The reign of the English king Edward the Second (1307–1327) has long been a subject of study, discussion, and debate for scholars and artists alike. Indeed, there is much in what has become the legend of this sovereign to draw one's attention. Arguably one of the first clear historical cases of a regularly troubled regime, the reign of Edward has become an ideal subject for the exploration of the nature of power by historians and sociologists, as well as by novelists, poets, and dramatists. Their studies, however, have been regularly subject to complications and distractions due to the many potentially prurient aspects of this reign: multiple murders, a grossly unhappy marriage, revolutions, rebellions, and, especially, Edward's engagement in homosexual activity. While the importance of Edward's sexuality is obvious as a means to explore the nature and treatment of sexuality in early English history, it has almost invariably distracted from or colored discussions of the more central, political issues of his rule.

The most significant artistic examination of Edward's reign has been subject to similarly skewed treatment. So resonant is Christopher Marlowe's play Edward II (1592) that it has become a veritable locus for cultural discourse on sexuality. Both in studies of the text and in performances of the play, the emphasis has been on questions of Edward's sexuality, whether through direct address of the subject or a conscious moral choice to avoid it.

In the preface to his famous Folie et Déraison Michel Foucault suggests:

No such total analysis in the structuralist sense has been attempted here. Nevertheless, the aim has been to reconstruct the history of madness among those treated by the British during ‘John Company's ’ time as completely as surviving sources allow. The treatment of the European and Indian mentally ill in British institutions has been analyzed in relation to colonial ideology, state policy and legislation; the important role of public opinion ‘at home’ and in the colony in the construction of treatment methods and administrative control measures has been highlighted; and the reconcilability of commercial interests, colonial ideology and humanitarian motives has been discussed.

Further, the comparatively early and successful intervention by the colonial state in the ‘lunacy sector’ has been related to the persistent endeavour of Company officials and of the expatriate community more generally to preserve the image of the European elite as formidable and impeccable colonial rulers.

The Search for Fortune and Professional Recognition

In many pre-modern societies the signification of madness encompassed a wide range of conflicting feelings and psychological projections. The mad could be revered or feared as bearers of preternatural powers, they could be despised as monstrous brutes. The apparent ‘simpletons’ among them could be romantically idealized as holy, innocent fools or ‘naturals’, or be ridiculed as village idiots and subjected to atrocities and mean tricks. Those suffering from a more violent strain of madness or melancholic gloominess tended to be approached with the cautious curiosity that is frequently fuelled by admiration and fear – a mixture that might easily find a cathartic release in abuse and brutality, or be converted into veneration. These diverse responses to madness could prevail simultaneously, or one particular attitude might dominate.

Those treating or caring for the mad tended to share the stigma attached to their charges. Just like the mad they were subject to quickly changing perceptions oscillating between respect and suspicion. In the late eighteenth century, this cautious and even hostile attitude can partially be accounted for by the fact that madhouse superintendents rarely possessed any formal medical qualification. They not uncommonly included clergymen and ‘quacks’, as well as the medically qualified. Until the passing of the Lunatics Act of 1845 obliged each county in England to build its own public lunatic asylum, most madhouses were private investments. This did not help to reduce mad-doctors’ ambivalent social image and generally low professional repute.

Proposals for colonization, put forward by interested nations in the seventeenth century, laid the groundwork for exploration through voyages of discovery, and yet, in the first half of the eighteenth century, the fraction of the total area of the antipodes explored was relatively small. Maps featured blank spaces spreading from the western coast of the Americas right across the Pacific to the western coast of the Australian landmass, and the search was on to find the elusive Northwest Passage to the South Seas. Major Pacific island groups such as the Hawaiian, Samoan and Society Islands, New Caledonia and New Zealand, remained unknown or practically unexplored, and the eastern coast of the Australian continent had not yet been discovered. The technical challenges of sea travel were an ongoing obstacle and there were also financial and political barriers to overcome. The extent of uncharted space understandably raised hopes of finding an abundance of natural resources for trade as well as room for colonies on a scale unheard of in the Portuguese, Dutch, British and French empires.

