“Where can we put our homes?” Gypsies and Travelers in the English Green Belt

For the past few centuries, anti-nomadic legislation has attempted to settle nomads who traveled throughout England and elsewhere in Europe, as their mobilities challenged the sedentarist goals of modern nation states. As recently as 1994, the nomadic way of life was effectively criminalized in England and Wales, revealing the unbalanced power relations between Gypsies and Travelers and the state. This article will examine and highlight the agency and spatialities of resistance of nomadic Gypsy and Traveler groups in England who are struggling for the recognition of their right to legally inhabit caravan sites in areas such as Green Belt land. The selection of places in the Green Belt for their homes offers another contested landscape that runs counter to the typical understanding of Gypsies and Travelers residing in marginalized places due to discrimination or wanting to remain unnoticed. By drawing from Gypsies and Travelers' own narratives, this article documents how they navigate through policies designed to constrain them.     

Where is the Caribbean? French Colonial Archaeology in the English Lake

Archaeological investigation of the Caribbean region has generally incorporated unquestioned assumptions about the nature and scale of the context. Most work has been done in the Anglophone Caribbean, and has implicitly taken the English colonial world as the normative context for comparative analysis. This view leaves out a significant portion of the Caribbean colonial world—that of the French imperial program. The French colonial venture in the Caribbean has, until recently, been overlooked by historical archaeology. Recent survey and excavation of sugar, indigo and coffee plantation sites, as well as urban archaeological work, has begun to shed light upon the nature of French colonial life as distinct from that in the Anglophone Caribbean, and also on the ways that the experiences on specific French islands were different from each other. The individual histories of Martinique and Guadeloupe are contrasted in this paper, with reference to the nature of the archaeological record that has been explored, and that remains to be investigated.     

“Where nothing was before”: (re)producing population and place in Ghana's Volta River Project

Significant infrastructural projects, and especially large hydroelectric dams, were envisioned and deployed by postcolonial governments to promote particular visions of industrialization, agriculture, democracy, and modernity. Newly independent states sought to annihilate formerly so-called backward and primitive landscapes and populations alike, promising to re-create both places and people as rational, economically productive entities. In this article, we re-examine such narratives as they related to Ghana's Volta River Project (VRP). Relying on archival and media sources between the 1950s and 1960s, we interrogate the Ghanaian state's pursuit of the VRP from a perspective rooted firmly in cultural geography and pay careful attention to the issues of population displacement/resettlement and landscape reconfiguration that permeated all dimensions of the project. We analyze the ways in which Ghanaian leaders used the VRP to translate a particular suite of cultural, economic, and political values into material reality, utilizing the techniques of displacement and population resettlement in efforts to enroll Ghana into a modern, global, industrial economic system. As such, this article augments the body of literature examining the modernist and state-building aspects of the VRP as well as studies critiquing the various processes of development that have unfolded in West Africa since the mid-twentieth century.     

A Relocated Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?

The idea that the public needs enlightenment is generally formulated by people who consider themselves in possession of the enlightenment the public supposedly needs. Herein lies the paternalism problem of popular enlightenment. Some seventy years after Immanuel Kant formulated his famous answer to the question What is enlightenment?, a Norwegian philosopher reaches for his pen on a similar errand. The Norwegian context, however, is different, and the reflection takes a different turn. The questions become: What is popular enlightenment? Who is in a position to decide what kind of enlightenment ‘the people’ need and to define what is enlightenment as opposed to darkness? The text takes a closer look at the Norwegian reflections, published as three articles in two newspapers in 1852 and 1855. The newspaper articles are written by the philosopher Marcus Jacob Monrad (1816–1897). He finds support in Kantian insights when reflecting upon how a concrete initiative for the enlightenment of the public, in which he himself participates, should be understood. Monrad addresses the problem of paternalism in popular enlightenment, and he does this by using his reason publicly, which is what is required, according to Kant, in order for man to escape from tutelage.     

Misunderstanding the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’: Venturi, Habermas, and Foucault

In his 1969 Trevelyan Lectures, Franco Venturi argued that Kant's response to the question “What is Enlightenment?” has tended to promote a “philosophical interpretation” of the Enlightenment that leads scholars away from the political questions that were central to its concerns. But while Kant's response is well known, it has been often misunderstood by scholars who see it as offering a definition of an historical period, rather than an attempt at characterizing a process that had a significant implications. This article seeks (1) to clarify, briefly, the particular question that Kant was answering, (2) to examine - using Jürgen Habermas’ work as a case in point - the tension between readings that use Kant's answer as a way of discussing the Enlightenment as a discrete historical period and those readings that see it as offering a broad outline of an “Enlightenment Project” that continues into the present, and (3) to explore how Michel Foucault, in a series of discussions of Kant's response, sketched an approach to Kant's text that offers a way of reframing Venturi's distinction between “philosophical” and “political” interpretations of the Enlightenment.     

Land Snail Shell Beads in the Sub-Saharan Archaeological Record: When,Where, and Why?

