Chapter 4 is a detailed description of Neurath’s adaptation to British life and professional re-establishment, mainly in the field of visual education. The Isotype Institute was established in Oxford, and this method was rapidly taken up by documentarist Paul Rotha for use in films for the Ministry of Information. The Neuraths also collaborated in producing books of ‘soft propaganda’ about Britain and its allies, and made a pioneering visualization of the Beveridge Plan of social insurance. Neurath attempted to reconstruct a scholarly environment for himself, and was keen to embrace the English language. He was much in demand as a lecturer and consultant, speaking ‘broken English fluently’. He was supportive of fellow émigrés but wary of Austrian exile politics. Inadvertently, he came into contact with some people later revealed to have been Soviet spies.

The two worlds of Bengal and Malaya were connected through language, religion, maritime trade and colonial administration. In addition to being a trade route, the Bay of Bengal carried flows of migrants, information, ideas, cultural practices, pilgrims and soldiers over the centuries. However, this tie between the two worlds became more direct and extensive as British bureaucratic control spread over the Malay Peninsula from Calcutta, creating opportunities in various capacities for the Bengalis. By exploring the cultural contexts of migration, and the routes and nodal points of bonding with the Malay world, this chapter examines the administrative web that cemented existing flows of people, commodities and cultural practices from Bengal.

Linguistic and Cultural Links

The linguistic connection between Bengal and Malaya dates back to the early Christian era. In the Malay Archipelago and mainland Southeast Asia, Austroasiatic languages are widely spoken, which are also used throughout some parts of India, Bangladesh, Nepal and the southern borders of China. Hindu and Buddhist preachers from the Indian subcontinent, including Bengal, spread their beliefs in Southeast Asia in Sanskrit and Pali, leading to Indian linguistic influences in the region. The influence of Bangla, in particular, can be seen through the use of a pre-Nāgarī script. Srivijaya, a Buddhist thalassocratic empire based on the island of Sumatra, also had religious, cultural and trade links with the Buddhist Pala dynasty of Bengal.

The Malay language has borrowed many Sanskrit words. The Bangla script and the Sanskrit language are found in the Sejarah Melayu (Figure 1.1). Lanman suggests that Sanskrit influenced not only the Malay vocabulary but also ideas. About 45 per cent of the total Bangla lexicon is composed of naturally modified Sanskrit words and corrupted forms of Sanskrit. Similarly, there are many Sanskrit loanwords in the Bahasa Melayu. Although Bangla belongs to the Indo-European languages family, while Malay belongs to the Malayo-Polynesian/Austronesian family, many common Sanskrit loanwords can be found in classic Malay and Bangla. Both languages have borrowed a good number of standard Arabic and Persian words (Tables 1.1 and 1.2).

One of the earliest references to Bengal in Malay texts is in Raja Culan's Misa Melayu (The Mass of Malay), dating back to the second half of the eighteenth century. It mentions that a British captain had come from Bengal.

The introduction outlines the major themes of the book and its scope and rationale. It explains briefly the origins of the book and its relationship to the companion volume by the historian David Fitzpatrick, The Americanisation of Ireland: Migration and Settlement 1841–1925 (2020). The chapter sets out the volume’s use of the term Americanisation and the value of applying this framework for examining Irish society in the decades after the Great Famine. It considers the question of race and the multicultural American identity and briefly discusses the scholarship on whiteness and Irish identity. Returned migration is a key aspect of the influence of the United States of America on Irish culture and the chapter provides information on the extent and exceptionalism of Ireland’s returned migration trends. The chapter includes a survey of the international and Irish historiography of the phenomenon and of Ireland’s relationship to America. It concludes by outlining the structure of the book, emphasising the thematic and interdisciplinary approach.

This chapter introduces readers to the main source for marriage ritual, namely the Byzantine priest’s service book known as the euchologion. A brief typology of Byzantine euchologia is given, and a discussion of the benefits and methodological limitations in the use of euchologia for the writing of cultural history.

