Time to Say Goodbye

Tim Hortons’ first donut store was established in Hamilton, Ontario, in 1964; other stores were added over time as the chain gradually diffused across Canada to become the country’s largest quick-service restaurant chain with more than 2,400 restaurants. In achieving this dominant status it adopted one of the strategies of any successful restaurant chain; utilizing a uniform architectural style to emphasize to customers the consistency in its menu and operations. This article examines the processes underlying the development of the Tim Hortons brand and the diffusion of its restaurants into the US, specifically the appearance of their restaurants in the Great Lakes borderlands. The study found a consistent architectural style in Ontario but several different styles in Michigan and New York. It is suggested that this lack of consistency in brand identification in its US restaurants is a contributory factor to their lack of profitability and smaller sales.     

The rights of a Florida wife: slavery, U.S. expansion, and married women's property law

Civil law rules were adopted in Florida that granted married women property rights long before legal reforms occurred in northern states. This article analyzes white wives' property and law in Florida between 1820 and 1860. Initially, married women's property rights were inadvertently protected by treaty law and limited to women who married before 1818. Wives' right to own separate property in Florida was subsequently reconfirmed in statute and extended to include later marriages. In contrast, nonwhites generally lost the rights and property they had enjoyed under Spain's civil law in the same period. This contrast reveals that in Florida (and other southern borderlands) it was not concern for women, or simply legal precedent, but the desire to incorporate new territory and expand slavery that influenced the development of marital property law. This challenges previous histories, which have excluded the earlier acts in the Southern borderlands and emphasized those passed in the Northeast beginning in the late 1840s. While those later acts were influenced by the early woman's rights movement and by concern for families reduced to poverty during the rise of market capitalism, this case study indicates that expansion of United States territory and slavery were responsible for the earlier married women's property rights in southern borderland territories such as Florida.     

Frontier Stories： Periphery as Center in Qing History

Since at least the 1960s, the importance of the tremendous territorial expansion under Qing role to the modem history of China has been generally acknowledged. Indeed, one can say that the frontier story is one of the things that makes the Qing ＂Qing.＂ However, only in the last twenty years has the study of what is now termed the ＂borderlands＂ come into its own as a sub-field. This essay begins by describing some key concepts and terms in the study of the Qing frontier, including the Manchu wordjecen. It then raises the problem of narrative fiameworks, asking how we might best contextualize the growth of the empire, before going on to explore the implications of the discursive shift represented by the ＂New Qing History＂ and the extensive research on Qing borderlands associated therewith. A poem by the Mongol poet Na-xun Lan-bao provides the focus for a concluding discussion of a distinctive Qing frontier sensibility.     

Commerce and Empire in the Borderlands： How do Merchants and Trade Fit into Qing Frontier History？

As our understanding of the Qing empire and its various borderlands has evolved, so too have we come to appreciate China＇s early modem commercial sophistication. In recent North American studies of the Qing, the links between commerce and conquest have come under investigation, and we are increasingly urged to pay attention to merchants and merchant capital. But how should we understand the relationship between merchants and the Qing empire in the borderlands？ This article surveys selected work on the borderlands and commercialization, primarily in the Northwest and Southwest. The goal is to initiate a more comprehensive discussion of how to understand the intersection of commerce and empire while also making some suggestions for ways that borderlands history might shape future work on China.     

Competing use of marine space in a modernizing fishery: salmon farming meets lobster fishing on the Bay of Fundy

Coastal fishing communities are frequently portrayed as bastions of tradition at odds with the modernizing forces of technological change and industrial capitalism. This article examines this debate in the context of intensive aquaculture introduced into regions formerly dependent on the wild fishery, specifically with respect to the explosive growth of salmon farming in New Brunswick. New farm sites are large, often located within or close to traditional lobster fishing areas, which has motivated considerable opposition from local fishermen. This article presents findings from research on interactions between salmon farming and lobster fishing around Deer Island and Grand Manan, New Brunswick. Fishermen and salmon farmers are concerned about possible long-term effects of farm operations on marine environmental quality and lobster health, and many are concerned about the concentration of ownership and lack of local control over the aquaculture industry. The potential for physical displacement from traditional fishing grounds is real, but the actual impacts have been tempered by a combination of factors, including unusually large lobster catches in recent years; technological advances that have encouraged a shift in lobster fishing effort further offshore, away from salmon farm sites; and social accommodations between salmon site managers and those who fish     

Shifting monument production chains and the implications for gravestone design on Prince Edward Island, 1820–2005

This paper examines changing gravestone design in Prince Edward Island (PEI) (1820–2005) and relates these changes to changing modes of production in the monument industry. Information from field surveys, newspaper advertisements and business correspondence reveals how supply-side factors helped shape the morphogenesis of the island's cemetery landscapes. Among these, different sources of raw materials and manufacturing innovations over time resulted in the use of harder, more durable types of stone. With these changes, gravestone production and design moved increasingly away from local monument works towards off-island producers in Vermont, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Since the early 20^th century, PEI's gravestone suppliers vertically integrated along Fordist mass-production lines and increased choices available to local monument sellers and their consumers.     