Shell beads are well established in the archaeological record of sub-Saharan Africa and appear as early as 75,000 BP; however, most research has focused on ostrich eggshell (OES) and various marine mollusc species. Beads made from various land snails shells (LSS), frequently described as Achatina, also appear to be widespread. Yet tracking their appearance and distribution is difficult because LSS beads are often intentionally or unintentionally lumped with OES beads, there are no directly dated examples, and bead reporting in general is highly variable in the archaeological literature. Nevertheless, Achatina and other potential cases of LSS beads are present at over 80 archaeological sites in at least eight countries, spanning the early Holocene to recent past. Here, we collate published cases and report on several more. We also present a new case from Magubike Rockshelter in southern Tanzania with the first directly dated LSS beads, which we use to illustrate methods for identifying LSS as a raw material. Despite the long history of OES bead production on the continent and the abundance of land snails available throughout the Pleistocene, LSS beads appear only in the late Holocene and are almost exclusively found in Iron Age contexts. We consider possible explanations for the late adoption of land snails as a raw material for beadmaking within the larger context of environmental, economic, and social processes in Holocene Africa. By highlighting the existence of these artifacts, we hope to facilitate more in-depth research on the timing, production, and distribution of LSS beads in African prehistory.     

Ferdinand Tönnies and Enlightenment: A Friend or Foe of Reason?

Ferdinand Tönnies, the founder of sociology, has been characterised as contributing to the “destruction of reason,” although he viewed himself as a champion of Enlightenment with a social vocation. Here, we shall consider Tönnies’s discussion of the epistemological bases of what he called “rationalism”: his theory of the state, based on the rationalism of Hobbes, and of society, based on the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, Smith and Hume; his implicit development of rationalist ethics and the positions he took on Spinoza and Kant; and the relationship between his philosophy of history and that of his philosophical forebear, Adam Ferguson, who wrote in the age of bourgeois emancipation that marked the high Enlightenment. We shall conclude with reflections on the grounds on which Tönnies has been read as an opponent to rationalism and even as a foe of Enlightenment.     

Journeys to Empire: Enlightenment,Imperialism, and the British Encounter with Tibet, 1774–1904

The English by Geoffrey Elton. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. Pp. xiii + 248, 37 plates, 8 figures. £19.99 (hardback). ISBN 0–631–17681–0.

Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 by Linda Colley. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992. Pp. x + 429, illustrations. £19.95 (hardback). ISBN 0–300–05737–7.

Myths of the English edited by Roy Porter. Oxford: Polity Press, 1992. Pp. xii + 276. £39.50 (hardback). ISBN 0–7456–08442.

The Tudor Navy: An Administrative, Political and Military History by David Loades. (Studies in Naval History) Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1992. Pp. x + 317, maps. £35.00 (hardback). ISBN 0–85967–922–5.

The Armada of Flanders: Spanish Maritime Policy and European War, 1568–1668 by R.A. Stradling. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Pp. xx + 276, maps. £35.00 (hardback). ISBN 0–521–40534–3.

Parameters of British Naval Power 1650–1850 edited by Michael Duffy. Exeter Maritime Studies, Number Seven. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1992. Pp. vi + 144. £11.95 (paperback). ISBN 0–85989–385–5.

The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500–1700: A Political and Economic History by Sanjay Subrahmanyam. London and New York: Longman, 1992. Pp. xiii + 320, maps, tables. £14.99 (paperback). ISBN 0–582–05068–5.

Portuguese Trade in Asia under the Habsburgs, 1580–1640 by James C. Boyajian. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. Pp. xvii + 356, maps, tables. £40.50 (hardback). ISBN 0–8018–4405–3.

A World on the Move: The Portuguese in Africa, Asia, and America, 1415–1808 by A.J.R. Russell‐Wood. Manchester: Carcanet, 1992. Pp. xiv + 230, maps, tables, illustrations. £30.00 (hardback). ISBN 0–85635–994–7.

The Spanish Frontier in North America by David J. Weber. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992. Pp. xx + 579, maps and illustrations. $40.00; £20. ISBN 0–300–05198–0.

The Intellectual Construction of America: Exceptionalism and Identity from 1492 to 1800 by Jack P. Greene. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1993. Pp.xiv + 216, illustrations. $32.95. ISBN 0–8078–2097–0.

Sojourners in the Sun: Scottish Migrants in Jamaica and the Chesapeake, 1740–1800 by Alan L. Karras. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992. Pp. xv + 231. $37.95. ISBN 0–8014–2691‐X.

Islanders in the Stream: A History of the Bahamian People, Volume 1, From Aboriginal Times to the End of Slavery by Michael Craton and Gail Saunders. Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1992. Pp. xxiii + 455, maps, illustrations. $60.00. ISBN 0–8203–1382–3.

Making the Empire Work: London and American Interest Groups 1690 to 1790 by Alison Gilbert Olson. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press, 1992. Pp. xiv + 261. £31.95. ISBN 0–674–54318–1.