The OAS in Perspective

Since 1824, the newly independent Latin American states continuously tried to advance regional integration projects while constantly and simultaneously reaffirming their own independence from Europe, and the right to define the kind of state that they would become. These projects revolved around Pan-American Conferences that promoted principles that would allow for the eventual achievement of a regional scheme. All through the nineteenth and the first part of the twentieth century; these series of conferences, treaties, doctrines and international law principles, meant to rally states in the Western Hemisphere to joint efforts and advance either common economic interest; enforce collective security and peaceful resolution of disputes; or develop a common social agenda that would allow for the development of a common Pan-American society of states. The successive Pan-American conferences tried and failed to rally multilateral support and advance a regional cooperation framework around either economic, security or social principles, due to the lack of consensus around any of these set of norms. Neither mechanisms such as 1) treaties and doctrines to advance the peaceful resolution of disputes between states; 2) the support for a customs union; or 3) the promotion of the traditional principles of respect for the right of self determination and sovereignty; successfully generated a common set of normative principles that could motivate elites in positions of authority to promote multilateralism.

One of the most unusual aspects of the Italian cinema of the late '50s and the '60s is the way in which it affords us multiple perspectives on the same event, namely the economic boom following the postwar recovery. Whereas the directors of the French New Wave each created a unique poetic universe, Italian cinema of the same period feels like a series of moons circling around one planet. Again and again, one encounters the identical sociological material, whether filtered through Michelangelo Antonioni's exacting nihilism, Luchino Visconti's luxurious emotionalism, Dino Risi's comic exuberance, or Valerio Zurlini's stirring sobriety. Over and over, one sees the same construction sites, quick-stop cafés, barren roadsides, and cramped apartments (owned by noisy, nosy landladies) that were constants of postwar Italian society. Most strikingly of all, these films feature a parade of young men outfitted in regulation white-collar attire yet betraying their essential inexperience – of the world itself as well as the work-world. That is, they are ill-equipped for a life of work and responsibility in a mechanized, high-efficiency world, and consequently they are lonesome for the nurturing comforts of home.

Of all the talented filmmakers who visited this particular terrain, none responded more soulfully than Ermanno Olmi (born 1931).

In the wake of Titanic back in 1997, a cinematic lifeboat managed to float my way from Europe: La Promesse (1996), by the Belgians Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne. This film is about cultural clash and the moral enlightenment as well as emotional awakening that, under the right circumstances, can come of it. Ironically, the “right circumstances” are those of war and captivity – not literal phenomena in this case but figurative. This is not exactly a new subject – the attempt to reveal a human bond between characters who are otherwise military enemies, political opponents, religious rivals, or racial opposites – but it need not be one in the hands of sensitive writer-directors like the Dardennes, interested in something other than sentimentality, hyperbole, and oversimplification.

Measured though moving, La Promesse has a national origin that certainly didn't help its distribution prospects. What didn't help this film, either, is its title – The Promise, in English – which was the title as well of the German director Margarethe von Trotta's emotionally empty, politically clumsy, and melodramatically labored 1995 romance about the profound impact the Berlin Wall had on all of its German captives, East and West alike. La Promesse premiered in the United States at the 1996 New York Film Festival and was made by two brothers, then in their forties, who had spent most of their twenty-year filmmaking career collaborating on documentaries for European television.

Ideological Positions

Writings on the Raj have often been fuelled by political interests and nearly always served some particular ideological purpose. James Mill's History of British India (1817), for example, represents an early attempt by a distinguished protagonist of utilitarianism and advocate of Enlightenment values, to support the idea of converting the Indian subcontinent into a nation governed by reason, fed by European knowledge. There were many other accounts, both preceding and following Mill's description of pre-European India as a society characterized by despotic rule and barbarism, and of Europeans' corruption and idle high living, or devotion to duty. Some of these were immersed in a vision of the spirit of Enlightenment or, more militantly, the pax Britannica spreading across the Indian peninsula. They sometimes described gruesome details of violent Indian customs (such as the burning of widows, mutilation of children and strangling of travellers) as evidence for the necessity of Westernization. Others (of which there were fewer) attempted to adduce evidence as to why India was no longer ‘worth keeping’.

Diversity of view is however not confined to the realms of fiction and scientific writing. It is in fact liable to characterize any but the most totalitarian political system. Government officials in India, too, espoused a variety of different ideological positions, personal interests and idiosyncrasies. Discussion of any aspect of government is therefore bound to reflect this, and lunacy policy is no exception.