The Middle Ground, “Middle Ground Moments,” and Accommodation in the Study of Later Qing Borderland History

This article examines Richard White’s concept of the “middle ground” and its prospective application to the study of China’s Qing (1644–1911) borderlands from the late eighteenth century. It argues that although White’s model, in its specific formulation, is problematic to apply due to the dissimilarity of Qing conditions, it yet has value and can be adapted. One possibility is advanced in the notion of “middle ground moments,” briefly explored in the cases of Shaanxi’s Dabashan highlands in a “population boom,” Hunan’s Miao Frontier in the “fog of war,” and Xinjiang’s Kashgar crossroads during the “fall of empires.” Focusing on group exchange, adaptation, and hybridization offers insight into regional cultural creation, as well as a means to question received narratives of breakdown, pacification, resistance, or Great Game struggle. Such modeling, and shared attention to accommodation perspectives generally, also presents a space for dialogue across the New Qing History and Chinese nationalist divide in Qing frontier studies.     

Jazzing Sheiks at the 25 Cent Bram: Panama and Harlem as Caribbean Crossroads,circa 1910–1940

Both Harlem and Panama were, in the early twentieth century, crossroads of the Caribbean. This essays traces the musical echoes of that fact, arguing that British West Indians had a central but often unrecognized role in the exchanges driving Black cultural innovation in the interwar metropoles. Hundreds of thousands of British West Indians came to and through Panama at the start of the twentieth century, creating a Pan-Caribbean space where the rhythms of son, tango, mento, cumbia, and ragtime rang out. From there many would travel onward. The lives of Panama-born, New York-based performers like Vernon Andrade, Luis Russell, Teófilo Alfonso ‘Panama Al’ Brown, and Estelle Bernier show how British West Indians shaped by the Greater Caribbean’s borderlands crossed boundaries within New York as well. Multilingual and multicultural, they moved easily within Harlem’s ‘Latin Quarter’ of Puerto Ricans and other Spanish-speakers, helping to bring rhythms and styles from the Hispanic Caribbean to the Afro-American listening and dancing public. Stories of the working-class dance halls of 1920s Panama and of the Latin connections of British Caribbean performers in New York together point to tropical circuits of music and moves rarely recognized as part of the metropolitan Jazz Age.     

Re-emerging Frontiers: Postcolonial Theory and Historical Archaeology of the Borderlands

The article considers the importance of frontier studies in historical archaeology and discusses applicability of some of the concepts deriving from postcolonial theories for a better understanding of human relationships in the frontier zones. The conditions of frontiers and borderlands are compared with the characteristics of the “Third Space” described by Homi Bhabha as a realm of negotiation, translation and remaking. It is argued that concepts developed in postcolonial theories, such as “Third Space,” “in-betweeness” or hybridity, are useful not only to address cultural and social processes in borderlands that were created by colonial empires. They are also an apt way to conceptualize relationships in frontiers that lacked colonial stigma. To illustrate this point, two different historical examples of borderlands are scrutinized in this paper: the medieval frontier region that emerged between Denmark and the Northwestern Slavic area and the creation of the colonial frontier in Northeastern America through the establishment of the Praying Indian Towns.     

Foreword

This second issue of Colonial Latin American Review for 2003 offers four articles that focus primarily on colonial Mexico, if from different disciplinary perspectives. In “El misterio de los cap?´tulos perdidos de la Cro´nica mexicana de Hernando de Alvarado Tezozomoc”, Roc?´o Corte´s does some detailed scholarly sleuthing to propose a reconstruction of the original text of Tezozomoc's late sixteenth-century chronicle. Professor Corte´s suggests a solution to the supposed lacunae in this chronicle, and in so doing helps to establish a more accurate sense of the range of the chronicler's historical concerns. The article by art historian Ilona Katzew, “The Virgin of the Macana: Emblem of a Franciscan Predicament in New Spain”, surveys the iconographical history of the cult of this Virgin, a cult born of a seventeenth-century event in the Mexican missionary borderlands, but actively and broadly promulgated by the Franciscan order throughout the following century for reasons apparently as pragmatic as devotional. In “ ‘El plato ma´s sabroso’: Eucarist?´a, plagio diabo´lico y la traduccio´n criolla del can?´bal”, Carlos Ja´uregui studies the trope of cannibalism as it emerged in the writings of a series of colonial writers, from early historians of the Encounter through the Mexican Creole Baroque as represented by Sor Juana Ine´s de la Cruz. Professor Ja´uregui is particularly interested in the evolution of this trope over time as a means to articulate notions of similarity and difference with regard to indigenous peoples and Europeans. In our fourth article, “A Reinterpreation of Nahuatl Poetics: Rejecting the Image of Nezahualcoyotl as a Peaceful Poet”, Professor Jongsoo Lee offers a persuasive revisionist argument regarding the work traditionally attributed to the Texcocan “poet king”.     

