This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book builds on the growing scholarly interest in the subject of museums and their various conflicted and shifting relationships with the British Empire. It reflects the complexity and diversity of the British imperial experience. The book addresses how museums formed part of the story of both colonisation and decolonisation. It reveals the subtle changes, within one exhibit, which represent multiple meanings in Australia's relationship with its own war-time history. The book focuses on museums in twentieth-century West and East Africa respectively, forcefully illustrate how museums were part of wider political contexts. It discusses the imperial experiences presented to the museum and exhibition-visiting public of Brighton and King's Lynn respectively. The book demonstrates how memorialisation impelled certain museums as strongly as collection display and interpretation.

This chapter asks how a precisely articulated set of practices, defined by artists as Conceptual Art, evolved into a broad notion of conceptualism. It shows how, in the United States' context, some of the most important strategies of conceptualism developed through the influence of contemporaneous politics. The chapter also shows the transition from Civil Rights into Black Power, the New Left, the anti-war movement, feminism, and gay liberation, as well as what later came to be collectively named 'identity politics'. Following the surge of Civil Rights activism in the 1950s, rights movements of the 1960s fought for subjects to gain the full benefits of citizenship, equal access to resources, and protection under the law. The synthetic proposition was debated in various guises in colloquies about identity politics and multiculturalism that raised issues of the universal versus the particular, or in conversations that examined the site of the political in art.

This chapter takes a comparative look at several models of interdisciplinary conceptualist practices that responded critically to Conceptual Art's original claims. Conceptual Art's transformation into a broad interdisciplinary conceptualism was also manifested in the turn from the analytic to the synthetic. In Mary Kelly's case, as with other synthetic proposition artists, specific and material objects and signs were overlaid so as to bring in multiple types of signifying modes and tropes. Like several of her synthetic proposition contemporaries, Adrian Piper isolated components of the work of art believed until then to be inseparable. Martha Rosler, a "post-conceptual" artist, has been working within traditions and approaches to political art that were considered methodologically contradictory, made common by her insistence on specific and explicit subject matter, and a commitment to a Leftist critique of culture.

The routines, procedures, justifications and ways of doing things in international bureaucracies are typically different from national bureaucracies. International bureaucracies share some important characteristics with national bureaucracies such as the fact that they are vertically specialised and rule-based organisations, the key elements of the Weberian model of bureaucracy. The idea of a 'bureaucracy' is quite strong in the mindset of the international civil servants, and the basic ideas implied in this organisational principle are directly or indirectly assigned to the international bureaucracy. The role of international bureaucracies in global governance is seen by some as rooted in knowledge and epistemic communities. Some signs of intergovernmentalism can be noticed mainly at the organisational helm of international bureaucracies among the top leaders. Intergovernmentalism is largely buffered within international bureaucracies.

Museums deal in history of one sort or another, or at least contemporary perceptions of such histories. In the case of the South Australian Museum (SAuM), it has been customary to identify its origins as far back as 1834. The colony of South Australia (SA) was in the process of being conceived as a planned, idealistic and free settlement, an offshoot of the United Kingdom rather than an Australian territory tainted by transportation like its predecessors. The museums in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide had all been more interested in Pacific materials than Aboriginal right up to the last decades of the nineteenth century. By the late nineteenth century, the international exchange of natural history specimens of all sorts had been replaced by a prolific trade in ethnographic materials. This shift reflected the change in emphases of museums throughout the British Empire, apparent in Australia no less than elsewhere.

In her history of the Bhil mission, Battling and Building amongst the Bhils, Rose Carter recounted an inspiring narrative of conversion. After the famine, she writes, many of the Bhagats became convinced that the sinless deity was the God of Christians, and they decided to convert en masse to Christianity. Like most other Bhils, the Bhagats went hungry in 1899-1900, and a number abandoned their vows and survived, as did others, by robbery, looting and killing cattle and other animals for food. The Bhagats held a meeting soon after, and reached a consensus that the missionaries were most probably those that Surmaldas had prophesied would come to save them after the famine. The opposition to the work of Christian missionaries by caste Hindus was becoming more focused and strident during the first decade of the twentieth century.

This chapter presents one of the last interviews granted by Georg Lukács before his death. It was broadcast on television on March 5, 1971. The questions were posed by director András Kovács, director of the film I muri (The Walls).

Chapter 2 develops the themes of working-class boys andmasculine expectations by examining the inter-war expansion of boys' clubs, which were significantly influenced by the determination to create a movement whose unifying mission was to turn ‘ordinary’ boys into ‘masculine men’. Within the movement, understanding and empathy for their working-class members combined with a desire to reinvigorate masculine values. This shaped a mission whose resonance had broader national implications, given that this ‘most truly working-class youth institution in terms of clientele’ had an authority beyond its size, with many influential supporters contributing to educational and social welfare policy for adolescent males, locally and nationally.

The newly born federal Australian Labour Party (ALP) loudly proclaimed itself to be the foremost representative of Australia as a 'new world' nation. The vital importance of 'the national' to Labour was clearly revealed during federal elections. In Australia the ALP's primary commitment to the unions was demonstrated by its programmatic support for 'White Australia' and compulsory arbitration. In Britain between 1906 and 1910 the Labour Party 'campaigned strongly for public programmes to remedy unemployment, and to establish the "right to work". Some historians, working within the discrete national frameworks of Britain and Australia, have argued that Labour's, albeit limited, success in appealing to working-class people was further enhanced by a renewed or new sense of class among workers. Australian labour historiography has, on balance, tended to adopt the view that class took precedence over nationalism in terms of the formation and subsequent twentieth-century development of the labour movement.

This introduction introduces the term ‘precariousness’ by contrasting it with the ‘ephemeral’. Precarious practices that explore the ‘almost nothing’ are situated in the context of studies of ‘nothingness’ and empty exhibitions in contemporary art. Such debates focus on the ‘dematerialisation’ of the art object since the 1960s, which will be addressed from a new perspective following Lawrence Alloway’s 1969 definition of ‘an expanding and disappearing’ work of art. Re-readings of the materiality of contemporary art since the 1960s are related to continental debates concerning ‘precarity’ in the 1990s, and traced back to Hannah Arendt’s 1958 remarks on The Human Condition. Two different philosophical books – Vladimir Jankélévitch’s 1957 Le Je-ne-sais-quoi et le presque rien, and Simon Critchley’s 1997 Very little, almost nothing – point to some of the questions and methods raised by the study of precarious practices.

This chapter introduces the subject of study, outlines why it is important, and sets out the key questions that inform the rest of the book. These are: why has it taken the Conservative Party so long to get back into a position to challenge for power? After landslide defeat in 1997, why was it (seemingly) so slow to adapt, reposition itself and begin rebuilding its support? And finally, how and why has this situation apparently been reversed under the leadership of David Cameron? The chapter argues that addressing these issues requires an assessment of party strategy over an extended period, so that contemporary developments can be adequately contextualised.The bulk of the introduction situates the book in relation to the existing literature on Conservative politics. This is characterised as falling into two broad categories: a historical tradition which has emphasised the role of pragmatic elite leadership, and a Marxist-inspired analytical tradition which has emphasised the institutionalised sources of Conservative power. Contemporary analyses of the Conservatives in opposition since 1997 are then reviewed, and both the value and limitations of this literature are discussed.