Defining Jamaica Sloops: A Preliminary Model for Identifying an Abstract Concept

Jamaica sloops were vernacular watercraft designed, built, and utilized by Caribbean colonists beginning in the late-17th century. Despite their popularity, no design or construction records or even a specific definition of their form survive, and many sources simply describe them as an early version of the Bermuda sloop. Vernacular Jamaica sloops were a unique adaptation by English colonists to combat the effects of piracy, and their design was specific to the economic, geographic, and political circumstances of colonial Jamaica. This article proposes a set of characteristics that can be used to define vernacular Jamaica sloops, firstly to distinguish them from the eighteenth-century naval Jamaica-class sloops but also to better understand them as a social response to external stimuli within the complex relationship between maritime economy, piracy and colonial control executed through the navy.     

Political dynamics in North Africa

North Africa is notable for the remarkable stability of its political systems despite the increasingly hostile social and economic environment in which they operate. In part this results from their current security engagement with Europe but more important, perhaps, is the shared political culture that informs them despite the great differences between them and their failure to fulfill the principles upon which they were, for the most part, founded. This is, in part, typified by the very similar mechanisms they have each developed to ensure political continuity, based either on monarchical succession or dynastic republicanism. It is less clear, however, that they will be able to resist the most recent challenges arising from Islamist social movements, although the new political dispensations that might emerge may not be so very different from their predecessors.     

Mussolini's colonial race laws and state-settler relations in Africa Orientale Italiana (1935-41)

Abstract Why in Mussolini's empire were relations between colonizers and colonized regulated by the government in Rome? The reason is not to be sought in the supposed tendency of Italians to fraternize with Africans but rather in the totalitarian nature of the regime and the rapidity with which the empire was populated. In a few years tens of thousands of Italians emigrated to Africa Orientale Italiana (AOI); the informal elaboration of common standards of behaviour on the part of colonists towards the local population would have required time while Mussolini intended to forge the empire following a strict hierarchy of racial relations.

By and large, Italians were in agreement with their government over the subordination of the colonized, but they disagreed with the forms that such subordination should assume. Many Italians violated the race laws; but mixing with Africans did not necessarily mean being on friendly terms with them. A significant minority of Italians went to AOI with the intention of making rapid and easy profits: they had no intention of settling permanently and were intolerant of any rules, including those aimed at racial segregation. Thus a clash developed between these Italians, who were not interested in long-term colonial projects, and the government which was determined to impose its own model of colonial order.     

HISTORY: A HANDMAID'S TALE

Historians are generally coy and diffident when it comes to engaging with the moral question despite it being a critical aspect of doing history. However, historians of empire cannot evade the moral question given the ethical dilemmas that imperialism posed for the men at its helm. To portray the colonists as hypocrites is too facile and cynical an explanation. So, what allowed the British colonists to manage the conscience that they indeed possessed? As Priya Satia boldly argues in Time's Monster: How History Makes History, the answer to this question resides in historicism, which became the new ethical idiom from the nineteenth century onward. It enabled the British colonists to assuage their conscience and made the empire an ethically thinkable reality. It helped whitewash colonial violence and generate public acceptance for colonization. The historians’ power lay in anointing history as providence and in using it to paper over the cracks in the British conscience. Being able to narrate was itself a manifestation of power. It was only after the Second World War that history renounced its pact with power and a reimagination of the historical idiom emerged. Various shades of South Asian and Caribbean anti-colonial leaders and postcolonial writers began to think beyond the historicist category of the empire. These efforts to dismantle the empire's historical narratives were paralleled by the writings of British historian E. P. Thompson, although he remained tied to the idea of history as progress. The moral question, however, remains unsettled. It endures for present-day historians because the teleserials, nostalgic period dramas, and “great men” histories continue to hold sway over the public mind, generate debates about the “benefits” of the empire, and feed Britain's anti-immigrant sentiments. Satia's book lies at the intersection of three sets of historiographies—histories of British political thought, postcolonial writings that highlight alternate conceptions of the past and the significance of orality, memory, and community history, and, lastly, histories of violence—all of which engage the moral question in some form or another.     

Demagoguery as Pathology: Interpreting European Politics Today

The End of Europe by James Kirchick and The Strange Death of Europe by Douglas Murray evince many of the very same political and discursive pathologies which they successfully diagnose in European politics. Both authors have discovered that Europe’s current situation is as much a result of irresponsible public policies and mismanaged crises as of a decay in European political thinking, a decay manifested in Europe’s ever-more simplistic, anti-deliberative—in a word, demagogic—public discourse. And yet, Europeans of today find themselves in a social, political, and economic crisis in part because they lack the discursive means to recognize and deliberate on the very crisis they are in. The result is a damaging political state of affairs which makes escape from itself nearly impossible—a political pathology. Kirchick and Murray do a fine job of capturing the true character of this discourse in their books, yet they do so by unwittingly reproducing it themselves, thereby revealing the difficulties inherent in reforming a political culture from within.     

