these once-famous institutions and so documentary and archaeological evidence form the core of the research. Using a technique of historic map regression – working backwards from the modern Ordnance Survey map and carrying out a succession of ‘digital tracings’ of historic maps – the early modern street plan of each friary was drawn. Then, evidence from dozens of archaeological excavations (small and large, antiquarian and modern) could be pasted onto the base map of each friary. Finally, documentary evidence was brought in, primarily a series of surveys (‘particulars for grant’) by the Court of Augmentations, the Crown body supervising the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 1530s and ‘40s. After setting out the historiography of research into monastic London, five chapters examine the five friaries in turn, discussing the church, cloister, precinct walls and gardens, and illustrating the evidence with a series of reconstructed plans. The chapters also examine the fate of the friary buildings in the mid-sixteenth century, after the Dissolution. In a concluding chapter, the churches and precincts are compared, looking at size, status and the use of space. The limited evidence for the economy of the friaries – both income and expenditure – is also examined. The gradual ‘secularisation’ of the friaries in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries is also considered, before studying the purchasers of the old friary buildings in the 1540s and the uses they made of their new properties.

The idea of ‘developing’ Sind has been a lynchpin of government action and rhetoric in the province during the twentieth century. The central symbols of this ‘development’ were three barrage dams, completed between 1932 and 1962. Because of the barrages’ huge economic and ideological significance, the ceremonies connected with the construction and opening of these barrages provide a unique opportunity to examine the public presentation of state authority by the colonial and postcolonial governments. This paper investigates the way that ideas of ‘development’ and ‘modernity’ appeared in discourses connected with these ceremonies, in order to demonstrate that the idea of imposing ‘progress’ on a province considered ‘backward’ by the state administrators survived longer than the British regime which had introduced it. The paper begins with the historical links between water-provision and governance in Sind, before examining the way that immediate political concerns of the sitting governments were addressed in connection with the projects, demonstrating the ways in which very similar projects were cast as symbols of different political priorities. The last part of the paper draws out deeper similarities between the logic of these political expressions, in order to demonstrate the powerful continuity in ideologies of ‘progress’ throughout midtwentieth century Sind.

The success of the First Crusade by the Christian armies caught the interest and arrested the imagination of contemporaries, stimulating the production of a large number of historical narratives. Four eyewitness accounts, as well as letters written by the crusaders to the West, were taken up by later authors, re-worked and re-fashioned into new narratives; a process which continued throughout the twelfth century and beyond. This thesis sets out to explore why contemporaries continued to write about the First Crusade in light of medieval attitudes towards the past, how authors constructed their narratives and how the crusade and the crusaders were remembered throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. It will analyse the development in the way the First Crusade was recorded and investigate the social, religious, intellectual and political influences dictating change: How, why and under what circumstances was the story re- told? What changed in the re-telling? What ideas and concepts were the authors trying to communicate and what was their meaning for contemporaries? The thesis will also aim to place these texts not only in their historical but also in their literary contexts, analyse the literary traditions from which authors were writing, and consider the impact the crusade had on medieval literature. The focus will be on Latin histories of the First Crusade, especially those written in England and France, which produced the greatest number of narratives. Those written in the Levant, the subject of these histories, will also be discussed, as well as texts written in the Empire and in Italy.

The present thesis is an annotated edition of the Refutation of the errors of the Latins by the Byzantine scholar, canonist and theologian Matthaios Blastares († c.1350). The thesis comprises an Introduction and an edition of the text. The Introduction is divided into two Parts (I-II). Part I gives biographical information on the author and his work in the wider context of the dialogue between the Byzantine and Latin theologians in this period. This is followed by an examination of the evidence concerning the circumstances of the composition of the treatise, an analysis of its structure and content together with a commentary on the arguments put forward by Blastares to refute the most important points of divergence between the two sides, concerning doctrinal and ecclesiastical issues as well as liturgical practices, and finally an evaluation of the treatise. Part II is devoted to the manuscript tradition. The treatise is transmitted in twenty-four manuscripts (MSS) dated between the fourteenth and seventeenth century. Our edition is based on eleven of the earlier MSS containing the entire treatise. These codices, together with the partial editions of chapter [38.66-60] by Dositheos Patriarch of Jerusalem, Τόμος Καταλλαγῆς (Jassi, 1694), pp. 441-456, and chapter [49] by Leo Allatius, In Roberti Creyghtoni apparatum, versionem & notas ad historiam concilii Florentini scriptam a Silvestro Syropulo de unione inter Graecos & Latinos, exercitationes, pars prima (Rome, 1665), pp. 331-332, are described and studied from the codicological and palaeographical point of view, before their relation is established and a reconstruction of the stemma codicum is proposed. The edition of the text of the complete treatise is accompanied by an apparatus fontium et locorum parallelorum, and an apparatus criticus, preceded by a brief note on the conventions adopted in the present edition and a list of abbreviations and signs used in the apparatus criticus. The thesis closes with full bibliography, an Appendix and facsimiles of selected folios of the MSS used in our edition.

