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In 1943, the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) launched one of the Allied intelligence services' biggest efforts to foster resistance within Nazi Germany in cooperation with Slovene partisans in the Carinthian borderland. The so-called Clowder Mission systematically supplied weapons and other military assistance to the partisans who, in summer and autumn 1944, offered the strongest -- albeit often neglected by scholars -- militant resistance within the borders of Nazi Germany. Although SOE's operational aim of externally fomenting Austrian separatist, patriotic resistance deeper inside the country failed, its strategic aim of assisting the separation of Austria from Germany and re-establishing an independent Austrian nation-state proved to be sound. At the same time, the Carinthian Slovene partisans fell short of attaining their political objectives. This article analyses the paradoxical results of British subversive politics towards Austria and Slovenia. It traces the impact of the SOE's agenda and the origins of the Moscow Declaration on the reestablishment of Austria, and elaborates on the character of British-Slovene cooperation, its success and its breakdown in the context of British subversive politics, inter-Allied rivalries and competition, and the geopolitics of resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From 1963 to 1966 Britain fought an undeclared war against Indonesia in the jungles of Borneo. Existing accounts of the tactical outcomes of this campaign take at face value the comments produced after the event by such key individuals as Sir Walter Walker, until March 1965 the British Director of Borneo Operations, who regarded the campaign as 'a complete success'. This article demonstrates that this narrative is a retrospective judgement and that senior British officers at the time regarded the conclusion of the campaign as a success for Indonesia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines an aspect of British counter-insurgency in Palestine in the 1930s during the Arab revolt there against British colonial rule and Jewish settlement: the pro-British, anti-rebel Palestinian militia ‘peace bands’, associated with the Palestinian Nashashibi family and raised with British and Jewish military and financial assistance, and with support from the British Consul in Damascus, Gilbert MacKereth. Using Hebrew, Arabic and untapped local British regimental sources, it details how the British helped to raise the peace bands and the bands’ subsequent activities in the field; it assesses the impact of the bands on the course of the Arab revolt; and it sets out the views of the British Army towards those willing to work with them. In doing this, it extends the recent thesis of Hillel Cohen on Palestinian collaboration with Zionists to include the British and it augments the useful but dated work of Yehoshua Porath and Yuval Arnon-Ohanna on the subject. Such a study is significant for our understanding of British methods of imperial pacification, especially the British Army’s manipulation during colonial unrest of ‘turned’ insurgents as a ‘loyalist’ force against rebels, an early form of ‘pseudo’ warfare. The collaboration by Palestinians resonates with broader histories of imperial and neo-imperial rule, it extends military histories on colonial pacification methods, and it provides rich, new texture on why colonial subjects resisted and collaborated with the emergency state, using the Palestinians as a case study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abolitionism as a humanitarian trend at the height of the colonial period was a great intellectual achievement by the European civilization. But the process of making Asian and African people and the right to manumit slaves exercised by Europeans also was a part of complex colonial policy and combined moral assumptions with political and economic interests. This article aims to show how the right to manumit became an important issue in British Imperial policy. It proves that for the British, with the on-going process of self-determination of people in Arabia and Persia, it became more and more difficult to exercise the right to manumit slaves and that in some cases a humanitarian approach was sacrificed for political interests and for imperial strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The interwar period presents a challenge to maritime economic historians due to the lack of quality data. To improve our understanding of freight rate development during this period, I have compiled a dataset of coal freight rates from the United Kingdom, based on the lists of fixtures in Fairplay magazine. In this article, I discuss the source material and data collection process, compare the Fairplay data to other sources on interwar freights and present a preliminary survey of the data. Due to the large number of observations and the high degree of detail in the data, the new Fairplay dataset presents promising opportunities for further research into interwar shipping. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Defining city-region boundaries for governance or policy requires robust data analysis reflecting a conceptualisation of city-regions. Geddes introduced the concept to England and both fundamental and contingent features he identified remain valid. Subsequent work has not clarified issues raised by the contingent features and one of these—whether or not cities dominate the region definitions—here structures the review of city-region definition methods. Following a historical review of the failure of proposals for English city-region governance geography—which ascribes a key role in those failures to institutional inertia fuelled by rural interests—a review of the ‘city-centric’ methods which exacerbate rural opposition shows they fail to meet essential requirements. By contrast a ‘regions first’ approach to city-region definition is shown capable of implementing all the fundamental features of the concept, including the analysis of flows over and above those of commuting. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Britain initiated an extensive pro-democracy propaganda campaign during its wartime occupation of Iraq from 1941–5. Organizations such as the Brotherhood of Freedom aimed to instil civic pride in disaffected Iraqi youth, and the propaganda message was accompanied by a call for internal political reform as a means of protecting against growing communist influence. Allied declarations such as the Atlantic Charter played a key role in this campaign designed to win Iraqi support for the war effort, but the publicity drive also opened up new avenues for protest. The war saw the revival of leftist groups that harnessed this rhetoric to their call for British evacuation. The confluence of Allied democracy propaganda, Iraqi reformist movements, and widespread demands for British withdrawal and political reform served as a catalyst for postwar political change. Yet the reality of the occupation, in particular Britain’s bolstering of the old regime in the interest of wartime stability, ultimately hampered the development of a viable democratic system. