‘Gamekeeper Turned Poacher’: Frank Chapple, Anti-Communism, and Soviet Human Rights Violations1

The inclusion of the British trade union leader Frank Chapple on the panel of the 1985 Sakharov hearings, an event designed to hold the Soviet authorities to account for their violation of human rights, raises questions about the workings of the broader network of activists highlighting Soviet abuses. This article assesses Chapple’s support for human rights in the Soviet Union, arguing that because of his historic membership of the Communist Party and subsequent anti-communist leadership of the Electrical Trades Union (ETU) in Britain, his support for victims of Soviet persecution was multifaceted in the Cold War context.

The representation of Turkey in British trade publishing after 15 July 2016. An analysis conducted on the translations from Turkish to English published in the UK

After the 2016 failed coup, the Turkish government implemented a series of measures that strongly restricted democratic freedoms in the country. This caused the UK media to propose a representation of the country in which the coup and the government reaction, together with the concepts of authoritarianism and censorship, played a central part. The present article aims to understand which role British trade publishing played in this new representation, analysing all the translations of trade titles from Turkish to English, published by British publishers in the UK, comparing the periods before (from 1 January 2012 to 15 July 2016) and after the coup (from 16 July 2016 to 31 December 2019). It tries to understand if some central socio-political events of contemporary Turkey, as the coup and its aftermath, the Kurdish issue, and Turkish intervention in the Syrian war, have had more space in the translations published in the UK after the coup. It also investigates if, after the coup, the choice of titles and authors to translate has been influenced, and if given paratextual elements (specifically, books’ descriptions on the British publishers’ websites) have shown a tendency of being linked to Turkey’s contemporary socio-political situation. It then presents an evaluation of the behaviour of British trade publishers toward the coup and their new focus on the state of Turkish democracy.

Britain’s European Island-Empire, 1793–1815

This chapter explores the creation and maintenance of Britain’s European island empire during the wars against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France. It traces the initial establishment of island bases in the Mediterranean, North and Baltic Seas, outlining their importance to British trade and strategy. It explains how and why British war aims came to rely on these imperial possessions. Across the Mediterranean, the war came to be defined by the extension of island empires. British victory in 1814 owed much to these islands, lynchpins of its wider European strategy. In northern waters, the island of Heligoland acted as a rendezvous point for trade with the continent, and was a key site from which Napoleon’s ‘Continental System’ could be undermined. Britain’s European island empire proved itself to be a crucial part of Britain’s wider imperial network, and its significance would continue into the nineteenth century and the era of Pax Britannica.

'Free Trade' and the Varieties of Eighteenth-Century State Competition

This chapter offers a fresh examination of the transformation of British trade policy in the later 18th and early 19th centuries. It reconsiders the 'rise of free trade' as a mutation, rather than a rejection, of an earlier 'mercantilist' logic of national power competition. Examining the writings of the Anglo-Dutch merchant Matthew Decker alongside those of the better-known Scottish philosopher Adam Smith, this chapter identifies a switch from a competition over trade balances in precious metals, to an all-pervasive struggle for labor discipline and productivity, applying not just to princes and rulers but entire 'nations'. The reduction of tariffs and the abolition of monopolies emerges as a means of enhancing the productive power of the nation, and its related capacity for funding military conflict.