Accessing the day-to-day, albeit pressing, concerns of Pakistanis in the early 1950s can be difficult as a result of the relative paucity of relevant primary material. One set of sources, however, are the letters written to the editors of contemporary newspapers during this period, in which correspondents outlined their expectations of, made demands on, and aired their frustrations with, the everyday state in the years following independence and Pakistan's creation. This paper draws on a sample of this correspondence on the letter pages of Dawn (Karachi) during 1950-1953 in order to explore the views of ordinary citizens as they grappled with problems of housing, transport, food rationing, water shortage, and corruption.

The idea of ‘developing’ Sind has been a lynchpin of government action and rhetoric in the province during the twentieth century. The central symbols of this ‘development’ were three barrage dams, completed between 1932 and 1962. Because of the barrages’ huge economic and ideological significance, the ceremonies connected with the construction and opening of these barrages provide a unique opportunity to examine the public presentation of state authority by the colonial and postcolonial governments. This paper investigates the way that ideas of ‘development’ and ‘modernity’ appeared in discourses connected with these ceremonies, in order to demonstrate that the idea of imposing ‘progress’ on a province considered ‘backward’ by the state administrators survived longer than the British regime which had introduced it. The paper begins with the historical links between water-provision and governance in Sind, before examining the way that immediate political concerns of the sitting governments were addressed in connection with the projects, demonstrating the ways in which very similar projects were cast as symbols of different political priorities. The last part of the paper draws out deeper similarities between the logic of these political expressions, in order to demonstrate the powerful continuity in ideologies of ‘progress’ throughout midtwentieth century Sind.

Like so many features of the British Empire, policy for colonial higher education was transformed during the Second World War. In 1945 the Asquith Commission established principles for its development, and in 1948 the Carr–Saunders report recommended the immediate establishment of a university in Malaya to prepare for self-government. This institution grew at a rate that surpassed expectations, but the aspirations of its founders were challenged by lack of resources, the mixed reactions of the Malayan people and the politics of decolonisation. The role of the University of Malaya in engineering a united Malayan nation was hampered by lingering colonial attitudes and ultimately frustrated by differences between Singapore and the Federation. These differences culminated in the university's partition in January 1962. In the end it was the politics of nation-building which moulded the university rather than the other way round.

Laskaris Kananos’s Greek description of a journey around the Baltic was first published in 1881. Nicolaus Busch argued that the journey was probably made in 1438 and that Kananos might have been connected to the Russian delegation that travelled to the Council of Ferrara. On the basis of neglected literary and archival evidence, this article proposes a later date of around 1468 and suggests that Kananos may not have been a merchant or diplomat as has been supposed but a refugee who was gathering alms to pay ransoms.

Police Stories: Building the French State 1815–1851 By John Merriman Review by Pamela Pilbeam, Royal Holloway, University of London

Review Article of: Rebellion in Brunei: The 1962 Revolt, Imperialism, Confrontation and Oil HARUN ABDUL MAJID London, I.B. Tauris, 2007 xi + 200 pp., ISBN978-1-84511-423-7 (£47.50 hardback) BY A.J Stockwell

The collection published here as an ebook arose out of a workshop on the comparative study of Jews and Muslims held at Royal Holloway, University of London, in 2006.

