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In the 1920s, scientists at the University of Cambridge's Sir William Dunn Institute of Biochemistry made major contributions to the emerging discipline of biochemistry while also devoting considerable time and energy to the production of a humor journal entitled Brighter Biochemistry. Although humor is frequently regarded as peripheral to the work of science, the journal provides an opportunity to understand how it contributes to the social infrastructure of scientific communities as modern workplaces. Taking methodological cues from cultural history, ethnography, and humor studies, this essay conducts a close and contextual reading of Brighter Biochemistry. This reading demonstrates how humor served as a central means through which members of the Dunn confronted workplace issues, including creating cooperative work teams, responding to gender discrimination, addressing funding anxiety, and defining professional identity. These conclusions provide a new perspective on the well-documented history of the Dunn and also offer a model for how historians of science can approach humor when its traces are encountered in other settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE GOUZENKO AFFAIR IS REFERRED TO as the event that started the Cold War. This article draws on recently declassified documents that shed new light on Britain's role in this affair, particularly that of the Foreign Office and the British High Commissioner to Canada. The documents reveal how the British had a major part in directing the response to Igor Gouzenko's defection in 1945. This event revealed the need for increased counterespionage security, but it also became a spectacle that directed the public's attention away from the British connection: specifically, the role of Alan Nunn May, a British nuclear scientist who had provided the Soviets with classified information. Instead, the public's interest was centred on Soviet spies, communism as a subversive force, and the brewing Soviet-US conflict. These newly declassified sources demonstrate how it was the British intelligence services and the British government that went to great lengths to help focus the public's attention in this direction. They took great pains to direct Canadian policymaking, which included working to discourage Canada's prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King from handling the affair privately with the Soviet ambassador, and were likely behind the infamous press leak to US reporter Drew Pearson that forced King to call a Royal Commission and publicize the affair. With the help of the British government and intelligence services, the Cold War began. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Great War of 1914 heralded a new era of gender awareness among British women. As men from every nook and corner of England were picked and sent to the war, there was a shortage of manpower to carry out day to day works. This was the time when women came out of the houses to break their stereotypical image. This social awakening which war brought is explicitly captured in Jessie Pope's well known poem "War Girls". Pope is one of the pioneers of war poetry capturing the essence of the Great War. Prior to the war women were "caged and penned up". The patriarchal constraints expected them to follow their natural roles as wife, mother, and housekeeper. The war offered women a pleasant change from pent up and meaningless chores and this relief is celebrated in Pope's poetry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The campaign fought by predominantly British Commonwealth forces in North Africa during the Second World War, in many respects, represented a final example of imperial solidarity and unity. Whilst the United States participated during the final stages prior to the surrender of Axis forces in May 1943, it was Britain and its Empire that provided most of the resources and manpower and contested most of the battles. Canada, however, played only a relatively minor part and this paper seeks to examine the associated decision-making process that took place in London and Ottawa and discuss the tensions that arose. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the Second World War, after a period when European markets were disrupted and Anglo-Cuban bilateral links had stagnated, Cuban diplomacy engaged in a diplomatic offensive aimed at regaining this market. This article starts by showing how the thinking of the ruling elite of the island was guided by a proactive foreign policy implemented at two interdependent levels: using normal diplomatic channels combined with economic and trade missions. In the second part, the stage immediately following the victory of the revolutionary forces in Cuba will be evaluated, during which time policy making was dominated by commonly held ideas about the importance of commercial and economic links. Finally, the combination of factors that interacted to upset this dynamic will be evaluated: US pressure, British promises to the American government and the growing close relationship between Cuba and the Soviet Bloc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article analyses the authority of store managers for the stocking and merchandising of British supermarkets in the period between the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s. Using oral history and business archive data, the article assesses the case of two broadly similar retail chains. It identifies variations between the firms in relation to the extent of centralised versus decentralised control at the start of the study period. It then shows how the firms came to operate an essentially similar approach by its conclusion. Explanations for the changes identified are drawn from an assessment of the retail environment, and differences between the firms in terms of corporate culture. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Families at the bottom end of the Edwardian white-collar income spectrum demonstrated middle-class status through observable consumption, at the cost of squeezing other expenditures, including ‘necessities’. This had negative economic impacts, lowering living standards due to inefficiently high budget shares for positional goods. Drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, we examine how railway clerks sought to demonstrate ‘distinction’ from manual workers through certain conspicuous expenditures and how this strategy was progressively undermined by falling real incomes over the Edwardian period. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Most prior work on historical female labour supply has been confined to looking at the female labour force participation decision. This article uses the detailed information on weekly hours of work and wages contained in the New Survey of London Life and Labour ( NSLLL) (1928-32) to provide the first estimation of both the participation and the hours-of-work decisions for female workers prior to the Second World War. The main finding is that the labour supply curve was negatively sloped-women worked longer hours at lower wages. It is also possible to compare the determinants of the labour force participation decision and the hours of work decision among females in the NSLLL. It appears that the labour force participation decision was more strongly related to household income level than to own wages, while the hours of work decision among working women was more strongly related to the wage level than to household income. Finally, the article also examines the differential labour market behaviour of married women, female household heads, and young single women; most striking among these results is the evident added-worker effect on married women of the onset of the Great Depression in 1930. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the relationship between theory and practice in nineteenth century English public health disinfection practice. Disinfection undertaken by local authorities and practised on objects, spaces and people became an increasingly common public health practice in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and was part of a newly developed public health system of ‘stamping out’ disease as described by Hardy. Despite disinfection's key role in public health policy, it has thus far not received significant investigation or historiographical attending. This article explores the development of disinfection policy at local level, highlighting that despite commentators assumptions that increasingly exacting standards of disinfection required professional oversight rather than that of the ‘amateur’ public, there was a significant gap between laboratory based knowledge and evidence derived from practical experience. Laboratory conditions could not replicate those found in day-to-day disinfection, and there were myriad debates about how to create a mutually understandable scientific standard for testing. Despite increasing efforts to bring local disinfection in line with new ideas promulgated by central government and disinfection researchers, the mismatches between the two meant that there was greater divergence. This tension lay at the heart of the changes in disinfection theory and practice in the second half of the nineteenth century, and illustrate the complexities of the impact of germ theory on public health policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