‘[A] Mere Cloak for their Proud Contempt and Antipathy towards the African Race’: Imagining Britain’s West India Regiments in the Caribbean, 1795–1838

This article examines opposition to the creation and presence of the West India Regiments in Britain’s Caribbean colonies from the establishment of these military units in the mid-to-late 1790s to the formal ending of slavery in the region. Twelve regiments were originally created amid the twin crises associated with Britain’s struggle with Revolutionary France and the horrendous losses to disease suffered by British forces in the Caribbean. Their rank-and-file were comprised mainly of men of African descent, most of whom had been bought by the British Army from slave traders or, after the abolition of the British slave trade in 1807, recruited from among people ‘liberated’ by the Royal Navy. While there was nothing new in using men of African descent, free and enslaved, in the service of the European empires in the Americas, such enrolments had tended to be for fixed or limited periods. Thus, the establishment of the West India Regiments as permanent military units, whose soldiers were uniformed, armed and trained along European lines, was unprecedented—and bitterly opposed by West Indian colonists. Indeed, although white West Indians were concerned about the protection of the colonies from both external and internal foes, they were highly sceptical about whether arming (formerly) enslaved people of African descent would serve to promote their security or might, in fact, imperil the system of racial slavery on which they relied.

The tensions arising from the establishment of the West India Regiments have been examined by other historians. However, much of the previous focus has been on the political conflict between the British authorities and local colonial legislatures, and on legal challenges to the regiments, especially during the early years of their existence. In contrast, this article takes a wider view of opposition to the regiments over a longer period up to the formal ending of slavery. In so doing, it examines how the regiments’ rank and file were viewed by white West Indians and the deep anxieties this reveals among colonists. The article also considers the efforts made by the regiments’ proponents and commanders to promulgate more favourable images of black soldiers, images that became more prominent by the 1830s. The more general argument is that this struggle around how the West India Regiments’ rank and file should be viewed was part of a broader ‘war of representation’ over the image of ‘the African’ during the age of abolition.     

Awareness and Action: The ethno-gender dynamics of Sri Lankan NGOs

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are the modus operandi in the development arena at this juncture. Many, including feminists, place much faith in these actors for creating a progressive space for social, political, and economic activities to be undertaken. This article employs fieldwork evidence from eastern Sri Lanka, carried out in 1998–1999 and early 2004, to challenge this simplistic reading. The primary social group that was studied during the fieldwork period was female-headed households. This article argues that there are different types of NGO working in multiple ways in the region, and it is important to distinguish between these differences. NGOs that primarily execute development-oriented projects without considering the ethno-nationalist and gender politics are culpable of the violence of development. It is only when NGOs are in local communities for the long haul that they are able to develop a commitment to reassess and evaluate the social transformative potential of their activities. Using a feminist political economy perspective this article argues that it is important and necessary that NGOs confront social, political, and economic structures, including ethnic identity politics, if their activities are to lead to transformative feminist politics. In other words, NGOs would have to do more than pay lip service to gender mainstreaming, as is more often the case. These actors need to recognize and understand the potency of ethno-nationalist politics, social structures, social exclusion, and social injustice in order to create social spaces that are enabling of women's agency in the local communities within which they work and operate.     

Political theorising: Four conceptions of the nature of theory

This paper is focused upon the issue of the nature of political theorising. The paper presents four different conceptions of political theorising derived from literature on the subject written by those concerned with the nature of political theory or philosophy. These four different conceptions constitute alternative practices for those who designate themselves political theorists. They constitute alternative practices because they are based upon different understandings of the nature of thinking, the role of the intellectual, the function of language or the character of social science. The intention behind this paper is to map the intellectual terrain occupied by those who engage in political theorising. The final recommendation is that each of the four conceptions be accepted as legitimate alternative practices and any temptation toward designating one conception as true political theorising be resisted.     

Social Protection and Class Relations: Evidence from Scheduled Caste Women's Associations in Rural South India

This article argues that the labouring class poor are best able to access social protection when they have sufficient economic autonomy from their village's dominant class to allow them to act politically. To this end, the article analyses the capacity of associations of scheduled caste female labourers in rural Karnataka (south India) to access social protection through collective action. It identifies links between modifications of the material conditions of the labouring class, their capacity to take political action and the social and institutional forms that reflect the social relations of production. Three important variables are identified: the extent of economic autonomy from the dominant class, support from class‐conscious social movement organizers and the political configuration of the local state. The former variable in particular is something that the mainstream social protection policy agenda fails to prioritize.     

