This chapter examines four seminal moments in the evolution of this ambit claim: the three devolutionary referenda of 1979, 1997 and 2014, and the Hamilton by-election of November 1967. The crucial context was undoubtedly the victory of Scottish National Party (SNP) candidate Winifred Ewing in the Hamilton by-election, an event that remains seminal in party folklore as marking the arrival of Scottish nationalism as a credible electoral force. Ewing's victory at Hamilton sparked a series of events that would culminate in the first referendum on devolution in 1979. On the eve of the two devolution referenda in March 1979, several accounts were published that tapped into similar assumptions about the deflating effects of the loss of empire on national morale. During the final throes of the 2014 campaign, Colin Kidd debunked the entire notion of a post-imperial story in a Scotsman essay provocatively titled: 'Say No to Colony Myth'.

Beginning with the religion law of 1997, and progressing through laws on social organisations, political parties, extremists, migration, foreigners, the media, and political demonstrations, the Russian state has tightened up its control of civil society in recent years. According to Aleksandr Gurov, a current member and former chairman, the Duma Committee for Security considers the concept of national security in the widest sense. This chapter examines securitisation in contemporary Russia as a specific feature of domestic policy-making. It focuses on the use of the securitisation discourse to convince key audiences — policymakers, legislators, and the general public — that particular policy areas are legitimate security concerns and therefore require special attention, oversight, and control. The first example of a securitisation discourse in a specific area of civil society in contemporary Russia is in relation to religion and, specifically, the Law On Religious Associations passed in 1997. As part of its analysis of Russia's securitisation efforts in the areas of spirituality and extremism, this chapter also discusses other legislation on civil society including the Law On Combating Extremist Activity enacted in 2002.

This chapter explores the continuities and discontinuities that exist between Georg Lukács' early aesthetic of the middle period (1908–16 period). It first presents an outline of Lukács' political involvement and writings from 1918 to 1957. The chapter then argues that the writings of the Lukács' middle period seek to establish an aesthetic typology which has a starting point that is instituted within The Theory of the Novel.

This chapter focuses on the heterogeneous juxtapositions which bring together diasporic Jewry and the history of anti-Semitism with the colonial struggle and anti-Black racism. It looks at the intertextual relationship between Frantz Fanon's and Jean-Paul Sartre's works. The chapter argues that both Sartre and Fanon slip between actuality and discourse in a bid to understand the impact of a dominant racial imaginary on Blacks and Jews. Fanon compared assimilated European Jews and Blacks in Peau noire as examples of racial groups which internalised racist structures. In his L'An V de la révolution algérienne, Fanon similarly notes that Jews, especially when part of the bourgeoisie, colluded with the colonial apparatus in Algeria. Fanon had served as part of the Free French forces in a war against racism and fascism and had lived through Nazi discrimination against the handful of Jews in Martinique and the larger Jewish population in Algeria.

This chapter hinges on a comparison between George Brecht’s 1961 concept of a ‘borderline’ art ‘at the point of imperceptibility’ and the concerns with invisible forces and energies of an international group of kinetic artists, associated with the Signals Gallery in London between 1964 and 1966. While the evolution of Brecht’s work from 1957 to 1962 was shaped by a search for the concrete and the changeable in which other ‘junk’ artists, such as Allan Kaprow, were engaged at the time, the Signals Gallery artists were more closely linked to a trajectory of abstract and constructive art. Nevertheless, both the Signals Gallery artists and Brecht shared a similar desire to create experimental forms that would reflect a new vision of reality, inflected by both scientific discoveries and Zen Buddhism. In particular, the issue of perception was closely tied to the role of the spectator, whether in Brecht’s participatory ‘arrangements’ and ‘borderline’ event scores or Lygia Clark’s manipulable sculptures and her conception of an ‘art without art’. Brecht’s work is shown to have contributed to Allan Kaprow’s reflections on precarious ‘activities’, while both the artists’ work impacted Lawrence Alloway’s definition of an ‘expanding and disappearing’ artwork in the late 1960s.

The collecting networks established by the Manchester Natural History Society (MNHS) in the nineteenth century provided a framework for acquisition in the twentieth. On 29 January 1868, the Natural History Society formally dissolved, and the commission took control of its collections; the Manchester Geological Society would transfer its collections the following year. Like many large European collections, the origins of the Manchester Museum are to be found in a private cabinet: that of John Leigh Philips. The Peter Street Museum was a grand affair, replete with a pillared façade. It was part of the Greek architectural revival in Manchester, echoing the original town hall on King Street. Continuing on the trajectory William Crawford Williamson had started at Peter Street, Thomas Brown and his successor Thomas Alcock sought to establish the curators' role similar to expert naturalist than glorified janitor, and additional staff were appointed to assist them.