El artículo discurre sobre el Mandato de Gran Breteña relacionado con la formación de un territorio para los judíos en Palestina. El autor comenta sobre el estado social y político de los israelitas durante este época, de 1918 a la creación de Israel en 1948. También se considera la importancia de este territorio en la cultura y las tradiciones judías.

The concept of nostalgia in relation to empire is usually analyzed as a longing for former imperial and colonial glory, thus eliding the full spectrum of hegemonic practices that are associated with empire. Focusing on the postindependence narratives and practices of France and Britain, this article distinguishes between imperial nostalgia and colonial nostalgia, arguing that the former is associated with the loss of empire-that is, the decline of national grandeur and the international power politics connected to economic and political hegemony-and the latter with the loss of sociocultural standing or, more precisely, the colonial lifestyle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mass public commemoration of war dead in Britain is often held to be a twentieth-century phenomenon, with its genesis in the Great War. However, the war memorial movement in the aftermath of the South African War (1899-1902) foreshadowed that of the Great War and acted as a blueprint for later commemorative activity. At the forefront of this movement were the nation's great public schools. The memorialization process provided these institutions with the opportunity to mold the memory of their alumni's war service to reaffirm the validity of their underlying principles and ethos. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 essay presents a speculative history, re-imagining Great Britain's social and educational differences if Jim Callahan had been elected as Prime Minister of Great Britain instead of Margaret Thatcher in the 1979 General Election. It addresses the state of England's race relations in the 21st century, the extent of racism in contemporary British society, and the potential for universal education in England.

