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This chapter focuses on how the history of political ideas has been approached in the context of British political science. This has the consequence that the discussion ranges over commentators who are explicitly not historians. It claims that the current British approaches to the study of past political thought have domestic origins in the development of the study of politics in British Universities, especially Oxford, Cambridge, and LSE. The first section accounts for different approaches to the study of political ideas in British political science by examining conceptions of the history of political thought. It shows how institutional history is connected to the development of a genre, and how this history has not been dependent on the direct import of Continental or American intellectual fashions or personalities. The second section delineates the three main British approaches to the study of the history of political ideas in the post-war period.

This chapter attempts to re-create the “internal dialogue” about their pasts as militants that the Shi'r poets chose not to make public. This narrative is centered on the career of Yusuf al-Khal, who as editor in chief played a leading role in determining the principles of the Shi'r movement. But the real protagonists of the story are institutions: the political party, the university, the Cénacle, and the little magazine. These settings constitute the backstory to al-Khal's engagement with the institutions of late modernism itself—the global network of actors and discourses examined in Chapter 1. This focus on institutional history is intended, in part, as a corrective to the Shi'r poets' insistence that modernist literature is the work of heroic, deracinated individuals.

Two male monasteries – and their roles in the religious observances of laywomen – illuminate another facet of the relationship among gender, devotion, and performance in Metz. This chapter first revisits the Celestine community, deepening the findings of the third chapter by examining the institution that housed the family chapel of the Gronnaix and the burial place of Catherine Baudoche. Its spaces reveal a culture of performance that was grounded in women’s material contributions and spiritual needs; contemporary institutional histories construct a performance “edifice” that depicts the partnership of laywomen and the Celestine brothers. A second Messine religious community documents an alternative perspective on the role of women in long-term history-making and performance practice. Through liturgical performance, the monastery of St-Arnoul had claimed a past that tied Carolingian-era imperial identity to female sanctity and patronage. Catherine Gronnaix’s foundation of masses at St-Arnoul took place during the decline of this institutional narrative, however, when the preservation and appropriation of older traditions of female performance had lost appeal. In distinct eras, the cloistered spaces of St-Martin and St-Arnoul – both permeated by the presence and remains of laywomen and their devotions – sheltered collaborative performances that intertwined monastic and familial aspirations.

This chapter details how the writing of institutional history proceeded along markedly different tracks in Europe and China, primarily because the men writing those histories and the institutions they were concerned with were very different. In medieval Europe most educated men were religious professionals, who involved themselves in royal or aristocratic court governments because of their class and education. Meanwhile, in China, most educated men pursued learning in order to work for the central, imperial government. Moreover, Chinese levels of education were considerably higher than in Europe or anywhere else in the world, both in literacy and numeracy, yielding an imperial bureaucracy that communicated with itself and its ruler in a highly systematic and nuanced manner. Governments outside of China were far smaller, less coherent, less continuous, and less literate.

The late nineteenth century was marked by profound concern about national physical well-being. Despite initial post-Famine optimism in the 1850s about the prospects of national dietary reconstruction and agricultural prosperity, pessimism about the Irish condition quickly re-emerged. To introduce this theme, this chapter focuses on mid-century feeding in institutions and maintains that critics of institutional dietary policies invoked this seemingly internal institutional matter as a concern with national implications. Following the Famine, physicians paid closer attention to the issues of nutritional quality and deficiency and established firm links between an insufficient diet and permanent physical and mental weakening. Institutions provided opportunities for physicians and medical witnesses to witness, monitor and better understand the negative physical and mental effects of poor nutrition. Their well-publicised observations drew public attention to the idea that a nutritionally inadequate diet encouraged the onset of bodily conditions such as scrofula (or tuberculosis of the neck) and ophthalmia (or conjunctivitis). This chapter explores these themes by analysing dietary arrangements in mid-century prisons, workhouses, reformatories and industrial schools.

This chapter begins with a brief survey of the literature that constitutes the present spatial turn in Middle East studies (MES). This review has two aims: to examine the (often undertheorized or loosely defined) understandings of space at work in MES research and to explore the central or emerging research interests in MES developed by this spatial turn. The chapter then considers the theories of space discernible in research on the Middle East for many decades before the present spatial turn. It argues that not only does an interest in space have a far longer history in MES than recent critical research lets on, but that attention to this issue is important because it illuminates the ways in which evolving understandings of space accompany changing research agendas and, possibly, new theoretical, methodological, or conceptual assumptions in the interdisciplinary arena of MES more generally. Next, the chapter discusses questions of disciplinarity, particularly in relation to geography, and the ways in which disciplinary and institutional histories have shaped the contours of the spatial turn in Middle East area studies. It concludes by identifying new directions for research.