The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific by Gananath Obeyesekere. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992. Pp. xvii + 251. ISBN 0–691–05680–3.

Women Against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780–1870 by Clare Midgley. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. Pp. xii + 281, illustrations. £37.50. ISBN 0–415–06669–7.

Religion and Society in Post‐Emancipation Jamaica by Robert J. Stewart. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992. Pp. xxi + 254, maps and illustrations. $42.50 (hardback); $19.95 (paperback). ISBN 0–87049–749–9.

Poverty Abounding Charity Aplenty: The Charity Network in Colonial Victoria by R.A. Cage. Sydney: Hale &; Iremonger, 1992. Pp. 190. $A35 (hardback); $A17.95 (paperback). ISBN 0–86806–437–8; 0–86806–438–6.

Muslims and Missionaries in Pre‐Mutiny India by Avril Ann Powell. London: Curzon Press, 1993. pp. ix + 339, maps. £30. ISBN 0–7007–021–5.

The Light of Nature and the Law of God: Antislavery in Ontario 1833–1877 by Allen P. Stouffer. Montreal and Kingston: McGill‐Queen's University Press, 1992. Pp. xvi + 273. $34.95 (hardback). ISBN 0–7735–0918–6.

Science and the Canadian Arctic: A Century of Exploration 1818–1918 by Trevor H. Levere. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Pp. xiv + 438, map, illustrations and photographs. £40.00 (hardback). ISBN 0–521–41933–6.

The Voyages of the Discovery: The Illustrated History of Scott's Ship by Ann Savours. London: Virgin, 1992. Pp. xvi + 384, maps, illustrations. £25.00 (hardback). ISBN 1–852227–117–5.

People and Empires in African History; Essays in Memory of Michael Crowder edited by J.F. Ade Ajayi and J.D.Y. Peel. London: Longman, 1992. Pp. xxv + 254, maps. £36.00. ISBN 0–582–08997–2.

Frontiers: The Epic of South Africa's Creation and the Tragedy of the Xhosa People by Noël Mostert. London: Jonathan Cape, 1992. Pp. xxix + 1,355, maps. £25 (hardback). ISBN 0–224–03325–5.

Occasional Papers on the Irish in South Africa by Donald H. Akenson. Grahams‐town: Institute of Social and Economic Research, Rhodes University, Occasional Papers Series, 1991. Pp. 95, figures and tables. R22. ISBN 0–86810–202–5.

The Irish in Southern Africa 1795–1910 edited by Donal P. McCracken. Durban: University of Durban‐Westville, 1992. Pp. 290, maps, tables and illustrations.

Threads of Solidarity: Women in South African Industry, 1900–1980 by Iris Berger. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press; London: James Currey, 1992. Pp. xiv + 369. £35 (hardback); £11.95 (paperback). ISBN 0–8525–5078–2; 0–8525–5077–4.

The Scattering Time: Turkana Responses to Colonial Rule by John Lamphear. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Pp. xxiii + 308, maps. £ 40.00. ISBN 019–820226–1.

Strike Across the Empire: The Seamen's Strike of 1925 in Britain, South African and Australasia by Baruch Hirson and Lorraine Vivian. London: Clio Publications, 1992. Pp. v + 117. £5.0 (paperback). ISBN 1–897640–00–5.

National Crisis and National Government: British Politics, the Economy and Empire, 1926–1932 by Philip Williamson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Pp. xvii + 569. £60. ISBN 0–521–36137–0.

Trade, Tariffs and Empire: Lancashire and British Policy in India 1919–1939 by Basudev Chatterji. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992. Pp. xiv + 521. Rs. 610; £25.00. ISBN 0–19–562815–2.

The Mystic Life of Alfred Deakin by Al Gabay. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Pp. 208. £30.00 (hardback). ISBN 0–521–41494–6.

Woman Suffrage in Australia: A Gift or a Struggle? by Audrey Oldfield. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Pp. xiv + 263. £35.00 (hardback); £12.95 (paperback). ISBN 0–521–40380–4; 0–521–4361–7.

Robert Menzies’ Forgotten People by Judith Brett. London: Macmillan, 1993. Pp. xi + 318. £14.99. ISBN 333–592–859.

L'Afrique noire française: l'heure des Indépendances edited by Charles‐Robert Ageron and Marc Michel. Paris: CNRS Editions, 1992. Pp. 728.

The Internationalization of Colonialism: Britain, France, and Black Africa, 1939–1956 by John Kent. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Pp. viii + 365. £45. ISBN 0–19–820302–0.

The Political Inheritance of Pakistan edited by D.A. Low. London: Macmillan, 1992. Pp. vii + 292. £45 (hardback). ISBN 0–333–524373.

Broken Waves: A History of the Fiji Islands in the Twentieth Century by Brij V. Lai. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1992. Pp. xxii + 404, maps, tables, illustrations. $38.00. ISBN 0–8248–1418–5.