In 1953, a book on Jammu and Kashmir titled "The Grim Saga" (Dasgupta & Co. Ltd.) came out in Calcutta, India. Its author, S. N. Shivpuri, lamented “the triple tragedy of Kashmir–local, subcontinental and international.” Almost five decades since then, a great deal has been written about the local and subcontinental tragedy(s) in Kashmir. This article instead turns its gaze towards the international aspects that accompanied the evolution of the first India-Pakistan conflict over Kashmir from 1947–49, which sowed the seeds of the enduring dispute between the two countries. Focusing on the British policy towards Kashmir during this period, it contends that the impact of three wider, over-lapping contexts of international geopolitics, namely, British fears about unrest in the north-west of Indian subcontinent along the border with Afghanistan, British involvement in the Middle East, and British plans against the former Soviet Union, affected the official interpretation of British interest in Kashmir. These contexts, in turn, were created by the two themes of decolonization in South Asia and the Cold War in that pivotal year of 1947. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article discusses the sources of competitive advantage in the interwar British radio industry. Specifically, it examines why sections of the industry that reaped substantial monopoly rents from the downstream value chain failed to dominate the industry. During the 1920s Marconi (which controlled the fundamental UK patents) had a key cost advantage, as had other members of the 'Big Six' electrical engineering firms which formed the BBC and were granted preferential royalties. Meanwhile the valve manufacturers' cartel was also able to extract high rents from set manufacturers. The vertical integration literature suggests that input monopolists have incentives to control downstream production. Yet-in contrast to the gramophone industry, which became concentrated into two huge companies following market saturation in the 1930s-radio retained a much more competitive structure. The Big Six failed to capitalize fully on their initial cost advantages owing to logistical weaknesses in supplying markets subject to rapid technical and design obsolescence. Subsequently, during the 1930s, marketing innovations are shown to have played a key role in allowing several independents to establish successful brands. This gave them sufficient scale to provide strong bargaining positions with input suppliers, negating most of their initial cost disadvantage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic historians have recently taught us a great deal about the ‘new consumerism’ in interwar Britain. However, the story has largely been told from the supply side and the Co-operative movement that played a key role in the lives of millions of working-class consumers has tended to be marginalised. This article brings the movement and the consumer centre stage. First, the uneven and vulnerable situation of the Co-op as a business is outlined. The next section briefly sketches economic and political attacks on the movement that made it more difficult to respond effectively to the challenges it faced. The major part of the article discusses oral evidence from ordinary co-operative members, which helps illuminate the contradictory pressures faced by consumers in this period. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including active citizenship, citizenship education, and educational policy in Great Britain.

