Tartars in Spain: renaissance slavery in the Catalan city of Manresa,c.1408

This article presents a summary and analysis of the slaves and slave owners who were living in a particular late medieval city at a particular time. The data for this overview comes from the 1408 Liber Manifesti of Manresa, a tax document which is quite similar to the Florentine Catasto of 1427. Unlike the Catasto, however, the Liber Manifesti consistently designates slaves as distinct from other servants. As a result, the Manresan document allows us to know many basic but often elusive figures such as the total number of slaves in our town, the proportion of slaves to free people, the percentage of households who owned slaves, the proportion of women and children amongst slaves, and even the market value of female, male, and child slaves vis à vis the cost of hiring a domestic servant. Access to such an unusually complete sample also enables us to make some fresh assertions about the extent and nature of renaissance slavery as a whole. Several of Iris Origo's influential observations, which still stand as a benchmark of renaissance slavery some 50 years after they were presented, are here both corroborated and challenged. For example, to what extent did renaissance slave owners pair male slaves with female slaves, as Origo's anecdotal evidence suggested? Our sample also provides invaluable data on the wealth, occupations, and family background of slave owners. We can gain some insight into the phenomenon of women as slave owners, and also coordinate slave owning with urban political power. In addition we can suggest an answer to the elusive question of just how much of a ‘luxury item’ slaves really were in the post-Black Death Mediterranean. In Manresa, as it turns out, slave owners were anything but a uniform block of ‘wealthy townspeople.’     

Mapping race and gender in the academy: the experiences of women of colour faculty and graduate students in Britain,the US and Canada

This paper examines the experiences of women of colour in geography. An analysis of qualitative, open‐ended questionnaires with women of colour geography faculty and graduate students in North America and Britain suggests that policies and practices within geography departments continue to reflect a pervasive persistence of racialized and gendered inequities in the workplace. There has been relatively little application of theoretical work on race and gender to the minority experience within geography. Some strategies suggested to challenge racialized and gendered barriers that limit women of colour's full participation in geography include a proactive recruitment programme, diversification of the curriculum and development of mentoring.     

Party Voting in the U.S. Senate, 1877-1990: An Assessment of Long- and Short-Term Effects

Although party voting in the U.S. Senate has been affected by long-term and short-term factors, models in previous research have ignored this distinction. The author employs a relatively new tool, error correction modeling, to measure the long- and short-term effects of internal and external factors on party voting in the U.S. Senate. The results show that party voting for both major parties is a long-term equilibrium relationship with ratification of the 17th Amendment and that external factors are much more important than internal ones for explaining changes in levels of party voting.     

Dilemmas of Party Leadership: Majority Whips in the U.S. House of Representatives, 1962-1982

This article examines party leadership in the context of personal ambition, institutional commitments and the representative's dilemma of choosing between a national vs. local perspective. The research focus is on the careers of five recent House Democratic party leaders and their tenure as appointed majority whips. From these case studies the whip, who occupies the third-ranking leadership post in the House, appears as an emerging leader who must develop strategies to enable him to balance a series of contradictory expectations: loyalty to leadership vs. self-promotion, service to the rank and file vs. policy impact, and support for national party positions vs. district preferences.     

National Forces and the U.S. House Vote, 1980-2004: The Uncertain Progress of Nationalization

Much recent scholarly attention has focused on the theme of growing nationalization in U.S. House elections. In this study, I reach a mixed verdict concerning the extent to which national forces have become more determinative of the House vote from 1980 to 2004. Only voter partisanship, but not ideology, economic evaluations, or assessments of presidential candidates' personal qualities, has increased in importance during presidential year elections. Since presidential voting, on the other hand, has come to depend more heavily on all these factors except the last, this means that contrary to the conventional wisdom, the bases of House and presidential voting actually have grown less, rather than more, similar over time.     

生存、适应与融合：牙买加华人社区的形成与发展（1854—1962）

本文对牙买加华人社会的生存和发展进行了历史的概览。作者对有关牙买加华人的外文研究状况进行了评述 ,试图利用至今尚无人利用的牙买加发行的华文报纸对当地华人的历史进行梳理 ,描述了 1 0 0多年来牙买加华人社区的的起源、适应、融合与身份认同变化的过程 ,特别对华人的组织、华人的经济社会活动及其参政态度的变化进行了分析。作者认为 ,华人在牙买加经历了从农业工人到商人的转变 ,他们依靠自己的组织———中华会馆在逆境中谋生存、求发展。一些社团领袖以特有的敏感积极投身于当地的政治活动。华人与当地社会的融合过程在牙买加独立时期已经接近完成。     

Centralized Governance and Student Outcomes: Excellence,Equity, and Academic Achievement in the U.S. States

Are states with more centralized approaches to education governance more likely to have higher student achievement and lower achievement gaps between poor and nonpoor students? This article addresses that question by theorizing about the effects of political, administrative, and fiscal centralization on student outcomes. It tests competing hypotheses about the degree to which centralization across these three dimensions is associated with the promotion of academic excellence (higher achievement) and equity (narrower achievement gaps). The results demonstrate the virtue of studying academic performance through the lens of governance and more distal system‐level variables rather than, as has been common in the literature, more narrow policy‐oriented measures. The findings show that strong relationships exist between student outcomes and the degree of political centralization and administrative centralization in a state, yet there are no apparent associations with fiscal centralization. The results also illustrate that governing arrangements are not consistently related to the advancement of excellence and equity. In terms of administrative centralization, specifically, apparent trade‐offs may exist.     