This chapter treats the marketing of transatlantic passenger shipping companies from the post-Famine period to the emergence of amphibious aviation at the end of the Free State era. It explores the use of evolving advertising, marketing and public relations techniques, collectively commercial propaganda, in the USA on the transatlantic passenger shipping trade. It compares and contrasts the commercial propaganda of American shipping lines with that of their British and Irish counterparts to determine the degree to which American marketing techniques influenced domestic marketing, shaped consumer tastes and stimulated desire for an American life experience that was grounded in participatory civic consumerism. The chapter suggests that the reverse flow of knowledge and practices, stimulated by temporary and permanent reverse migration, and correspondence with Irish-America, led to the post-Famine modernisation of commercial promotional activity, with attractive communications from America copied by shipping lines and agents in the Irish market to create a domestic, Americanised form of marketing, more sophisticated and polished than previously seen.

Although the reception history of American influence in Irish musical affairs has sometimes been a negative one (as in the hostile resistance to jazz in the early years of the Irish Free State), the impact of American retrievals and recordings of Irish traditional music is another matter. This chapter examines the entirely positive influence of Francis O’Neill (Chicago) and Michael Coleman (New York) in the recovery and dissemination of traditional dance music in 1900–35, partly through the agency of two cultural paradigms which shaped the revival of this music throughout much of the twentieth century. The first of these paradigms is one of remembrance, in which the ingathering of O’Neill’s published collections defined the repertory and meaning of Irish traditional music to an exceptional degree. The second is that of stylistic authority, effectuated by the influence of Coleman’s recordings on the development of fiddle playing in Ireland. Taken together, these characteristically American agents of recovery and reproduction allow us to reconsider the history, meaning and influence of ‘Americanisation’ in an Irish musical context. They also illuminate the more recent history of traditional music practice, in which the exemplary influence of jazz (as a definitively American art form) is apparent.

The epilogue covers the development from Basel I to III and reflections on the evolution of capital regulation in the long run. Particular emphasis is given to the divergence of risk-weighted and risk-unweighted capital ratios among large, global banks – most of which have their roots in the nineteenth century. The chapter calls for a fundamental reassessment of banking regulation. From a historical perspective, regulatory frameworks are highly path dependent and seldom fundamentally reconsidered, aiming to increase financial stability. Moreover, once we accept a certain degree of banking instability in modern banking, the focus should be on who covers losses and how significant such losses can potentially be without the involvement of the public.

The conclusion sums up the main arguments of the book on the formative albeit discreet role of caravan trade in the political economy of the Middle East both during and after the Ottoman period. It draws on this history to challenge recent directions in the history of the Middle East by advocating for inner perspectives on connections thanks to the crossing of endogenous documentation (in Arabic and in Ottoman) with foreign sources, more attention for legacy, resilience and slowness in a period of rapid technological and political transformation. The history of caravan supports a new way of considering the Middle East from inside. It also offers insights on the background of debates over past carbonisation and present decarbonisation.

This article explores the reception of American popular visual culture in Ireland. The role Irish Americans played in the development of blackface is discussed, highlighting how blackface was used by the Irish to distance themselves from African Americans, thus helping their integration into (white) American society. Reception of blackface in Ireland is also explored. Consideration is then given to various technological visual media, notably large-scale panorama paintings, which offered American scenes of interest to Irish emigrants, and the cinema, which became so pervasive by the Great War that American cinema, especially, had eclipsed all other entertainments. The article then outlines the contributions made to Irish film by reverse migrants, who produced the first realist representations on film of Irish history and culture during 1910–14. The last section focuses on the ideological resistance by Catholics and nationalists alike to American cinema, which was deemed immoral and undermined the Catholic-nationalist project. This led in 1923 to the introduction of the first piece of media legislation in independent Ireland that severely restricted what could be shown in Irish cinemas. Notwithstanding this cultural protectionist measure, American cinema remained hugely popular in Ireland.