Interwar British retailing has been characterized as having lower productivity, less developed managerial hierarchies and methods, and weaker scale economies than its US counterpart. This article examines comparative productivity for one major segment of large-scale retailing in both countries-the department store sector. Drawing on exceptionally detailed contemporary survey data, we show that British department stores in fact achieved superior performance in terms of operating costs, margins, profits, and stock-turn. While smaller British stores had lower labour productivity than US stores of equivalent size, TFP was generally higher for British stores, which also enjoyed stronger scale economies. We also examine the reasons behind Britain's surprisingly strong relative performance, using surviving original returns from the British surveys. Contrary to arguments that British retailers faced major barriers to the development of large-scale enterprises, that could reap economies of scale and scope and invest in machinery and marketing to support the growth of their primary sales functions, we find that British department stores enthusiastically embraced the retail 'managerial revolution'-and reaped substantial benefits from this investment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to debates about the economic framework of industrial politics by examining aspects of the 1984-5 miners' strike in Britain, focusing on developments in Scotland. It focuses on strike endurance and pit-level variations in strike endurance by examining the contrasting quantity and quality of the material and moral resources available to the strikers at different collieries and in different communities. Powerful local variables in building or inhibiting strike commitment included pre-strike pit-level production, industrial relations, and the impact of debates about the economics and finances of coal-getting; incomes gained for households during the strike by married women in part-time and full-time employment; expenditure saved by households in local authority housing where rents were in effect deferred by sympathetic local authorities; communal attitudes to pits, jobs, and redundancies; the character and weight of political tradition; and the cultural as well as economic role of women. By focusing on developments at community and colliery level the article challenges dominant narratives of the strike, which remain wedded to high politics, the strategy of the union leadership, changes in energy supply and policy, and public order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Just over fifty years ago, Prime Minister Macmillan made an extensive tour of Africa, culminating in his ‘wind of change’ speech in Cape Town, 1960. This article traces Macmillan's progress through Africa with particular emphasis on his intervention in South African politics. It offers a novel reading of the ‘wind of change’ speech, arguing that the message was far more conciliatory with respect to white South African interests than is usually assumed. Pragmatism rather than principle was always the prime consideration. Far from being cowed by Macmillan's oratory or his message, Verwoerd stood up to Macmillan and, at least in the eyes of his supporters, gave as good as he got. The shock of the ‘wind of change’ speech was more evident in Britain and in British settler regions of Africa than in South Africa. Macmillan's advisers had an inflated view of the import of the speech and in many ways misread Verwoerd's brand of Afrikaner nationalism. One of the consequences of the speech was to embolden Verwoerd politically, and to prepare him for the declaration of republican status in 1961 and departure from the commonwealth. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Monoclonal antibodies played a key role in the development of the biotechnology industry of the 1980s and 1990s. Investments in the sector and commercial returns have rivaled those of recombinant DNA technologies. Although the monoclonal antibody technology was first developed in Britain, the first patents were taken out by American scientists. During the first Thatcher government in Britain, blame for the missed opportunity fell on the scientists involved as well as on the National Research and Development Corporation, which had been put in place after World War II to avoid a repeat of the penicillin story, when patent rights were not sought. Instead of apportioning the blame, this essay suggests that despite past experiences and despite the new channels that were in place, Britain was not in a "patent culture" in the 1970s. It traces the long and painful process that made a commercial attitude among publicly funded British research scientists and in a civil service institution like the Medical Research Council both possible and desirable. In this process the meaning of the term "public science" also changed dramatically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A heterogeneous panel-based Bayesian model averaging approach is used to identify the robust economic and policy drivers of international migration to the UK from 14 different source regions over 1980-2007. Around three-quarters of the increase in net immigration over the last decade, which is particularly pronounced for selected source regions, is associated with structural change, which may be attributed to UK and foreign immigration policy. The remainder of the rise is largely explained by 'friends and family' effects. There are considerable uncertainties associated both with the effects of particular economic drivers of immigration and with forecasts of immigration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the history of South African foreign relations at the beginning of the suppression by the 5th Brigade of Zimbabwean soldiers called the Gukurahundi in Zimbabwe under Prime Minister Robert Mugabe between 1981 and 1983. The author contends that Cold War relations between the United Kingdom and Zimbabwe helped to provide cover for the 5th Brigade's terror campaign, which included atrocities against Zimbabwean civilians. The author asserts that diplomatic history of the Gukurahundi is useful in understanding the tragedy from a Cold War context, and also discusses the role of the Zimbabwe African National Union -- Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) and the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) in the situation.

The first half of the twentieth century saw rapid improvements in the health and height of British children. Average height and health can be related to infant mortality through a positive selection effect and a negative scarring effect. Examining town level panel data on the heights of school children, no evidence is found for the selection effect, but there is some support for the scarring effect. The results suggest that the improvement in the disease environment, as reflected by the decline in infant mortality, increased average height by about half a centimetre per decade in the first half of the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Seeking to align psychiatric practice with general medicine following the inauguration of the National Health Service, psychiatric hospitals in post-war Britain deployed new treatments designed to induce somatic change, such as ECT, leucotomy and sedatives. Advocates of these treatments, often grouped together under the term 'physical therapies', expressed relief that the social problems encountered by patients could now be interpreted as symptomatic of underlying biological malfunction rather than as a cause of disorder that required treatment. Drawing on the British Journal of Psychiatric Social Work, this article analyses the critique articulated by psychiatric social workers based within hospitals who sought to facilitate the social reintegration of patients following treatment. It explores the development of 'psychiatric social treatment', an approach devised by psychiatric social workers to meet the needs of people with enduring mental health problems in hospital and community settings that sought to alleviate distress and improve social functioning by changing an individual's social environment and interpersonal relationships. 'Physical' and 'social' models of psychiatric treatment, this article argues, contested not only the aetiology of mental illness but also the nature of care, treatment and cure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