Chapter four stresses the importance of institutions in enabling the reproduction of large numbers of Buddhist texts. It surveys the types of institutions that existed in ancient Japan and argues for the close connection between bureaucracy and ritual practice. It begins with an overview of the process of sutra copying. It then turns to continental precedent before looking at some of the earliest sutra copying projects in Japan and the institutions that sponsored them. It provides a detailed institutional history of a scriptorium at Tōdaiji closely connected to Queen Consort Kōmyōshi but also uncovers numerous other scriptoria managed by a variety of individuals in the capital and provinces, some of relatively small scale. It also addresses projects known as “private copying” in documents at the Tōdaiji scriptorium to show how individuals could use personal connections to utilize state institutions for their own purposes.

This chapter compares the patterns of business ownership and control in Great Britain and Canada. It provides an historical account of the evolution of the British and Canadian governance systems and compares their structural properties using the social network theory. It also describes the British and Canadian system of director networks and explains the reasons for their differences. This chapter also highlights the influence of government policies and institutional histories on the structures of control in the two countries.

This chapter begins with an oral history of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, describing how the school changed over the course of gaigekaifang. Gaigekaifang is often referred to in English as “reform” (gaige), putting the stress on the structural adjustments that fomented change, while kaifang roughly means “opening up.” This institutional history is given a broader social context through interpretations of three art exhibitions commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of reform and opening up in 2008. These exhibitions offer perspectives on the legacies of socialism and the novelties of reform that are variously aligned with or critical of official state narratives, showing how contemporary Chinese dreamworlds contest with one another.

One of the central arguments of this book is that institutional characteristics are of paramount importance in shaping the ways that the ICRC and UNHCR understand and practise protection. This chapter, therefore, outlines the institutional history, structure, and culture of each of the ICRC and UNHCR. It explains the process of mandate expansion in both of these international organizations, and contrasts the formal structure of the ICRC, designed to ensure a system of checks and balances on major policy developments, with the more hierarchical structure of UNHCR. It further argues that the ICRC organizational culture is characterized by consensus-led decision-making, and strong internal information-sharing combined with a tendency to secrecy externally, while UNHCR is characterized by weaker internal communications and a lack of clarity on various issues.

This collection of essays shows that Transatlantic Studies allows for a wealth of topics and approaches—even as key methodological questions remain unresolved and the very legitimacy of Transatlantic Studies as such is still under dispute. This volume has sought to advance the discussion by putting the disputes surrounding the field front and center. The field need not reach consensus in order to thrive. Yet in order to be productive, every debate needs to start from an agreement about underlying principles. These would include the basic idea that it is valuable to study and teach the cultural archive in an academic context, or that a deep understanding of that archive can only be achieved through engagement with the languages in which that archive was written. These values have come under question, however, as an increasing number of colleges and universities have eliminated programs, courses, and faculty lines dedicated to serious work in the humanities. And if we cannot afford to disregard our institutional context, we also cannot ignore the changing tone of political discourse, as different forms of nativism and populist nationalism rear their heads across the world.

This chapter discusses the pedagogical and institutional history of UNC from founding in 1789 through the Civil War, and the significant changes made following Reconstruction, which formed the basis for the modern research institution. The birth of the student newspaper, the Tar Heel, is discussed, along with early operations and editors, including Frank Porter Graham and Thomas Wolfe. The paper’s initial function to promote the new student activity of intercollegiate athletics, first football and baseball, and later basketball, is examined. The university’s growth during the early twentieth century and following World War I are discussed, along with early issues involving women and African Americans.

This chapter focuses on possible linkages among the diverse institutional histories of the University of Hawai’i, the University of Puerto Rico, and the University of the Philippines—all universities founded under U.S. administration of island colonies, or colony-like possessions, between 1903 and 1908. It then provides a consideration of discursive formations from these universities which grapple with the meaning of the new imperial university—and of liberal education in particular—in the early years of three vastly separated institutions with potentially resonant concerns. The chapter also examines the implicit and explicit institutionalization of liberal education at these institutions by analyzing primary documents from the archives of each of the institutions, mainly via the genre of the general catalog and related university discourse.

This chapter traces the beginnings of eunuchs serving in the palace and the rise of eunuch power during the Han, Tang, and Ming dynasties. The remainder of the chapter focuses on the evolution of the eunuch system from its “embryonic” state before the Qing established its rule over China proper to its initial growth during the reign of Shunzhi (r. 1644–1661) to its maturation during the mid-Qing, and finally its gradual decline after the 1850s.

The conclusion summarizes the main findings of the book and draws out some implications for our understanding of international organizations more broadly. It emphasizes the importance of institutional history in shaping the approaches taken by international organizations to address new issue-areas incorporated into their mandates as a consequence of mandate expansion. The analogies employed by the ICRC and UNHCR to justify mandate expansion have also had an impact on how the new issue-areas are addressed, with ‘old solutions’ used to address ‘new problems’. To the extent that the ‘new problems’ are different from the old ones, seeking to address them with ‘old solutions’ limits the scope of protection that the ICRC and UNHCR are able to provide.