Contemporary relations between the Muslim and Jewish communities in Britain have been largely shaped and marred by international politics as a result of the creation of the state of Israel in the aftermath of the Second World War. However, historically the two distinct communities have enjoyed long periods of cultural proximity and cross-fertilisation, particularly in their migration and settlement experiences in Britain. From as early as the late-eighteenth century Maghribi and Levantine Muslim and Jewish traders migrated into the ‘Cottonopolis’ of industrial Manchester and their shared middle-eastern traditions and cultures ensured that both communities enjoyed a lengthy reciprocal relationship of inter-religious tolerance and collective community development. This paper explores some of the issues, experiences and historical details relating to Muslim and Jewish communities in 19th century Manchester.

The paper discusses the late twentieth century mobilization of American Muslims along both religious and political lines. It analyses the impact of 9/11 on these mobilizations, and it also considers changing views and practices toward Jews and Jewish organizations in America.

The central focus of the paper will be a comparison of the experience of settlement, acclimatisation and integration of Eastern European Jews and Bangladeshis in the Spitalfields district of London in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It will seek to identify the role played by religion in those processes, particularly within the contexts of communal cohesion, welfare provision and social control. The paper will then proceed to explore the way in which the two immigrant groups have negotiated their cultural identity - by means of fusion and separation, acceptance and rejection. It will also seek to locate points at which the two groups (in some cases the children and grandchildren of the first generation immigrants) have interfaced socially and in commerce. Finally, the paper will evaluate the importance of location in the Muslim/Jewish integration process by evaluating the role played Spitalfields, a first point of immigrant settlement and home to religious dissidence since the seventeenth century.

The paper focuses in the first instance on the refusal of the Muslim Council of Britain to attend the newly introduced Holocaust Day in the UK on the grounds that it should be renamed Genocide Day. In the second half of the paper I show that Quaid-i-Azam ceremonials in Manchester held by diasporic Pakistanis to commemorate the birth death of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, founder of the nation, highlight a key dimension of political mythologising: it is a feature which stems from a notion of time as cyclical. A prior mythic unity will be recaptured in a visionary, utopian future. Prior external and internal enemies (in their current manifestations) are apocalyptically destined to threaten the integrity of the nation once more. Ideologies based on political myths thus draw on both the future hopes and the future fears of people. Even when the enemy is different, fear of a new Holocaust repeating a prior one within a "cycle of death and suffering" is an important feature of a nation's political mythology. For Pakistanis, the Hindus and British oppressors have been displaced by Jews and Christian in a never-ending cycle of suffering and death. Thus too, in Israel the Arabs have displaced the Germans, themselves manifestations of earlier enemies, Romans, Babylonians, Assyrians or ancient Egyptians in the apocalyptic political mythology of Israeli society. For those who experience racism and exclusion in their daily lives, fears of expulsion and genocide loom much larger than for those who move easily through more tolerant, cosmopolitan circles. The more bound they are by their narrow group's particular symbols and images and its specific history, the more apocalyptic a group's vision of this future is likely to be.

Religious communities are increasingly seeking participation in public space on the basis of the recognition of their religious convictions and beliefs. This has led to a growing debate about the status of arguments based on religious beliefs in democratic deliberations. The paper outlines this development and explores tensions it often generates between obligations towards religion and demands of the state. Within this context, the main concern of the paper is the often neglected issue of the relationship between demands for recognition by religious communities and their internal diversity. Through the case study of Islam, the paper argues that unless religious communities devise ways of engaging with their internal diversity they will be inconsistent in their stance: seeking representation externally and suppressing it internally.

This paper seeks to identify and categorize a range of activities initiated to improve relations between Muslims and Jews, to illuminate specific concerns around which these initiatives were organized, and provide a broad analysis of their effectiveness. Data was collected through reviews of popular literature and the media, participant observation in a variety of contexts, and qualitative interviews. The study categorized and studied various types of initiatives and motivations for engagement in them, and developed criteria for assessing their success. Conclusions include recommendations for initiating Jewish-Muslim dialogue and for improving the efficacy of various categories of existing programs.

A concise survey of current scholarship on the history of relations between Muslims and Jews, and the current situation dominated by events in the Middle East, is followed by a summary of the papers collected in this book, placing them in their context.

