Accredited to Africa: British diplomatic representation and African experience, c. 1960-95

How justified is the complaint sometimes voiced by British businessmen and other UK visitors to contemporary Africa that, compared to 'the [good old] colonial days', Britain's FCO representatives have no experience of Africa and little idea about who's who and what's going on in their bailiwick? The aim of this article is to construct a professional profile of Britain's Heads of Mission assigned to newly independent African states over the past 35 years, with a view to assessing the extent of their African experience. This period also neatly coincides with what in one sense can be interpreted as a single FO generation, in that the mean entry age into the Diplomatic Service is around 25 and the maximum retiring age is a strict 60. The statistical biodata on which the argument is premised are presented in the 19 Mission Tables appended. The article concludes with an examination of the major issues surrounding the question of 'African experience' among those Heads of Mission.     

The Seventeenth-Century Origins of Modern Salvage Law

Reginald Marsden argued that Sir Henry Marten, while judge of the High Court of Admiralty, had in 1633 entertained the first action for civil salvage ‘in the modern sense’. But Marsden could find little evidence among the formal Admiralty decrees of the seventeenth century that sea-coasters or mariners had regularly used this new plea in the central court to seek rewards for saving ships and cargoes. A sampling of the court's Act Books, however, reveals that Admiralty judges may well have ruled in more than 200 salvage cases from the time of Sir Henry's innovation until the end of the century. In some of these cases, moreover, Sir Richard Lloyd, a late-Stuart judge, abandoned the ancient custom of rewarding salvors with half of what was saved and developed instead the modern and equitable practice of adjusting awards according to what salvors had done and risked in rescuing the property of others.     

New identification criteria for the Chilean population: Estimation of sex and stature

In the analysis of human skeletal or otherwise unidentifiable remains the assessment of sex is an initial vital element when rendering a biological profile. As such other aspects of the biological profile are sex-specific (e.g. stature and age) and cannot be successfully determined without this preliminary assessment. In addition, the estimation of stature is an essential parameter of the biological profile, which is often used to confirm or exclude presumptive identifications.The purpose of this study is to present newly developed local identification criteria for the estimation of sex from the postcrania and stature for Chileans. Linear discriminant functions were derived for the humerus and femur. Sexing accuracies of 87%, 86%, and 82% were achieved. Furthermore, new univariate predictive stature equations are presented using a Bayesian approach for the humerus, femur and tibia.