States use wedge strategies to prevent hostile alliances from forming or to disperse those that have formed. These strategies can cause power alignments that are otherwise unlikely to occur, and thus have significant consequences for international politics. How do such strategies work and what conditions promote their success? The wedge strategies that are likely to have significant effects use selective accommodation--concessions, compensations, and other inducements--to detach and neutralize potential adversaries. These kinds of strategies play important roles in the statecraft of both defensive and offensive powers. Defenders use selective accommodation to balance against a primary threat by neutralizing lesser ones that might ally with it. Expansionists use selective accommodation to prevent or break up blocking coalitions, which isolates opposing states by inducing potential balancers to buck-pass, bandwagon, or hide. Two cases--Great Britain's defensive attempts to accommodate Italy in the late 1930s and Germany's offensive efforts to accommodate the Soviet Union in 1939--help to demonstrate these arguments. By paying attention to these dynamics, international relations scholars can better understand how balancing works in specific cases, how it manifests more broadly in international politics, and why it sometimes fails in situations where it ought to work well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an examination of the social sources that influenced Great Britain's appeasement approach to foreign policy during the 1930s. It examines appeasement in an international context and explores how economic factors motivated this stance and how economics influence foreign policy and international security in general. It argues that Great Britain's appeasement approach towards Nazi Germany was a crisis strategy that attempted to eliminate multiple socioeconomic and geopolitical problems by limiting their foreign policy responsibilities.

In the years before and during the Second World War, the Roosevelt Administration played an important and often overlooked role in encouraging Britain's disengagement from the Indian subcontinent. Roosevelt's motivations in pressing for Indian independence were varied. They included a mix of principled opposition to colonialism, practical concern for the outcome of the war and pragmatic jockeying for influence with post-colonial nations when the war was won. Churchill's government was wary of being pushed by Washington to move more quickly to 'quit India' than it thought prudent. U.S. policy and actions clearly influenced the direction of events toward independence, but U.S. caution as the war ground on led to disillusionment among nationalist leaders. This reaction would have consequences once swaraj was won and India came into its own, at a time when the Cold War was becoming the dominant factor in America's view of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports that three films including Daily Round, Penny Journey and The Horsey Mail, produced by General Post Office (GPO) projected the physical, social, and cultural landscapes of the countryside of Great Britain and the obstacles to integrate modern transportation services within contemporary rural Britain are presented. It is stated that several documents depicting the state of interwar Britain, including H.V.Morton's "In Search Of England," were published during that period.

