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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]

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]

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]

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]