‘Access to Women’: Securing Mormon Whiteness in the US Army's Regulation of Commercial Sex in Chihuahua, 1916

This article argues that Mormon colonists – once refugees who had sought freedom from persecution for their sexual practices – asserted a white middle-class respectability as they cooperated with the US Army and corresponded with officers on the management of the soldiers’ sexual conduct. Their success depended heavily on shared understandings of the race and gender of the people involved. That is, they leveraged prevailing assumptions about Black soldiers’ bodies as aggressive and in need of sex, about white Mormon women's bodies as vulnerable and about Mexican women's bodies as racially in-between and thus suitable for the sexual service-work of enlisted men, pliable and ready to be made ‘accessible’ to soldiers. John Pershing, when asked to explain his decision to build the brothel, justified his choice by saying he had all Black troops at the camp and that nearby Mormon colonists had complained of these Black men meeting women outside for sex. This article explains how, why, for whom and to what end Pershing's explanation worked.     

Destructive creation: fascist urban planning,architecture and New Towns in the Pontine Marshes

This paper examines the construction, architecture, planning and design of New Towns in the Pontine Marshes, south of Rome, in the 1930s, analysing the discourses which contributed to their shaping and settlement. It focuses specifically on the plans and architectural characteristics of the city of Sabaudia as the best example of fascist urban utopias in the area. The paper also moves beyond an analysis of architecture and planning to consider the human beings who were slated for occupying what were viewed as ideal, utopian fascist spaces. This is done through an investigation of Italy's ruralization and internal colonization policies, which aimed to tackle a ‘demographic problem’ defined through recourse to statistics and sociological analysis. These policies were animated by colonists, and their families, chosen by the regime's institutions to take part in the Pontine Marshes project. Italian fascism's structuring of a new urban environment, which stretched from grand systemic designs to the measurement of mosquito net dimensions in colonial houses' bedrooms, justified the attempted social and political control of fascism's experimental urban subjects.     

Liberté, égalité, fraternité?: Views from the far‐right fringe in France (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

The current financial, economic, social, and political crisis is widely thought to benefit far‐right parties in many European states. The Front National party, a fixture in French politics for more than two decades, achieved its best result ever in the 2012 presidential elections. This article explores far‐right voters’ accounts of their political life‐stories, analyzing the factors that trigger people's “conversions” to the right, and examining the ways in which this increasing, yet diverse minority views French history, society, and politics. Far‐right supporters legitimize their political convictions and actions in different ways. Some believe that they are part of a “resistance movement”, others draw on what they believe to be sociological or anthropological insights. Many pretend to advocate Republican ideals such as equality and freedom. Democracy stands to gain from drawing this growing part of the population back into mainstream debate, and social scientists may have a role to play in this effort.     

Waves,Floods, Currents: The Politics and Poetics of Water in Social Movement Analysis

The task of conceptualising social movements draws on a wealth of watery images, from protest waves and political currents, to imagining mobilisations as tides, ripples, cascades or high-pressure hydraulics. Called upon to analyse complex processes, these waters have a life of their own, carrying analytical implications while extending a relationship to water that is never only symbolic and is material, embodied and historical. This article explores the ways water is “enrolled” to understand movements, to advance three arguments: first, these use familiar water morphologies to naturalise particular, located understandings of political change and social form; second, they imply normative claims and ideological affinities regarding political struggle; third, this has implications for our relationship to water, echoing the abstract and alienating “modern water” of capitalist world-ecology. The article considers how critical water knowledges and subjectivities, often sustained by social movement spaces, indicate possibilities of a being-otherwise with water and its meanings.     

Imagining Political Possibility in an Age of Late Liberalism and Cynical Reason

Inspired by innovative social projects and new political movements, anthropologists have turned to the study of political possibility. In looking at how people imagine and struggle for temporalities and conditions that will afford them the opportunity to exist in ways different from those they are experiencing now, cultural analysts draw on ethnography and critical political philosophy to chart new analytical trajectories and themes. By foregrounding a language of potentiality and becoming, scholars also envision new ways for looking at democracy and justice. In drawing on three contemporary ethnographies, this review traces how anthropologists examine possibilities in diverse cultural and political contexts, including some of its tenets and conjectures.     

Friendships Moderate an Association Between a Dopamine Gene Variant and Political Ideology

Scholars in many fields have long noted the importance of social context in the development of political ideology. Recent work suggests that political ideology also has a heritable component, but no specific gene variant or combination of variants associated with political ideology have so far been identified. Here, we hypothesize that individuals with a genetic predisposition toward seeking out new experiences will tend to be more liberal, but only if they are embedded in a social context that provides them with multiple points of view. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we test this hypothesis by investigating an association between self-reported political ideology and the 7R variant of the dopamine receptor D4 gene (DRD4), which has previously been associated with novelty seeking. Among those with DRD4-7R, we find that the number of friendships a person has in adolescence is significantly associated with liberal political ideology. Among those without the gene variant, there is no association. This is the first study to elaborate a specific gene-environment interaction that contributes to ideological self-identification, and it highlights the importance of incorporating both nature and nurture into the study of political preferences.     

