Search results

This paper aims to explore various tensions related to the diffusion and reception of the New Qing History (NQH) in China, and more specifically, it aims at underlying a recurrent tension within the core of this debate, between a Global and a Nationalist historical narrative.

The author’s focus is to analyze various texts published in China between 2006 and 2018.

The author argues that the intensity of the current debate is partly related on the one hand, to the fact that NQH undermines various aspects of China’s Nationalist teleology and territorial claims and, on the other hand, to the basic difficulty of accepting the coexistence of various historical representations that are risking to weaken contemporary’s justifications of its rising schemes.

The text presents an original reading of some important issues raised by the NQH debate.

Despite the exponential spread of the British Empire by the late nineteenth century, there remained in England a continued indifference to “the Empire”. In 1883, J.R. Seeley, Regius Professor of Modern History in the University of Cambridge, had expressed concern because ‘we think of Great Britain too much and of Greater Britain too little’. People had to rethink their understandings of nation and empire, he suggested, and steps had to be taken to modify what he saw as a ‘defective constitution’. Seeley’s lecture series had prompted debate about ‘the imperial question’, but the ‘anomalous political arrangements’ and the reluctance of the people to think imperially persisted. Insularity was not exclusive to the people in Britain, however. Because of their preoccupation with their own local affairs, it was suggested, there had been little opportunity for people from other parts of the empire to devote much time to the larger questions of imperial and common citizenship.

This article assesses the development of flood relief and recovery, and their narratives, as political sites for the central and local governments to negotiate each other's standing and role in imperial Japan.

The article examines local flood narratives, most prominently from Okayama, to assess how imperial Japan's central government intruded into the periphery through disaster relief, and how the localities negotiated and challenged Tokyo's political agenda on the ground and through these narratives.

The above sources reveal that the national government attempted to use flood experiences to unite the pluralizing society by three main means: building meteorological stations, relief laws, and through the imperial being. The process was systematized gradually, and local prefectures aided and challenged Tokyo's attempts. The prefectures also used disasters to try to bring unity within their community.

Historical flood narratives are often used to mine data from which future preventative and management measures are constructed. The article suggests the narratives' political nature, and hence the nuances that must be considered in these efforts.

Looks at the reasons for the collapse of both regimes and considers the importance of repression with these developments. Contrasts the methods of Imperial Russia with the Bolsheviks looking at Court proceedings, prison conditions, education and propaganda in prison, exile and the secret police. Concludes that whilst social support is usually seen as essential for survival of a system, repression is not regarded as a positive element but can become the method for a system’s survival and stability.

The purpose of this study is to draw attention to the heuristic value of intersectionality by historicizing it as a framework appropriate for the use of studying discrimination and discriminatory practices in organizations over time.

Utilizing a fusion between amodernist historiography vis-à-vis the nascent ANTi-History approach and intersectional complexity, the authors draw upon historical narratives from archival materials British Airways to empirically examine the utility of, and turn to, intersectional history in historical organization studies.

Analysis of archival materials and commissioned corporate histories revealed subjectivities of socially constructing historicized intersectional identities. This suggests that certain identities have been and continue to “enjoy” privilege while others are marginalized and/or neglected through serial interconnected historical meanings. These processes of privileging and marginalization rely on the way a nexus of meaning is configured.

The research process relied and is dependent on limited archival materials within a single organization (British Airways) and industry (civil aviation). The critique herein should not be misinterpreted as judgment of the airline itself as an exemplar of discriminatory practices but rather for its longevity as an ongoing concern; its rich, colonialist history within the United Kingdom and accessibility of data. Archival traces are housed within a semi-public corporate archive which means those traces available for study have been professional and rhetorically curated.

From the perspective of workplace diversity, our aim has been to reveal to diversity professionals and activists not only the role of history in shaping discrimination but also, in particular, to be alert to the processes whereby the production of knowledge of the past takes place. The authors hope also to have drawn attention to the power of organizations in the generation of discriminatory historical accounts and the need to further explore how such accounts are produced as knowledge of the past. Finally, the authors introduce the notion of “nexus of meaning” to suggest that in the complexity of intersectionality, the authors need to explore not only how people experience different and combined forms of discrimination but also how those experiences are shaped in a complex series of meaning that owe much to past experiences.

The research directs attention to the nexus of meaning that constitute intersecting identities.

The research attempts to historicize intersectionality as a qualitative framework worthy of consideration in management and organization studies. From the perspective of studying discrimination in organizational life, the aim of this paper is to bring forward the role history plays in shaping discrimination as well as the processes whereby the production of knowledge of the past takes place. Attention is also drawn to the power of organizations in the generation of discriminatory historical accounts and the need to further explore how such accounts are produced. This study introduces the nexus of meaning analytic that understands how the experiences of different and combined forms of discrimination are shaped by meanings of the past.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how the Empire Marketing Board used enhanced marketing tools and approaches to reduce British consumer bias against foreign products. The paper asks: “How have marketers historically increased foreign exports to domestic markets?”

The paper comprises an historical account of the Empire Marketing Board during the 1920s and 1930s. Applying a qualitative approach, it relies on archival materials gathered by the author in the United Kingdom – including official and personal papers; newspaper and poster advertisements of the Board; and existing scholarship for its information.

The Board used three strategies in its advertisements: collaboration, showing how domestic and overseas markets were linked in mutually beneficial ways; globalization, emphasizing the expansive “home” market and the benefits of removing borders; and producer profiles, narrating the producers of imperial products to create the desire to benefit producers.