In both Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, Captain Cook has loomed large in public history: his visits have been understood as foundational moments, as marking the true beginnings of the histories of each nation. This chapter shows how key aspects of Cook's encounters with Maori and indigenous Australians have been imagined and re-imagined. The process began with the reworking of the journals of James Cook and Joseph Banks into the official published narrative of the voyages, 'for making discoveries in the southern hemisphere', as the rather cumbersome title put it. Despite the limited contacts, Cook's proto-anthropological curiosity was stimulated, and he wrote an extended description of the Aboriginals encountered that ranged over physique, hair, ornament, body paint and piercing, canoes, subsistence and dwellings. One of the results of the last thirty years of Maori struggle has been the official redefinition of New Zealand as a bicultural nation.

This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book shows that in January 1939 marines and navy personnel made up more than a third of the American community in Shanghai, and was twice as numerous as any other occupational group. The British arrived on the China coast confident of their moral and cultural superiority over a declining and even degraded civilisation. The book also shows how East Asian history can be illuminated by a similar approach. It suggests that the changing treatment of Christians in nineteenth-century Sichuan was a side effect of the demographic and political upheavals brought about by Qing colonisation of the province in the previous century. The chapter also suggests that the availability of Korean and Taiwanese manpower was of comparable importance to Japanese expansion in East Asia.

The Second World War witnessed a massive expansion of state power in Britain, and it is unsurprising to find that the state and its various agencies had a massive impact on wartime cinemagoing. British exhibitors sought to maintain a positive relationship with the government, whilst also seeking to mitigate the impact that wartime regulations had on the industry. Analysing the government’s positive attitude to the cinema – which was understood as a channel for the dissemination of propaganda and as a means of maintaining morale – this chapter also demonstrates the limits the government placed on its willingness to accommodate the cinema. In addition to exploring the exhibition industry’s dealings with the Ministry of Information (in relation to MoI films), the Ministry of Food (in relation to sweets rationing and a ban on ice-cream manufacture) and the Treasury (in terms of Entertainments Tax), this chapter also investigates issues such as Sunday opening which allow not only for a better recognition of the ways in which government legislation influenced cinemagoing, but also for a more rounded understanding of the position that the cinema was thought to have in wartime.

For Arendt, the fragile balance between labour, work and action that lies at the heart of the human condition was fundamentally endangered by the planned obsolescence characteristic of the new post-war consumer capitalism. Artworks displaying a ‘junk’ aesthetic produced on the East and West Coasts of the United States in the period between 1957 and 1962 can be read in light of Arendt’s perspective, which intersected with both sociological critiques of the new capitalism and the writings of Zen master D.T. Suzuki and other popularisers of Zen Buddhism. Jack Kerouac’s 1958 novel The Dharma Bums resonated with both critiques of consumer society and newly discovered Zen alternatives. This chapter outlines some of the links between Kerouac’s Beat aesthetic and the assemblage and happenings of the early 1960s, by analysing the reception of landmark exhibitions such as The Art of Assemblage in 1961, and the practices of Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, Bruce Conner and Allan Kaprow.

During the nineteenth century Scotland had come to occupy third place in a European league table of people-exporting countries. Scottish enthusiasm for emigration revived after the war, although throughout the twentieth century statistical precision remained elusive in the face of patchy and ambiguous data, frequent changes in classification criteria, and the absorption of separate Scottish returns into UK figures. Most emigrants were oblivious to political arguments, and only partially aware of government strategies. In the same era, much of Scotland spectated as unprecedented immigration from the New Commonwealth fuelled overt discrimination and the politicisation of race relations in England. There is no evidence that Scots favoured the dominions because they believed there was any psychological or cultural benefit to be gained by remaining within the fold of the imperial family.

This chapter discusses the large-scale paintings of colonial warfare, associated with Lady Elizabeth Butler arid Richard Caton Woodville. It also discusses the sketches of the 'specials' or war artists, such as Melton Prior and Frederic Villiers, as representative types of a British popular art which gave cultural expression to and reflected imperialism in politics. The chapter focuses on Egypt and the Sudan between 1882 to 1888 and again in 1898. It provides a stream of incidents for the chroniclers and portrayers of patriotic adventure, including a list of exotic sounding battles: Tel-el-Kebir, Abu Klea, Tamai, Abu Kru, El Teb and Omdurman. The war artists and painters must bear some of the responsibility for the almost sacrosanct status which the British Army enjoyed in the public mind until the disasters of 'Black Week' in the second South African or Boer War.