Memory,Forgetting and the New Tribes Mission in West New Britain

In this paper, I use ethnography from the Kaliai area to explore the social and political relationships which underpin memory and forgetting. I analyse the relationships of hegemony and resistance which are inscribed and articulated in a context of missionising where villagers and missionaries enter into an uneasy alliance to control what should be remembered so that people emerge as particular kinds of subjects. In exploring the social and political organisation of memory, this paper does not treat memory and forgetting as opposites, for people are also taught how to forget. Indeed they are caught in the paradox of always needing to remember that they have to always try to forget. Here the need to forget has the paradoxical effect of keeping alive the content of what must be forgotten. In a strange sort of way the need to forget sustains the need to remember what must be forgotten. I explore the political implications of these paradoxes and ambiguities for sustaining a place outside European hegemony whilst still inscribed in it.     

Who were the Reunion ‘Coolies’ of 19th-century New Caledonia?

The history of the importation of ‘coolie’ labour from Reunion Island to New Caledonia in the 19th century is little known. While most historians mention the groups of ‘Malabars’ brought in to help colonists from Reunion set up the New Caledonian sugar industry, few have delved into the backgrounds or indeed identities of this particular group of contract labourers. Who were they? Where did they come from? What languages did they speak? What was their status in the colony? What became of them after the demise of the sugar industry? Based on archival research, this paper traces the arrival and settlement history in southern New Caledonia of the sugar industry ‘coolies’ and discusses the problems of status and identity among this surprisingly heterogeneous group.     

Does Patronage Still Drive Politics for the Rural Poor in the Developing World? A Comparative Perspective from the Livestock Sector

Is the analysis of patron–client networks still important to the understanding of developing country politics or has it now been overtaken by a focus on ‘social capital’? Drawing on seventeen country studies of the political environment for livestock policy in poor countries, this article concludes that although the nature of patronage has changed significantly, it remains highly relevant to the ways peasant interests are treated. Peasant populations were found either to have no clear connection to their political leaders or to be controlled by political clientage. Furthermore, communities ‘free’ of patron–client ties to the centre generally are not better represented by political associations but instead receive fewer benefits from the state. Nonetheless, patterns of clientage are different from what they were forty years ago. First, patronage chains today often have a global reach, through trade, bilateral donor governments and international NGOs. Second, the resources that fuel political clientage today are less monopolistic and less adequate to the task of purchasing peasant political loyalty. Thus the bonds of patronage are less tight than they were historically. Third, it follows from the preceding point and the greater diversity of patrons operating today that elite conflicts are much more likely to create spaces in which peasant interests can eventually be aggregated into autonomous associations with independent political significance in the national polity. NGOs are playing an important role in opening up this political space although at the moment, they most often act like a new type of patron.     

The dilemmas of ontological insecurity in a postcolonising Northern Ireland

ABSTRACT

Since the signing of the Belfast Good Friday Agreement of 1998, Northern Ireland has made significant progress towards a postcolonising transformation of its political culture and its major political and social institutions, as it has shifted away from violence and the dominance of political ideologies structured by the friend–enemy distinction. These ideological formations and the practices of social and political antagonism that they prescribed have been challenged by adversary–neighbour ideological formations that construct identities and relations through more inclusive norms of recognition and that support a more complex emotional constellation. However, as this cultural transformation has been neither thoroughgoing nor universal, Northern Ireland finds itself in the somewhat counter-intuitive situation in which the shift away from the violence of the past has increased, rather than reduced, the ontological insecurity of its citizens. Moreover, as ontological security may be supported by either friend–enemy or adversary–neighbour ideological formations, two distinct ways in which ontological security may collapse or re-configure have emerged in Northern Ireland.     

北魏前期汉族士人的社会交往初探

在中国中古门阀政治的背景下,士人之间的社会交往对于维护和提升其政治地位具有重要作用。北魏前期的汉族士人虽然在政治上受到较大的限制,但他们仍然试图在现有政治状况之下,通过社会交往建立社会网络,从而形成相互间的身份认同并获得有效的政治资源。乡里社会是汉族士人展开社会交往的基础,他们也十分重视。随着仕宦于平城的汉族士人逐渐增多,平城就成了北魏前期汉族士人社会交往的中心。以崔浩为中心的社交网络和青齐地区的汉族士人的交往成了这一时期较为明显的两种社会交往形态。当然,汉族士人之间的社会交往往往受到政治的牵连。