Lil' Kim's first musical track, 'Big Momma Thang', is audible as he purchases a small order of popcorn, a large order of butter and a load of napkins. Lil' Kim's Hardcore introduces and develops the Queen Bitch persona, Lil' Kim's alter ego, who features in all her records to date. Hardcore essentially tells the tale of Queen B's rise to wealth and fame in a music business that for a woman is virtually no different from the sex business. As if confirming Queen B's work ethic gone bootilicious, the male hip hop stars past and present involved in the porn industry all stressed its economic dimension and the hard work involved. The chorus to Lil' Kim's track 'We Don't Need It' stages a sexual stand-off in which that relation is contested in the form of a symbolic exchange.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book. The book presents a study of the communist life and the communist experience of membership. The study will place itself on the interface between the membership and the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) by considering the efforts of the latter to give shape to that experience. The book claims that a communist life provided a positive life experience for those who embraced the Bolshevik 'faith', although it also recognises that it could bring pain and disillusionment to others. It aims to give a qualitative sense of the experience of membership and activism as it was felt by different individuals in different ways. The book draws on the experiences, recollections and commentary of long-serving members and those who remained in the communist framework for shorter periods.

In the conclusion, Levine makes more explicit the themes throughout the work: figure-ground reversal, obviation, and scale. At the same time, she relates these themes to the ethnographic moment both in South Korea and ethnography more generally. Finally, the conclusion restates the key arguments and contributions of the book.

This chapter describes the conflagration of forces from above (the rapid expansion of the foreign aid regime) and below (the rise of an increasingly powerful NGO sector) that transformed aid and humanitarianism into key constituents of international relations in the 1970s. It illustrates how these twin themes became the defining elements in the ‘fire brigade’ states’ relationships with the developing world. The resulting description acts as a distillation of several key narratives at the heart of this book. It describes increasing Irish government interest in foreign aid (including the birth of the official aid programme in 1974) as a result of changes in the international environment, pressure to match the contributions of its peer group of states, and the obligations of its membership of the European Community, but also as a response to growing domestic debate – not least the consolidation and expansion of the NGO sector in the post-Biafra period. The chapter concludes by emphasising the important link between aid and Irish state identity: as an extension of the country's colonial and missionary heritage, its anti-colonialism, and its approach to international relations (the pursuit of justice, collective security, and the creation of a stable international system).

Grace Ashley-Smith had managed to make practical arrangements through her contacts in Belgium to provide nursing and ambulance support for the Belgian Army in Calais. This chapter focuses on the developments and highlights the ways the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY) were able to take opportunities and risks that stretched them and helped them cope with the labours of the First World War. It shares the story of the first FANY working for the Belgians at Lamarck Hospital from 1914-1915. The FANY at Lamarck came close to the firing line through their work at a Regimental Aid Post associated with the battalion doctors of the Belgian Army. Ashley-Smith nonetheless set out with her colleagues to find an appropriate site and settled upon a church hall at St Ingilvert. The big opportunity for the FANY was the running of a canteen for Belgian convalescents at Camp du Ruchard.

Militarization and post-armistice demilitarization had been active and hybrid processes. This chapter explores the history of militarized environments between 1918 and 1940 that was characterized by the lingering physical and cultural legacies of one war and the ever-heightening fears, and then arrival, of another. It begins the story with the devastation wreaked by the First World War. As battlefield tourism increased after the cessation of hostilities, the guidebooks portrayed a war-ravaged land. War-damaged forests that pre-existed the Western Front would simply be subsumed within the new forest. The afforestation programme was therefore poised to transform the region. Cemeteries and memorial sites gave sections of the red zone a national purpose by turning former battlefields into sites of remembrance and commemoration. The trauma and immense loss of life during the First World War made the French determined to avoid another war.

The Highland support for Jacobitism gave it a degree of military credibility in the same way that the French connection boasted its political and diplomatic standing, but the commitment of the clans seems paradoxical. The clans of the inner and outer Hebrides played little part in the '45. The appeal of Jacobitism for the clans may have been based on the fact that they could readily identify with the values of kinship and hereditary right which were shared by both monarchy and clanship. There were two key differences from the aftermath of the '15 rebellion. First, a huge regular army, supported by naval units, had been drawn into the heart of the Highlands and could be used in effective combination for punitive action against the clans. Second, the '45 rebellion had come too close to success and the social system which had produced the attempted counter-revolution had to be destroyed.

This chapter explores the imperial careers of the literary and cultural criticism of F. R. Leavis and his collaborators on the Cambridge journal Scrutiny (1932-1953). For the Scrutiny group, a training in close reading promised a way of resisting the seductions of contemporary culture and a means of engaging with what was authentic and sustaining in the European tradition. The active commitment of “Leavisite” school teachers and adult education tutors turned a Cambridge school into a broader-based and self-described “movement”. The Scrutiny tradition held in tension a variety of ideas and practices that could serve different intellectual and political ends, underwriting both conservative and “left-Leavisite” cultural criticism and educational initiatives. The Scrutiny project was also appropriated in unexpected ways in colonial settings, not only buttressing the claims of metropolitan culture, but also offering models for interpreting indigenous and settler-colonial literatures. This chapter begins with a survey of the intellectual and institutional networks linking “Cambridge English” to the empire, and then examines the ways in which the Scrutiny group’s early work, especially Q. D. Leavis’s path-breaking study of bestsellers, Fiction and the Reading Public (1932), provided models for the study of “colonial” or “national” literatures as cultural formations—in the cases of India, Australia, New Zealand, and Scotland.

This chapter examines the conditions and experiences of service in the context of naval officers' understanding of their work on the West African coast. It explores the motivations that served to balance their emotional and physical distress: the financial incentives of prize money and belief in the virtues of the anti-slavery cause. Service on the West African coast presented abundant risks, arising from tropical heat and heavy rain, threats of disease and violence, all of which gave rise to the view of West Africa as a 'horrid hole'. Francis Meynell's letters exemplify the variety of emotions experienced by officers on anti-slave-trade patrols, but imply that prize money was one of the few advantages of the service. For many naval men, their allegiance to the anti-slavery cause was fuelled by pride in Britain as an abolitionist beacon for the rest of the world.

The great drama of the clearances had been played out between the landowners and the people with occasional interventions from external forces of law and order. With the passage of the Crofters' Act in 1886, however, social and economic conditions and relations in the western Highlands and islands could never be the same again. The immediate aftermath of the passage of the Crofters' Act therefore saw several episodes of significant unrest in 1886 and 1887 and the return of military and naval forces to the Highlands in support of the civil power. The passing of the Crofters' Act produced a good deal of bitterness and disillusion and a subsequent return to violence and confrontation in some parts of the Hebrides. Popular agitation in the years after the passage of the Crofters' Act began to become more common in the districts and the centre of discontent switched to Lewis from Skye.

The Church of England c.1689-c.1833: from toleration to Tractarianism is widely regarded as one of the best general surveys of the national Church in the long eighteenth century. This chapter aims to fill the historiographical lacuna by examining the parish of St James', Bury St Edmunds between 1692 and 1720, when Francis Hutchinson was perpetual curate. It suggests that, largely through his reforming efforts, the established Church in Bury St Edmunds was well run in terms of pastoral administration. The chapter illustrates the way the directives of the national Church, formulated at the centre by national bodies such as the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (S.P.C.K.), were interpreted by reforming ministers such as Hutchinson. Hutchinson's election broke the monopoly which the High Churchmen of the archdeaconry of Suffolk and Sudbury had enjoyed in electing diocesan proctors since the beginning of the eighteenth century.