While there can be little doubt that the period between the October 1917 Russian Revolution and the outbreak of World War Two saw an extraordinary upsurge in innovative approaches to language in Russia and then the USSR, only isolated examples have reached an Anglophone audience beyond a relatively narrow circle of Slavists. This is especially regrettable since many of the questions that now occupy theorists of language and society were those with which early Soviet linguists grappled, and one can still learn a considerable amount, both positive and negative, from this experience. As the work of what have become known as the Bakhtin and Vygotskii Circles began to appear in translations in the late 1960s, structuralist and then poststructuralist approaches to language became dominant in Western scholarship in the humanities. This movement was led by scholars who often claimed to be giving language due consideration for the first time, and who, polemically, presented previous approaches in caricatured form, as outdated and naïve theorizing that either unwittingly or willingly made common cause with Stalinist totalitarianism. As a result of this, the newly translated Russian texts appeared as exceptions that proved the rule, covertly subverting the official Soviet position and so anticipating, in fragmentary form, the new French-led paradigm. Just as these approaches arose in Europe, so in the United States William Labov led a bold attempt to catalogue and theorise social variations within American English by synthesizing dialect geography, attempts to define language as a social rather than natural science, and US writings on language contact and conflicts of the 1950s into a new discipline that was to be known as sociolinguistics (Koerner 2002).

Trade, the WTO and Development – An Introduction

The dictionary definition of trade is: ‘the buying and selling of goods and services; a commercial activity of a particular kind’. Development signifies a progress from a less sophisticated phase to a more advanced stage. It is defined as ‘a new stage in a changing situation; a new product or idea’. Synonyms include: advance; betterment; change; enlargement; growth; progress.

In the past, ‘development’ remained within the realm of discourse on economic and social rights of individuals and societies around the world. As such, development work is largely credited to the activities of international agencies such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and alliances between nations under which some financial assistance is offered to the less developed countries of the world, such as the G8. The World Trade Organisation (WTO) with its rules-based system, its compulsory dispute settlement mechanism and its promotion of the free trade ideology, has not hitherto been counted as an international development agency. Therefore, it could be argued that ascribing a development character to this trade organisation may well be beyond its circle of influence. It is important to assess the validity of both sides of the argument.

Trade and development, the two concepts which form the basis of this study, must necessarily be assessed in the context of their relationship within the WTO. The starting point is to appreciate the WTO: what it stands for, how it came into being and how it functions in the trading environment.

Tourist Space in Ireland

As the preceding chapters have made clear, the Irish Tour involved more than the picturesque. In order to understand the complexity of the tourist experience, it is necessary to investigate “tourist space” in Ireland. The term as used here considers the parts of a country in which tourism occurs, and how deeply into a country tourism may penetrate. Tourist space may be thought of in terms of traveling to, traveling through and/or traveling into a country. Each involves very different kinds of tourist experiences.

Much tourism today involves the most limited form of tourist space: travel to a country. People fly to a location, enjoy a resort, shop around a city, attend a convention or international sporting event, and fly out again. Even on “side trips” to famous ruins or scenic attractions, visitors may move quickly to and from their destinations, encapsulated in buses, planes or helicopters. This sort of point-to-point travel, whatever its joys and rewards, offers a very limited experience of the host country, treating it like a series of unconnected “dots” or sites.

Traveling through a country invariably takes more time. In following a well-trod itinerary with little deviation from the guidebook or the route established by the tour guide, this sort of trip may allow the tourist enough time to observe bits of the countryside and the towns along the way; to make brief stops at minor attractions; to visit enough cafes, inns, or food stalls; and talk to enough natives to get some sense of the local as opposed to the international.

The Western Hemisphere's Integration Precursor Efforts: The Founding of a Pan American Society Versus the Establishment of a US Sphere of Influence (1889–1945)

Today's Inter-American system is a result of the search by the United States and Latin America for common ground as each has simultaneously sought conflicting objectives. The traditional goals of the US for regional preponderance have time and again conflicted with the Latin American states' perennial aspirations to secure national sovereignty and self-determination. This fundamental difference in objectives helps explain why, even today, Latin American states tend to distrust and resist US leadership. US interests and goals are perceived to hinder Latin-America's objectives to build and secure sovereign and democratic states; forge an inter-state society capable of addressing common security concerns; and accomplish regional cooperation and integration around a common purpose (Waltz 1979; Bull 1984; Morgenthau 1993; Buzan and de Wilde 1998; Gilpin 2001; Herz 2003; Buzan 2004; Hurrell 2005).

Since the early nineteenth century, the Latin American ideals of independence, modernization, democratic consolidation and regional integration have been contested not only from within by the domestic authoritarian and populist tendencies but also from without, by European imperialism and by recurrent attempts by the US to establish and institutionalize its claim to regional hegemony (Waltz 1954; Waltz 1979; Watson 1984).