State atrophy and the reconfiguration of borderlands in Syria and Iraq: Post-2011 dynamics

Circumstances in the MENA region invite us to redirect our attention to geographic areas that emerged as primary sites of power-contest. This paper looks into emerging trends in the unraveling of bounded sovereign territoriality in borderlands by examining the contest over military, economic, and socio-political spaces in the wake of the devolution of the monopoly of violence and the rise of a multitude of new and old actors to local prominence. Since 2011, borderlands in the MENA region transformed into considerable sites of contested power by a plethora of actors. The paper points out emergent patterns of deterritorialization and reterritorialization of power in its various forms and manifestations in borderlands. The dynamics of ‘place and performance’ in the borderlands of Syria and Iraq showcase the variety of ways borders were instrumentalized under circumstances of state atrophy and their destructive tendencies for borderlands.     

‘Brothers at Peace’: People-to-People Reconciliation in the Ethiopian–Eritrean Borderlands

The coming to power of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed in Ethiopia in 2018 opened up a renewed peace engagement with Eritrea and diplomatic relations were restored. Before the political rapprochement, grassroots processes of people-to-people reconciliation in the borderlands between the two countries had been underway for years, gradually eroding officially-produced enemy stereotypes. This article explores how physical borders and boundaries of identity at a local level may be conceived differently from that at state borders or expressions of formal nationalism at an inter-state level. The local level border between the northern regional state of Tigray in Ethiopia and Eritrea has become increasingly porous over the last years, whilst the inter-state border was rigidly defended. The political rapprochement is however disconnected from the people-to-people reconciliation, as the local government in Tigray is at odds with both Ethiopia’s federal government in Addis Ababa and the Eritrean government. The formalised peace processes are elite driven, leaving no voice for the people affected in the borderlands.     

The production of borders in nineteenth-century Europe: between institutional boundaries and transnational practices of space

The article proposes a synthesis of the major historical works on nineteenth-century European borders. Founded on an original methodological approach, the article advances a rethinking of the concept of ‘territoriality’ traditionally attributed to the rise of modern nation-states. The innovative method adopted is based on combining the focus on spatiality in recent historiography – especially in global history – with the categories and the ethnographic method developed within the border-studies field. The analysis is conducted in two directions. The first focuses on ‘borders’, specifically on some border-creation processes developing throughout the European continent. The second is more centred on European ‘borderlands’, conceived as trans-state and trans-national regions, mainly linked to the space's well-established social practices, familial and economic networks and religious experience. On the one hand, the article highlights how nineteenth-century borders were not simply the product of an institutional decision performed by emerging nation-states, but also the result of an interactive dialectic between state institutions and social actors inhabiting the borderlands. On the other, it shows how the borderlands as cross-border territorial entities continued to exist alongside the new territorial state limits, helping shape a more complex European spatiality than traditionally stated.     

The forbidden sex in the New Guinea highlands

Meigs, Anna S. Food, Sex and Pollution: A New Guinea Religion. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1984. xix + 196 pp. including appendices, glossary, bibliography, and index. $22.50 cloth.     

Environment,utility, and universals in ethnobiological classification

Brown, Cecil H. Language and Living Things: Uniformities in Folk Classification and Naming. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1984. xvi + 306 pp. including appendices, references, and index. $35.00 cloth.     

Surplus precaritization: Supply chain capitalism and the geoeconomics of hope in Myanmar's borderlands

The Thai-Myanmar border represents one of the most protracted displacement situations in the world, while the Myanmar-Bangladesh border is now home to nearly one million displaced Rohingya, making it the world's most populated refugee camp. During the period of “democratic transition,” pre-emptively terminated by the February 2021 military coup, foreign direct investment continued to flow into Myanmar despite ongoing humanitarian crises. Rather than being presented as exacerbating ethnic tension, economic development was frequently deployed as a panacea for conflict in ways that rendered borderland residents increasingly precarious. In this article, we draw on multi-sited ethnographic research carried out between 2014 and 2020 in Myanmar's borderlands and along the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor to examine how aid donors' support for displaced ethnic minority populations is supplanted by widespread geoeconomic hope for the ameliorating effects of capitalism. We home in on the role of aid flight, special economic zones, and China's Belt and Road Initiative to argue that geoeconomic hope surrounding Myanmar's deepening integration into circuits of global capital obscures processes of surplus precaritization in which populations progressively approach the point at which they become absolutely surplus or beyond reabsorption into labor markets. The article contributes to emerging scholarship on migrant labor exploitation, supply-chain capitalism and the geoeconomics of BRI in Myanmar's borderlands and beyond.     

Military and Civilian Governance in the Western Borderlands of the Russian Empire during the First World War

On the whole, the civilian and military authorities were able to coordinate and compromise in governing Russia’s western borderlands during the First World War, despite constant military interference in civilian governance and a certain apathy in the center, both of which contributed to administrative disunity from the onset of the war.