Campaign Promises,Democratic Governance,and Environmental Policy in the U.S. Congress

One important criterion for assessing the quality of democratic governance is the extent to which the policy process effectively translates citizen preferences into collective choices. Several scholars have observed a discrepancy between citizen preferences for strong environmental protection and weak policies adopted in the United States, indicating that the United States may fall short on this criterion. We examine one possible mechanism contributing to this discrepancy—legislator defection from campaign promises. Our data indicate that legislators in the U.S. Congress routinely defect from their campaign promises in environmental protection, undermining the link between citizen preferences and policy choice. We also find that legislators are much more likely to defect from pro‐environmental campaign promises, which moves government policy toward less stringent environmental programs. Finally, the propensity of legislators to defect from their campaign promises is systematic, with defection affected by partisanship, constituency influence, the influence of the majority party, and the likely consequences of defection for policy choice. These findings contribute empirical evidence relevant to the “mandate theory” perspective on how citizen preferences are translated into collective choices through the policy process. These findings may also complement research in comparative politics concluding that legislatures selected through single member districts adopt less stringent environmental policies than do legislatures chosen via proportional representation in that the mechanism for this effect may go through legislator defection from campaign promises.     

Government, Business, and U.S. Economic Expansion in the Americas in the Late Nineteenth Century: A Reappraisal

Books reviewed in this article:
Pletcher, David M. The Diplomacy of Trade and Investment: American Economics expansion in the Hemisphere, 1865-1900     

In the front line: women,work and new spaces of labour politics in Poland

Pessimistic accounts of women's lives in post-communist Poland view women as powerless and passive victims of the transformation process. In contrast, this article argues that while political change and the restructuring of the economy have closed down some spaces of articulation and organisation, others have opened up. The article focuses on the way in which women in their spheres of work are shaping and actively resisting change through new organisations and individual and collective actions, which are in some ways a break with the past, but in other ways build on previous forms of activity. The work draws on qualitative research conducted over the last decade across Poland. This has coupled extensive interviews with women workers, national and regional trade union leaders, activists and feminists in a number of major Polish cities with reviews of Polish media and policy. We examine the economic and ideological context in which these new articulations are taking place, against the background of Poland's post-war communism and the rise of opposition movements. We look at the neoliberal restructuring of the economy and the implications for women within the labour market and in their domestic lives. In particular, we examine initiatives from below in workplace organisation, by focusing on new unions and new actions in the public sector, and the beginnings of organisation in the new areas of the economy such as supermarkets. Finally, we look at how women are articulating their interests beyond formal workplaces. We conclude that we should be optimistic about these new spaces of activism. While some are well established, others are embryonic but provide a strong foundation on which women can increase their participation in spaces that promote their varied interests.     

双重的矛盾——印度尼西亚与美国关系的历史解析(1949-1966)

从1949至1966年,印美两国关系经历了友好、冲突、缓和与恶化的曲折变化。印尼中立主义与美国遏制战略之间的冲突,是阻碍两国关系发展的第一重矛盾。印尼民族主义与美国维护冷战盟友荷兰、英国殖民主义之间的冲突,则成为影响两国关系的第二重矛盾。印美两国矛盾的实质在于,冷战的两极格局下,一个全球超级大国和一个新兴地区大国之间难以调和的国家利益的冲突。     

Uxores, ancillae and dominae: women in thirteenth-century Hungary in the Register of Várad

Women’s history for Árpád-era Hungary (1000–1301) has generally been restricted to legal issues and the royal court. This study addresses these deficiencies by examining women in the Register of Várad in regard to three areas of investigation: marriage practices and the involvement of the Church, access women had to property and the access women had to authority. Evidence from the register indicates that by the thirteenth century, ecclesiastical ideas regarding marriage were barely making themselves felt. Ideas of consent and even the indissolubility of marriage were at times unimportant. Though priests were occasionally present at marriages, their role was not decisive. Women had three primary means of obtaining property. They could receive gifts or dower on the event of their wedding, and they could receive a portion of the patrimony. This inheritance was termed the quarta filialis as it amounted to no more than one-quarter of the father’s property. These gifts came under the control of the woman’s husband, and she could not access them until his death. Widowhood combined with guardianship of a minor son could allow women to exert considerable power and, just as elsewhere in Latin Europe, women’s access to public and private authority most approximated that of men’s as a widow. Not all women, of course, had access to such power. The Register of Várad shows numerous instances of women slaves who were under the complete control of their master.