The aim of this paper is to promote better understanding between Muslims and the adherents of other religious traditions, in particular Jews, by discussing some ecumenical aspects of Islam that have not been well explained, or even understood, by many Muslims. It is thus addressed as much to Muslims as to Jews. I begin by distinguishing between true religion, which promotes peace, and militant religious exclusivism, which tends to be violent and divisive. I mention the growth of Islamophobia, which has many parallels with anti-Semitism. I give a brief account of the Jewish character of Medinan society and the scriptural inheritance shared by Jews and Muslims, concentrating on the story of Abraham; I mention some of the theological beliefs and ritual practises shared by Jews and Muslims; I suggest that the “Constitution of Medina” presupposes a concept of social and religious pluralism; I then explain the Qur’anic model of religious pluralism and the inter-faith principles that can be deduced from the Qur’an.

Review Article of: The Defence and Fall of Singapore 1940-1942 BRIAN P. FARRELL Stroud, Tempus Publishing, 2005 446 pp., ISBN 0-7524 2311-8 (£25.00 hardback) Singapore Burning: Heroism and Surrender in World War II COLIN SMITH London, Viking, 2005 xiii + 628 pp., ISBN 0-670-91341-3 (£25.00 hardback) The Battle for Singapore: The True Story of Britain’s Greatest Military Disaster PETER THOMPSON London, Portrait Books, 2005 x + 470 pp., ISBN 0-7499-5068-4 (£20.00 hardback) By AJ Stockwell

This paper builds on research originally published as "The 'Hoover Scare' in South Carolina, 1887: An Attempt to Organize Black Farm Labor" Labor History, 40:3 (August 1999): 261-82. Shortly after that article was published, Mr. John Seawright, of Athens, Georgia, sent me newspaper clippings documenting Hover's visit to Atlanta in 1889. These led me to discover further primary sources, most importantly the indictments mentioned below (pp.16ff). I presented a much shorter version of this paper at the annual meeting of the Southern Historical Association in Atlanta, Georgia, on 4 October 2005. A somewhat longer version will be published under the title “'The First Anarchist That Ever Came to Atlanta’: Hiram F. Hover from New York to the New South” in Rachel Rubin, Christopher Green, and James Smethurst, eds., Radicalism in the South Since Reconstruction (New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, forthcoming 2006/2007).

Review Article of: Australia and the Formation of Malaysia 1961-1966: Documents on Australian Foreign Policy Edited by MOREEN DEE Canberra, Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, 2005 xlvi + 654 pp., ISBN 1-920959-22-X; 1-920959-24-6 ($69.05 hardback, $49.95 paperback) By A.J. STOCKWELL

From late 1956 onwards, British colonial officials spoke of the postwar influx of Chinese refugees from the mainland to Hong Kong as a ‘problem of people’, with serious consequences on housing, social services and even political relations. The problem was also one of an international concern: both Communist and Nationalist China and the United States saw it in the wider context of their Cold War struggles. At first, the Hong Kong government was ambivalent about providing massive relief for the refugees, either by itself or by the United Nations. But by the late 1950s and early 1960s, the political importance of turning potential rioters into responsible citizens, and the Cold War implications of great powers' involvement convinced British colonials that the only lasting solution to the problem was not overseas emigration (with outside aid) but full local integration (through trade and industrialization). The international history of the Chinese refugee problem epitomizes the local history of the Cold War over Hong Kong.

Review Article of: TREMORS OF VIOLENCE: Muslim Survivors of Ethnic Strife in Western India. By Rowena Robinson. New Delhi. Thousand Oaks. London: Sage Publications. 2005. 261 p. (Tables, maps). US$28.00. paper. ISBN 0-7619-3408-1.

Pamela Pilbeam, Professor of French History review of: Susan K. Foley, Women in France since 1789, Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke, 2004; xi + 378 pp.; 0333619927, £59.50 (hbk), 0333619935, £21.99 (pbk)

The paper examines autograph manuscripts of members of Emperor Manuel II Palaeologus' intellectual circle as sources for the social history of late Byzantium, focusing on evidence revealing the extent of their co-operation and their close friendship.