During the first year of the war there was nothing to suggest that Britain, the world's main carrier, would experience a shipping shortage of critical proportions. But by the end of 1915 the cumulative effect of factors associated with the enlarged scale of the conflict had begun to strain merchant shipping. In the first place, British merchant ships were requisitioned to transport troops, animals and stores to the various theaters of war. As many continental ports were closed to British traffic, it became necessary to travel longer distances to fetch food and raw materials. To make matters worse, much of Britain's overseas imports went to supply the requirements of its allies who were cut off from their prewar sources – Italy from countries now at war with it, and France from its own provinces now held by the enemy. Then, too, the submarine menace had not only reduced available tonnage, but required ships to take circuitous routes to avoid the danger zones. Finally, ships were often immobilized for long periods owing to congestion in the ports.

As the months passed, the exigencies of the war required increased imported supplies, while the number of ships to transport them diminished. In January 1916 the Asquith government appointed a Shipping Control Committee under Curzon to advise on allocating the requisitioned tonnage with the essential needs of the country.

Although Shelley's “Mont Blanc” is a difficult poem that has elicited widely differing interpretations, its readers have arrived at several generally accepted points of agreement about its significance and place in the Shelley canon. It is, for example, routinely assumed that this poem and “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” are to be taken together, the one “sister” to the other.

Repeatedly in his prose speculations, Shelley insists upon the undifferentiated chaos we habitually make of our semantic and semiotic fields. When a linguistic community inevitably cannot sustain what the “Defence” calls the, “vitally metaphorical language of poetry,” it disorganizes a system of manifest relations into the opacity of dead metaphor. The process is nicely defined as “semantic entropy” by John Wright, and against this collective backsliding Shelley would frame his utterance so as to

Son of a Scottish laird by his second wife, after being educated partly abroad, Urquhart spent a few months at Woolwich Arsenal where, according to the 1898 DNB entry, he ‘acquired some knowledge of gunnery.‘Whilst at Oxford he was advised by Jeremy Bentham to travel in the Levant (Maehl, 1981: 512). His association with Ottoman Turkey began in 1827 when he fought briefly for the Greeks in their war of independence. After the war had ended he gained a name for himself by his report on the borders of the new state. In 1831 he accompanied Ambassador Extraordinary Sir Stratford Canning to Istanbul where he became first secretary at the British embassy. So began a career that saw Urquhart exercise an important influence on the public mind in the early and mid-Victorian periods as a propagandist for Turkey and a virulent enemy of Russia and Lord Palmerston. The 1830s was a decade in which he swapped diplomacy for political pamphleteering and intrigue and also succeeded in publishing The Spirit of the East: a Journal of Travels through Roumelia, a work that mixes unobtrusive political commentary with romantic descriptions of the wild and sublime scenery of Greece and Albania, and celebration of Ottoman culture and civility. From thereon political writings far outnumber works of travel – Lebanon: A History and a Diary of 1860, is a rare combination of the two.

No sooner had the War Cabinet given reluctant and conditional assent to the Flanders operation, than Lloyd George tried different means to prevent Haig from carrying it out, lobbying instead for his Italian scheme. His big opportunity came when he crossed the Channel on July 22, along with Robertson and several members of the War Cabinet, to attend an inter-Allied conference in Paris. Before the start of the conference, he visited Painlevé and dined with his old friend, Albert Thomas. He advanced his case for concentration on the Italian front and, while they were attentive and sympathetic, they remained noncommittal.

Robertson, for his part, had no idea that Lloyd George was planning to rally the French authorities to his peripheral strategy. His first intimation of Lloyd George's machinations came when he, Foch, Pétain and Cadorna were asked to advise on the feasibility of sending assistance to Italy. By now, nothing that Lloyd George did should have surprised Robertson. At the gathering, Robertson persuaded the generals that it was folly to flip from one war plan to another and that the only sensible thing to do was to allow the existing arrangements to stand. It was agreed by all that the dispatch of Anglo-French troops to the Italian front should be considered only after the battle in Flanders was over and its results assessed.

After Carsten Neibuhr's visit to Muscat in 1764, James Wellsted, a naval officer who travelled there in 1834–5, was among the first to explore the important districts of inner Oman including the Jebel Akhdar mountain range. Dedicated to the young Queen Victoria, Travels in Arabia was published in 1838. Its political context was the British expedition against the Bani Bu Ali tribe, which had converted to Wahhabism and defeated a British force in 1821. Wellsted was part of General Lionel Smith's expedition of 1834 that all but wiped the tribe out. Wellsted characterizes Sultan of Oman Sayid Said bin Sultan as liberal, tolerant, personally abstemious, and a keen ally of the British – ‘probably, if any native prince can with truth be called a friend to England it is the Imam of Maskat.’ The Sultan received him warmly furnishing him with presents and promising every assistance. According to Robin Bidwell (1976), Wellsted ‘had the greatest of all gifts in an explorer – an intuitive understanding of the people that he met and a sympathy with them’ (207). An Austrian editor of Travels in Arabia (1838) writes: ‘The description of Nizwa and above all the ascent of the Jabal Akhdar represents the highlight of Wellsted's book’ (Scholz, 1978: XVI) Wellsted's writing visits some of the key themes of travellers to Arabia: Bedouin nobility, Arab treatment of women, and the freedom the desert gave.