The sale of buses by the Leyland Motor Company to Cuba proved contentious, not only in the realm of Anglo-American relations, but also in the domestic sphere of a behind the scenes inter-departmental disagreement within the British government. This is because the bus exports pitted political against economic interests at the height of the Cold War and in the midst of a British export drive. As Her Majesty's Government readily recognized, Washington was particularly sensitive over any issue related to Cuba, which by 1963 was firmly in the communist orbit of the Soviet bloc and which the United States was determined to isolate economically through the application of a trade blockade. The decision to approve the sales came at the end of the Macmillan and Kennedy administrations, and clouded the short-lived partnership of Prime Minister Alec Douglas-Home and President Lyndon B. Johnson. The bus exports became an election issue in the campaigns of both leaders in 1964, assuming a political significance that belied the buses' seemingly innocuous function and outward appearance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we argue that the fertility decline that began around 1880 had substantial positive effects on the health of children, as the quality-quantity trade-off would suggest. We use microdata from a unique survey from 1930s Britain to analyse the relationship at the household level between the standardised heights of children and the number of children in the family. Our results suggest that heights are influenced positively by family income per capita and negatively by the number of children or the degree of crowding in the household. The evidence suggests that family size affected the health of children through its influence on both nutrition and disease. Applying our results to long-term trends, we find that rising household income and falling family size contributed significantly to improving child health between 1886 and 1938. Between 1906 and 1938 these variables account for 40% of the increase in heights, and much of this effect is due to falling family size. We conclude that the fertility decline is a neglected source of the rapid improvement in health in the first half of the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the political efforts of American and British labor movements during World War II, focusing particularly on the British Trade Union Congress (TUC) and the American Federation of Labor (AFL). The author explores the impact of national foreign policies upon the labor movements and considers whether national interests or the interests of the trade unions are considered most important by the unions. Other subjects considered include the trade union movement, internationalism, the International Labor Organization, international labor standards, interactions between the TUC, AFL, and the Soviet International Federation of Trade Unions, and union leaders Sir Walter Citrine and William Green.

The author comments upon various reports published within this special issue on the history of labor unions and foreign relations, including one by Elizabeth McKillen on labor during World War I, one by Geert Van Goethem on government policies regarding American and British labor movements during World War II, and one by Daniel Garcia on class relations within the U.S. armed forces at the end of World War II. Some of the subjects explored include the public opinion of the working-class in the U.S. regarding foreign policy, the study of international labor movements, and the inability of marginalised groups within the U.S. to influence political decision making.

In the Lancashire cotton textile industry, mule spinners were prone to a chronic and sometimes fatal skin cancer (often affecting the groin). The disease had reached epidemic proportions by the 1920s, which necessitated action by the government, employers, and trade unions. In contrast to previous accounts, this article focuses on the government's reaction to mule spinners' cancer. Using official records in the National Archives, the slow introduction of health and safety measures by the government is explored in detail. Although obstructionism by the employers played a key role, one of the reasons for government inaction was the ambiguity of scientific research on engineering oils. On the other hand, prolonged scientific research suited a government policy that was framed around self regulation - a policy that had proved largely ineffective by the 1950s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historians tell us that the term "fundamental research" entered the discourse of science in the interwar period as a synonym for "pure science" and that both terms referred to work concerned with the search for knowledge, without thought of application. The aim of this paper is to show that when the expression "fundamental research" was used in Britain during and after World War I, it had a particular status that was not equivalent to pure science. In the annual reports of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR) "fundamental research" was endowed with multiple meanings, including work that was orientated towards some practical goal. The fluidity of the meaning of "fundamental research" in the reports of the DSIR can be understood as a strategy; "fundamental research" was a rhetorical term that served to persuade more than one audience of the legitimacy of the DSIR and its policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the British Empire in Asia, focusing on battles which were intended to prevent the Russian Empire from dominating the continent. Aspects of these events which may be relevant to the 21st century Afghan War are emphasized. It is noted that the reputation of Afghanistan as a graveyard for empires is exaggerated. British forces which invaded Afghanistan in the 19th century, like Soviet forces in the 20th, inflicted far more casualties than they suffered and left in an orderly fashion, after determining that the country was not worth occupying. The adventures of Colonel Francis Younghusband in Tibet in the first decade of the 20th century are also recounted, as an edifying instance of the perils of success.

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]

The article focuses on diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Great Britain during the Berlin Crisis of 1961-1962. The author argues that American foreign policy was influenced by the personal relationships between Anglo-American politicians, diplomats, and other officials that went beyond the interactions between British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan and U.S. President John F. Kennedy. Other notable people discussed include British ambassador to the U.S. David Ormsby-Gore, U.S. secretary of state Dean Rusk, British foreign secretary Alec Douglas-Home, and Soviet Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev. The American two-part policy involving diplomatic negotiations with the Soviet Union and the buildup of NATO's (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) conventional weaponry are considered.