Volume 50 part 2 (August 2005)

Summaries

John McIlroy and Alan Campbell, The British and French Representatives to the Communist International, 1920-1939: A Comparative Survey
This article employs a prosopographical approach in examining the backgrounds and careers of those cadres who represented the Communist Party of Great Britain and the Parti Communiste Français at the Comintern headquarters in Moscow. In the context of the differences between the two parties it discusses the factors which qualified activists for appointment, how they handled their role and whether their service in Moscow was an element in future advancement. It traces the bureaucratization of the function and challenges the view that these representatives could exert significant influence on Comintern policy. Within this boundary the fact that the French representatives exercised greater independence lends support, in the context of centre-periphery debates, to the judgement that within the Comintern the CPGB was a relatively conformist party.

Stephanie Cronin, Popular Protest, Disorder and Riot in Iran: The Tehran Crowd and the Rise of Riza Khan, 1921-1925
This article looks at the continuing political vitality of the urban crowd in early Pahlavi Iran and the role it played in the crises which wracked Tehran in the first half of the 1920s, examining, as far as possible, the ways in which crowds were mobilized, their composition, leaderships and objectives. In particular it analyzes Riza Khan's own adoption of populist tactics in his struggle with the Qajar dynasty in 1924-5 and his regime's attempts to manipulate the Tehran crowd in an effort to overcome opposition, both elite and popular, and to intimidate formal democratic institutions such as the Majlis (Parliament) and the independent press. In attempting to rescue the Tehran crowd from obscurity or from condemnation as a fanatical and blindly reactionary mob, the article hopes to rectify the imbalance in much older scholarship which views early Pahlavi Iran solely through the prism of its state-building effort, and to introduce into the study of Iranian history some of the perspectives of "history from below".

Lindsay Proudfoot and Dianne Hall, Points of Departure: Remittance Emigration from South-West Ulster to New South Wales in the Later Nineteenth Century
This paper considers aspects of the local geographies of Australian emigration created in south-west Ulster by the New South Wales government-sponsored Remittance Emigration scheme between 1858 and 1884. The scheme mobilised the financial resources of settlers in New South Wales to part-fund the passage of friends and relatives from Britain and Ireland. The paper utilises the comprehensive socio-economic and demographic archive generated by the scheme, to explore the response of rural communities in thirteen civil parishes in Counties Cavan and Fermanagh to this opportunity to emigrate. It concludes that although the emigrant sample's demographic profile accorded with conventional models of Irish assisted emigration, it was also marked by pronounced over-representation of Protestants and under-representation of Catholics. Possible explanations for this are considered in terms of the positionality and human capital of the three major denominations and the efficiency of their social networks in negotiating the bureaucratic process in Australia.