This book explores colonial gendered interactions, with a special focus on the white woman in colonial India. It examines a wide range of both literary and non-literary colonial narratives which offer a rich site for studying constructions of inter-racial interactions as well as gender representations against a grid of colonial transactions. The book also examines missionary writings, their delineation of zenana education visitations, their construction of the oppressed purdah woman, as well as their projection of the zenana as a site of disease, ignorance and idleness. It focuses on narratives which underline the disadvantaged position of the white woman in India. The book seeks to unravel the gender politics that undergirded colonial medical handbooks which were authored mostly by male colonial physicians. This book focuses on yet another aspect of female health in the colony, namely mental health.

Chapter seven examines two aspects crucial to the construction of post-war official memories of reserved workers: public memorialisation and cultural representation. It discusses several memorials to civilian workers, including the Merchant Navy and the fire service, and analyses a range of literary, filmic and televisual depictions, including A Family at War (1970-2) and Goodnight Sweetheart (1993-9), in order to illustrate how reserved workers have been largely forgotten despite their crucial wartime contributions. The emasculation thesis appears to be confirmed by their omission in cultural memory.

Intellectual montage is, according to Russian film-maker Sergei Eisenstein, the juxtaposition of shots that elicit a specific intellectual meaning. Absurdity provides a lens through which to appreciate the multitude of organizational links, and of competing goals, purposes, and ways of framing decisions as being sensible. A policy provides one set of goals or values which will have to struggle for the implementers' attentions with a string of other and often contradictory goals and purposes. In the spring of 2009, before the new rules were included in the law on sickness benefit, a controlled trial (Active-Back Sooner) was carried out in order to test central elements of the amendments to the law. The fact that the National Labor Market Authority resides here seems especially appealing to the Danish sense of self-irony, and causes many knowing looks to be exchanged by visitors and employees alike.

This chapter describes two portraits that introduce the reader to the municipal and ministerial reality respectively. The two portraits includes "making a difference" and the perfect plan. The chapter also describes a casework regulated by the legislation which the proposed legislative revision projected in the Action Plan on Sickness Benefit would substitute. The development of the Action Plan on Sickness Benefit and, along with it, the project Active-Back Sooner, were far from being developed in a political or economic vacuum. The close contact and concrete future-oriented offers were two elements in the Back to Work project that Ida found highly important and which she knew would play a central role in Active-Back Sooner. She contrasted this anticipated way of working with the "normal intervention", which she found unsatisfying.

Transnational connections and communication were critical for English ethnic associations. But this was by no means restricted to the United States and Canada as English associational connections linked all geographies of the English-speaking world. Consequently, chapter 7 extends the geographical focus, placing our North American research in the broader context by examining the spread of English societies around the world, and adopts a transnational framework to explore levels of communication between territories. In particular we investigate the spread of St George’s societies to locations beyond their first formation, examining developments in Africa and Australasia, While Australasian St George’s societies developed at about the same time as those in the Mid-West of America, and thus reflected the internal colonisation of both British and American worlds, they were not in any sense joined up at that point. Enduring connection did not in fact occur till the Royal Society of St George appeared in 1894 to bond Anglo-world’s various English societies. Celebrations of monarchy and Empire were critical in this globalization, providing a communal adhesive for English migrants wherever they were located. A similar anchor—albeit for a very different reason—was war. Not only did it heighten a sense of belonging among many, invigorating shared roots as the common denominator, it was, critically, a belonging often framed by Britishness rather than Englishness, and one paramount among those keen to stress the shared cultural characteristic of the English, British, Americans and neo-Britons in Empire. Still, Englishness was employed within that wider identity to help the ‘motherland’. English associations around the world collected funds in support of the war effort, or to help the widows and orphans of soldiers who had made the ultimate sacrifice, during both world wars, and, more directly and actively, the Toronto St George’s Society provided homes for children who had been sent over from England during the Second World War. All of these actions and communications criss-crossing the world—connecting diaspora English not only with the old homeland, but also each other—point not just to what Anderson called an ‘imagined community’, but also to an ‘imagined community’ made real through consistent practical connection.

The Introduction situates the study within the literature on late Yugoslav socialism, generations and youth. Scholarly literature on Yugoslavia views the 1980s primarily as the prelude to the violent dissolution of the country and has generally dealt with the end of Yugoslavia as a fait accompli. The Introduction posits the manuscript as one of the first attempts to explore this alternative world of the Yugoslav 1980s through a generational lens, taking the variety of political and cultural projects that sought to redefine – but not destroy – the Yugoslav project. The study maintains that a generational approach provides new insights into the processes of remaking/rethinking and decline in late socialism. The younger generation was not central to negotiating the dissolution, yet some of its representatives were at the forefront of trying to rethink Yugoslav socialist federalism.

Having established the structures and social and cultural activities of English ethnic associations, Chapter 5 examines in detail the two critical pillars of English ethnic associationalism: charity and mutual aid. It does this through the charity dispensed by St George’s societies, and the collective self-help facilitated in particular by the Sons of England (there are no detailed archives for the OSStG, hence the focus on the SoE). The chapter explores both levels of support and the regulatory framework adopted by the associations to disburse funds. By exploring the aid distributed by St George’s societies, this chapter enables us to examine the level of associational networking between organisations in dispensing charity to all immigrant groups, and the extent to which this gave those organisations a wider civic role. We have located particularly good records for the SoE in Canada and thus explore the workings of this friendly society. Quite unlike the St George’s societies, the SoE built up reserves of members’ funds, which were expended on sickness, unemployment and burial benefits. Ranging across Canada from the Maritimes to British Columbia, and entailing thousands of members in hundreds of lodges, and engaging in the good management of funds and the promulgation of a shared English culture, the Sons add very significantly to our understanding of what it meant to be English in North America.

Chapter 2 explores, first, the development of elite English associations in North America, focusing on St George’s societies. These earliest English societies were more than gentlemen’s dining and drinking clubs, and extended beyond the cultural life of the colonial tavern where they often met. Their roles encompassed social, cultural, civic and also emotional aspects of immigrant community life. Critically, however, the idea of charity underpinned them and provided the basis for all their activities, with the societies established for the purpose of aiding fellow English migrants who were in distress. This associational anchor of benevolence continues to be a mainstay for the St George’s societies that are still active today. And it was one that spread with the St George’s tradition—first to the largest centres of the original Thirteen Colonies and then, in the 1830s, to British North America. All this was in tune with the patterns of English migration, as well as its overall volume, with a plethora of new societies being founded in the mid-nineteenth century to cater for the mass arrival of migrants. Hence, while the associations’ leaders were comprised of the migrant elite, the work of St George’s societies had wider resonances for it embraced the poorest and most unfortunate of their fellow countrymen and women. Importantly, charitable culture also signifies the extent to which the English formed an active diaspora: that is, one denoted both by the geographical range of its adherents, transnational communication between them, and persistent social action. Indeed, transnational integration and the quest for consistently was fostered by the North America St George’s Union, which was founded in the 1870s for the purpose of bringing closer together the St George’s societies of the United States and Canada.