The strategies of the Board are not dissimilar to fair trade campaigns used by the private sector today, notably in coffee. Looking forward, these approaches could be valid ways for companies today to reduce consumer bias against foreign goods, and this paper hopes to be a stepping-stone for future research.

Analyzing under-used archival sources, the paper illuminates the complex processes and ideologies embedded within the Board’s campaigns. The Empire Marketing Board played an important role in the interwar British consumer conceptualization of the relationship between Britain and her Empire, construction of a global British “home” market and the familiarization of imperial producers.

This paper seeks to examine the social construction of the racialised, colonial subaltern accountant in the British imperial centre in the early twentieth century..

Primary sources are used to provide an historical analysis of the British accountancy arena in the 1920s, this being the period when “race thinking” first became explicit. Secondary histories of race and empire are used to contextualise this analysis by highlighting: the growth of “race thinking” in the latter part of the nineteenth and the early decades of the twentieth centuries; and the American challenge to British imperial hegemony after the First World War.

This paper tracks the struggles of British accountants in the imperial centre in the 1920s to find a path between racialist attitudes in the imperial centre, their own included and countervailing discourses of non‐discrimination. For the Scottish chartered bodies, this involved the development of a de facto barrier to entry when a proposed de jure one aroused, surprisingly enough, the prospect of retaliation from American accountants.

Limitations in the primary sources preclude detailed examination of the attitudes of individuals or for all variations in the positions adopted by particular bodies.

The troubling thing about the demise of explicit race talk by the end of the 1920s is that de facto barriers to the entry of the racialised, subordinated Other remained in place.

This paper shows that the rise of race thinking in Britain did not leave British accountancy untouched; largely through the pressure it placed upon the identity of British accountants qua Britons and the consequential issue of inclusion/exclusion of non‐Britons.

Recent trends in Western civics education have attempted to secure democratic institutions from perceived threats. This paper investigates how political securitisation historically operated within civics textbooks in Australia and Aotearoa, New Zealand. It further evaluates how Māori, Aboriginal and other Indigenous peoples were variably incorporated or marginalised in these educational discourses.

This discourse analysis evaluates a sample of civics textbooks circulated in Australia and New Zealand between 1880 and 1920. These historical sources are interpreted through theories of decoloniality and securitisation.

The sample of textbooks asserted to students that their self-governing colonies required the military protection of the British Empire against undemocratic “threats”. They argued that self-governing colonies strengthened the empire by raising subjects who were loyal to British military interests and ideological values. The authors pedagogically encouraged a governmentality within students that was complementary to military, imperial and democratic service. The hypocritical denial of self-government for many Indigenous peoples was rationalised as a measure of “security” against “native rule” and imperial rivals.

Under a lens of securitisation, the discursive links between imperialism, military service and democratic diligence have not yet been examined in civics textbooks from the historical contexts of Australia and New Zealand. This investigation provides conceptual and pedagogical insights for contemporary civics education in both nations.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how Si-shu, a traditional form of local, private education grounded in classical instruction, responded to the rapid modernization of education during the late Qing dynasty and early Republic of China and to explain why these schools, once extraordinarily adaptable, finally disappeared.

The authors have examined both primary and secondary sources, including government reports, education yearbooks, professional annals, public archives, and published research to analyze the social, political and institutional changes that reshaped Si-shu in the context of China's late-19th- and early-20th-century educational modernization.

Si-shu went through four stages of institutional change during the last century. First, they faced increased competition from new-style (westernized) schools during the late Qing dynasty. Second, they engaged in a process of intense self-reform, particularly after the Xinhai Revolution of 1911. Third, they were marginalized by the new educational systems of the Republic of China, especially the Renxu School System of 1922 and the Wuchen School System of 1928. Finally, after the foundation of the People's Republic of China in 1949, they were considered remnants of feudal culture and forcibly replaced by modern schools.

This paper brings hitherto unexplored Chinese sources to an English-speaking audience in an effort to shed new light on the history of traditional Chinese education. The fate of Si-shu was part of the larger modernization of Chinese education – a development that had both advantages and disadvantages.

The purpose of this paper is to provide fresh insights into the meaning and experience of an imperial education and the evolving concept of empire itself in Britain during the inter‐war years. At this time, in imperially‐minded circles, the desire to preserve the cultural and political unity of the Empire was, in part, channelled into forging lasting bonds of brotherhood amongst Empire youth through education. To this end, a host of Empire‐oriented societies launched a variety of travel and exchange programmes designed to educate British youth in the importance of their imperial inheritance. Among these was the School Empire Tours (SETs; 1927‐39), a voluntary organisation led by prominent figures in government and education, which, over the course of 12 years, was responsible for the expeditions of more than 500 public schoolboys to the far flung corners of the Empire.

A contextualist methodology is employed throughout to produce a nuanced description of the concept of Empire as found within the archive, to assess the contribution made by the SETs to contemporary understandings of Empire and therein identify the significance of the organisation in the thought and practice of education across time.

A discursive change is highlighted through the subtle re‐conceptualisation of Empire as a progressive and modernising force and the evolving perceptions of the tourists themselves. Moreover, the SETs appear as a microcosm of the problematic co‐existence of democratic tradition and imperial practice during a period of intense social and political flux.

A new light is cast on the competing ideologies of imperialism and brotherhood, offering a unique perspective on the role of gender, class and race in imperial education at this time.