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Royal Navy’s 1939 ‘Fighting Instructions’ provide a unique and underutilized window onto British naval doctrine in the World War II era. A comparison with US and Japanese pre-war tactical/operational thinking clarifies and illuminates the ideas and issues faced by naval officers in the interwar period. Additionally, this line of inquiry foregrounds the question of how we assess naval tactical schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article investigates the origins, development, and impact of a unique experiment in British military education. It began in 1907 as part of the radical post-Boer War reforms of the British army, and ended in 1932, a victim of the May committee’s financial austerity programme that was forced on the War Office. ‘The Class for the Administrative Training of Army Officers’ was run by the London School of Economics on behalf of the War Office. Its students consisted primarily, but not exclusively, of army logistics officers. It was a synthesis of the ideas and praxis of two men: Richard Haldane, then secretary of state for war, and the polymath Sir Halford Mackinder, then director of the LSE. It delivered a syllabus of officer education that was embedded in a number of ‘special ideas’. The first of these argued that the army existed to produce power, used both to maintain peace and in war to achieve victory. The second was a focus on the power of efficiency, interpreted as an outcome of both empirical knowledge and imagination. Both these ‘special ideas’ linked the course to one of the core functions of strategy, identifying the most suitable means to achieve set objectives. The course represented a synthesis between the practical utility of information and the general principles underlying these special ideas. Despite its radical approach the course passed the hard litmus test of military education. It covered a diverse number of subjects in a relatively short period of time, while ensuring that a single objective was met. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article describes the relations between academic psychology and psychical research in Britain during the inter-war period, in the context of the fluid boundaries between mainstream psychology and both psychical research and popular psychology. Specifically, the involvement with Harry Price of six senior academic psychologists: William McDougall, William Brown, J. C. Flugel, Cyril Burt, C. Alec Mace and Francis Aveling, is described. Personal, metaphysical and socio-historical factors in their collaboration are discussed. It is suggested that the main reason for their mutual attraction was their common engagement in a delicate balancing act between courting popular appeal on the one hand and the assertion of scientific expertise and authority on the other. Their interaction is typical of the boundary work performed at this transitional stage in the development of psychology as a discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The British fear of bombing in the early twentieth century has aptly been termed ‘the shadow of the bomber’. But the processes by which the public learned about the danger of bombing are poorly understood. This paper proposes that the press was the primary source of information about the threat, and examines a formative period in the evolution of public concern about airpower — the so-called air panic of 1935 — during which German rearmament was revealed and large-scale RAF expansion undertaken in response. A proposed air pact between the Locarno powers enabled a shift from support of disarmament to rearmament by newspapers on the right, while simultaneously supporting collective security. Paradoxically, after initially supporting the air pact, the left-wing press and its readers began to have doubts, for the same reason: the need to support collective security. This episode sheds new light on Britain’s early rearmament, and how the government was able to undertake it, despite the widespread feelings in the electorate in favour of disarmament. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The grave political, humanitarian and economic crises facing Britain in Southeast Asia in August 1945 were first reflected in a remarkable ad hoc policy towards surrendered Japanese. To the alarm of civilian officials in London, the Geneva Convention was effectively suspended. Subsequently, the British used Japanese troops against nationalists and detained other Japanese for use as coolies, in clear breach of the Potsdam Declaration. These extreme measures -- and frequent pleas for cheap American repatriation shipping -- underlined Britain's lack of capability and starkly limited options. Nevertheless, Britain's influential status as victor also allowed it to impose controls unilaterally on prisoners, leaving a legacy that continues to reverberate in contemporary warfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Margaret Thatcher was a key late-20th-century political figure, with a major part of her influence felt in international affairs. Her colleagues and interlocutors agree that Thatcher was a distinctive and forceful individual. Yet, few studies have sought to systematically investigate her worldview and leadership style, and evaluate their impact upon her policy choices. Here, I apply Hermann's conceptual complexity content analysis scheme to the entirety of Thatcher's responses to foreign policy questions in the House of Commons, finding that she scores significantly lower in complexity than both the average world leader and the average post-1945 British prime minister. This aspect of cognitive style, which has been associated with stark, black-and-white worldviews, is shown to have strongly conditioned Thatcher's foreign policy decisions in the Falklands crisis, her relationship with Ronald Reagan, her evaluation of the Soviet Union and of Mikhail Gorbachev, and her attitude toward German reunification. I conclude, then, that Thatcher's personality is key to understanding her time in office, and that she presents a vivid example of how individuals matter in politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the transformation of French policy of the Labour Party of Great Britain during the Phoney War. Labour leaders' advocacy of the establishment of a permanent Anglo-French alliance by 1940; Postwar organization of European security; Doubt about the usefulness of terms such as 'realistic' or 'idealistic.'

