The Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester has recently acquired the Electricity Council archives, a body of material of national scope and a major resource for researchers into the electricity industry. The Electricity Council had previously transferred its collection of electrical artefacts to the Museum to be used in the development of the National Electricity Gallery, opened in March 1986, which it co-funded with Greater Manchester Council. In order to illustrate the content and value of these archives, this paper focuses on the promotion of the domestic use of electricity during the inter-war period, a choice of subject which relates to a strong area of the Museum's object collections. The first section outlines the acquisition and scope of the archives and describes the records therein of the Electrical Association for Women (EAW) and the British Electrical Development Association (EDA); the second section uses the relevant records of the EAW and the EDA to investigate the chosen theme, with particular reference to women's involvement and perceptions of women.

This paper is a study of the intersection between aviation and diplomacy in the semi-autonomous Indian state of Jodhpur in the final decades of British colonial rule in India. Jodhpur's Maharaja Umaid Singh established a major international aerodrome, patronized one of India's first flying clubs and collaborated with British authorities to make aviation laws for the Indian states. He would also serve in the Royal Air Force during the war and placed Jodhpur state's aviation resources at the disposal of the king-emperor. This paper argues that Jodhpur was able to leverage its aviation resources to wield substantial influence both within and beyond the British Empire through both war and peace. An analysis of Jodhpur's engagement with aviation diplomacy is also revealing of some of the limitations as well as possibilities for the deployment of science diplomacy frameworks, especially in non-Western contexts.

This paper looks at a genre of meetings that, while neither purely ‘scientific’ nor ‘diplomatic’, drew on elements from both professional spheres and gained prominence in the interwar decades and during the Second World War. It proposes to make sense of ‘technical conferences’ as a phenomenon that was made by and through scientific experts and politicians championing the organizing power of rationality, science and liberal internationalism. Against the background of swelling ranks of state-employed scientists, this paper documents the emergence of technical conferences as the forums where they got down to work. To make this case the paper traces the influence of a new way of thinking about the function and organization of conferences, originating in the time around the First World War, on one international organization in particular: the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), as a new hub of scientists and technicians.