Notes for the Reader

There are always several ways to navigate a dictionary. Most are invented by readers themselves, but the editors can nevertheless provide some guidance. The most obvious is the alphabetical list of entries, mirrored in their arrangement in the volume itself. Thus, headwords have been arranged in alphabetical order, and some appear twice in the case of a complex headword: for instance, the ‘GATT and WTO’ essay appears under ‘G’ in the alphabetical arrangement of the volume, but ‘WTO and GATT’ also appears as a signpost entry under ‘W’, to direct the reader to the essay itself. Individuals are listed by their family name (‘Schwimmer, Rosika’), and books by the first substantive word of their title, for example, under ‘Bible’ rather than ‘The Bible’. When the topic being sought cannot be found in the alphabetical list, the indexes are the place to look. It is fully developed at the end of this volume and allows readers to find the entry which includes or documents the term they are searching for, be it a place name, an individual name, or a topic. ‘Automobile’, which is not a headword, will thus point to the entries ‘assembly line’, ‘car culture’, ‘car safety standards’, ‘industrial organization’, ‘International Road Federation’, ‘Toyotism’, and ‘transportation infrastructures’, and perhaps others. Related essays in the Dictionary are also cross-referenced at the end of each essay, even when they have not been explicitly mentioned in the body of the essay. Our rationale for crossreferencing entries was, of course, to connect obvious companion and complementary entries (like ‘news and press agencies’ with information society’,or ‘advertising’ with ‘marketing’. But we have also tried to suggest hidden or far-reaching connections, that can only be seen after reading the entries; thus we believe it is stimulating to cross-reference ‘food’ and ‘literature’, for their methodological hindsight; or to tie ‘theatre’ with ‘kindergarten’ and ‘organization models’ as these three offer detailed views on how some practices and ideas have been exchanged and appropriated; or to suggest that readers of ‘League of Nations Economic and Financial Organization’ also read ‘philanthropic foundations’, despite the fact that the financing of the Economic Intelligence Service by the Rockefeller Foundation is not explicitly mentioned in the former article. Cross-references thus give access both to the clusters of substance that group some articles together, and to clusters that we editors have identified at different stages of the editorial process.

Finally, we have provided graphic presentations that may allow readers to find their way into the themes and territories explored by the Dictionary. Alphabetical lists and indexes are fine when you know what you are looking for. When you don’t, or when you want to get some idea of the general picture, what you need is a kind of map or plan. Ideally, we would have loved to be able to conceive and represent a tangled web of topics, but the result would have been both literally unprintable and unreadable. We eventually came up with a less suggestive but more expressive solution, embodied in the ‘tree’ diagrams that complete our search tools section. This is an idea we borrowed from our colleagues Victoria de Grazia and Sergio Luzzatto ‘s Dizionario del Fascismo (Turin: Einaudi, 2003) after discussions with them, and that we had used earlier on as a development tool for our headword list. At draft stage, we began by using alphabetically arranged lists, which were useful for launching the whole project and receiving feedback on its usefulness. But when we tried to move towards a final list of entries, development by list was no longer sufficient. Our aim was to cover a wide range of circulatory and connective processes, types and moments, if only to trim the results at a later stage. What we needed were categories within which this development process would take place. In order to open the range of entries, it would have been counterproductive to start from areas, regions, chronological chunks or subdisciplinary fields, and try to imagine entries within those frames. So we started from wide themes, like ‘people flows’, asking ourselves what the potential headwords were that would appropriately cover the circulations and connections pertaining to people movements between 1850 and today. We imagined some big-picture entries: ‘international migration regimes’, ‘human mobility’; a typology of such movements: ‘diasporas’, ‘labour migrations’, ‘forced migrations’, and from each of these derived a number of entries that grappled with a specific aspect: ‘slavery’, ‘brain drain’, ‘guestworkers’, ‘Lebanese Diaspora’. We used the same process for some twenty families/groups of entries, which went from ‘places’ to ‘Planet Earth’, trying to build threads of connected essays within each of them in order to cover our chronological, geographical and thematic range. These families and groups allowed us to distribute the articles amongst the editorial team so that each one could be dealt with and eventually commissioned by the associate editor with the greatest experience or curiosity in that particular field, although several of these groups were eventually handled by several editors. This exercise made it clear that the families/groups allotment was to serve as the basis for building a graphic map of the volume in its final stage. To do so, we have recombined the entries into ten large families. This graphic presentation in the ‘tree’ diagrams should not be taken literally: these are not Linnaean trees, nor Joshua trees. Some entries are repeated in several of them and their presence in one family or the other is not a consequence of any particular conceptual assignment. Moreover, the presentation of a graphic link between two entries is not an expression of the subordination of one entry to another, nor of an exclusive connection between the two. Our ‘tree’ merely suggests to the reader that there are gains to be made in reading a number of entries together, just as there was some gain in conceiving, writing or editing them as a cluster. We feel that this will help readers to find their way into the volume, just as we had to find ours.