Presents a case study of the first years of the Irish Legation in Berlin from 1929 to 1932. Challenges created in the transition from Empire to Commonwealth; Third states with which Britain and the dominions had diplomatic relations, such as Weimar Germany; Saorstat's representation of its co-equal status within the British Commonwealth; Saorstat's perception of the Irish role in the Commonwealth.

Examines Great Britain's war policy and strategy in 1917 during World War I after a year of defeats. Definition of war aims; Level of military planning; Formulation of war aims; Doubts about defeating the German-led coalition; Causes of pessimism; Role of the U.S. entry into the war in 1917 on British optimism; Decisions by Lloyd George after becoming prime minister in December 1916.

Focuses on the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) during the so-called Third Period of 1928-1932. History of the international communist movement; Relationship between Communist International (Comintern) and Moscow; Intensification of class struggle; Comintern intervention in the CPGB; Adherence to theoretical formulations of the Comintern.

Examines the steps that were taken between the demonstration of vulnerability of Malta and the entry of Italy in the Second World War to improve the defenses of Malta. Overview of the operation of the defence organization of Great Britain in the nineteen thirties; Effects of slowness of the government in accepting hostility of Italy in a war.

This paper examines the relationship between regional and national identity in England in the first half of the twentieth century. It explores the ways in which England was imaginatively constructed through regional identities and their uniqueness. It further argues that this amounted to a powerful myth of regionalism in England which informed a discourse of national unity, particularly in the interwar years. Taking the example of the Cotswolds - a limestone hill region in central southern England - the paper shows how a unique regional identity was constructed through a corpus of local writing which also invoked the Cotswolds as an ideal version of England. The paper also examines more wide-ranging examples found in topographical writing from the first half of the twentieth century which reveal how England‘s regions were mobilized to represent something of the nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]