I write this essay with some degree of trepidation. First, because it is by no means an academic paper. Second, because in some senses this is not a subject that admits of academic presentation.

I am of this community but also in many senses outside its pale. If you hear the first person far too often in this essay, it is because it is largely one person's recollections of the last 55 years. No research work has gone into it. Aside from memory, this essay has few sources; however with memory having become the strong suit of social scientists in the present generation, I suppose you will bear with me.

Many years ago in 1956, when the oldest of my sisters married a Bengali, Acharya J B Kripalani, who was a good friend but no relation of my father's, sent my father a strange long telegram. Referring to his own marriage to a Bengali Brahmo woman Smt. Sucheta Majumdar, later first woman Chief Minister of an Indian state, and to that of Krishna Kripalani (also no relation) to Nandita, granddaughter of Rabindranath Tagore, he had written, and I quote the telegram exactly:

It is being increasingly recognized that Raja Rao is the most intellectually demanding of Indian English novelists. His texts have a discursive dimension which makes them essays on some of the major ideological and philosophical systems of our times. This concern with ideas and conceptual systems is typical of Raja Rao's fiction and is noticeable from his earliest works. Kanthapura (1938), for instance, is both an exploration and an exposition of Gandhian ideology, worked out through its application to a small, remote South Indian village. The Serpent and the Rope (1960) is a compendium of philosophical disquisitions on Vedanta, Bhakti, Hinduism, Christianity, Buddhism, Indian and European history, mysticism, mythology, metaphysics and so on. In fact, the novel is an exploration of India as an idea in contact with the West; as Rama, the protagonist puts it, ‘India is not a country like France is, or like England; India is an idea, a metaphysic’ (376). The Cat and Shakespeare (1965), too, is a Vedantic–Shakespearean parable on the working of self-surrender and grace or what Govindan Nair calls ‘the way of the Cat’. Finally, Raja Rao's much awaited, finally released tome, The Chessmaster and his Moves (1988), continues and intensifies the debates of The Serpent and the Rope. Among other things, it is a dialogue between a Brahmin and a Rabbi, symbolizing the quintessential confrontation between India and the West, the vertical and the horizontal, zero and infinity respectively.

This paper discusses the role of social capital as a policy tool against poverty and inequality in the development strategies enhanced by international agencies in rural India.

In spite of the important results in economic growth, rural India still shows a very high level of poverty and inequality. Moreover, many scholars (Morris, 1998; Krishna, 2003; and Dowla, 2006) have focused on the lack of social capital to account for the increasing gap between rural and urban India, pointing out that social capital exerts a deep influence on development processes, especially in rural areas. Finally, many international agencies have launched, in rural India, development projects in which social capital is seen as a strategic variable.

We argue that the role played by social capital in development processes suffer from some sorts of ambiguity. It is not clear whether the lack of ‘good’ social capital can be considered in theoretical terms as a main cause for the failure of development strategies, or it is only one among other causes. Moreover, there is some evidence (see below) that social capital is not influent at all, and that, due to ‘bad’ quality, can become an obstacle to growth. At the same time, from a policy point of view, a careful reading of programmes and reports of international organizations shows a basic incoherence between the verbal emphasis on social capital and the actual role that is assigned to it.

In his new book Happiness: A History, Darrin McMahon refers to the observation made by Hegel: ‘One may contemplate history from the point of view of happiness, but history is not the soil in which happiness grows. The periods of happiness in it are the blank pages of history.’ But what are the ‘periods of happiness’ in history, and were there, in fact, such periods in history (even if we allow them to be ‘blank pages’)? Obviously, the yearning for happiness is one of mankind's fundamental needs, and its fulfilment is the basis for a person's creative activity, filling the sphere of his/her imagination. The yearning for happiness is a quite individual need, and this is why drama arises from the historical impossibility of harmonising individual happiness with the overall social project. Without doubt, the Soviet era attempted to achieve just this harmony. It was, however, an era of shortages everywhere. The only thing that it provided in abundance was the historical cataclysms that followed hard upon each other, any one of which might well comprise an entire era in the history of a nation. The Russian revolution was an attempt to fast-forward history. Today, what it produced-the Soviet era-has itself become history.

Marxism, which the Russian revolutionaries invoked, was least of all concerned with the private (or bourgeois) ideal of happiness.

Despite the changes that had occurred in the upper military echelons in 1917 and 1918, the man commanding the BEF had somehow managed to survive. Lloyd George had plenty of cause to give Haig the boot, particularly after Cambrai, but as we have already noted, shrank from doing so for one reason or another. The issue emerged again in the second half of July, mainly because new leadership was desired in anticipation of the campaign for 1919. Lloyd George never had much use for Haig, was convinced that he was obstinate, used unimaginative tactics and showed little interest in avoiding heavy casualties. Other factors now came into play. The prime minister resented that Haig would not join him to induce Foch to place American divisions in his sector, thus freeing British troops to assist in his plan to protect and expand the empire in the east. This brought up a related point, namely, that Haig was certain to collaborate with Foch to prevent the removal of British troops from the western front.

The prime minister felt that the scorching indictment of Haig by Borden and the other Dominion prime ministers provided him with enough justification to sack Haig. He raised the matter at the meeting of the X Committee on July 16.