Shrines and neighbourhood in early nineteenth-century Pune,India

The roadside shrine, and similar such objects of devotion, are a characteristic feature of Hinduism and the Indian city. The distribution of such shrines is examined in Pune city for the early nineteenth century just prior to the British conquest. Evidence from vernacular Marathi documentation is available to map shrines by Pune's traditional neighbourhoods. Distinctions are drawn between the major temples of the high Sanskritic Hindu tradition with their subsidiary shrines and shrines of regional and folk deities. The relation of Muslim shrines to Hindu places of devotion is also considered. Analysis reveals shrines in the ritual, ceremonial and political core of Pune with a strong degree of place rootedness. The evolving suburban neighbourhoods however show a prevalence of new shrines of regional and folk deities.     

Spaces of protest: gendered migration,social networks,and labor activism in West Java,Indonesia

This article examines the gender geography of labor activism through a comparative investigation of two communities in West Java, Indonesia. Based on in-depth interviews and a survey of workers carried out in 1995, 1998, and 2000 in the two sites, it explores the place-specific meanings attached to migrants’ social networks and gender relations, and their roles in mediating the gendered patterns of labor protest in the two villages. Previous analyses of labor protest in Indonesia have occluded scales and processes that are critical to understanding how gender dynamics are linked to the geography of protest. By contrast, attention to the gender- and place-based contexts of women’s activism illustrates the complex interactions between migrants’ local interpretations of gender norms, social network relations, household roles, state gender ideology, and global neo-liberal restructuring. Through examining these interactions, gender is conceptualized as ontologically inseparable from the production of specific activist spaces, rethinking the uni-directional spatial logic and deterministic views of gender and place put forth in theories of the New International Division of Labor.     

Unpacking the discursive Irish woman immigrant in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Newfoundland

From the late 1600s to the early 1800s, Irish migrants journeyed to Newfoundland to take advantage of opportunities in the lucrative Newfoundland cod fishery. Focusing on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this essay explores constructions of Irish-Newfoundland womanhood as articulated by local British officials, the Catholic Church, and male-centred family history narratives. These discourses located women at the margins of early settlement experiences or rendered them invisible altogether. Yet Irish-Newfoundland women were able to negotiate their own subjectivities within this discursive terrain, finding spaces for identity construction in the disjuncture between rhetoric and lived experiences. Some resided more immediately under the hegemonic gaze and struggled to break free from dominant narratives. But most became essential workers in household fishing production outside the capital of St John's, and their vital contribution as shore crews gave them considerable power and authority both in their households and in the broader community. Performing demanding physical work on stages and flakes (elevated wooden structures) or in gardens and fields, carrying out various economic activities in their own right, they were hardly the unproductive, unruly bodies of British official discourse or the passive flowers of civilisation narrated from Catholic pulpits. And far from being absent from the migration story, they were central players in community formation and the economic life of the island. In this historical context, proximity to/distance from hegemonic knowledge production created variations in identity construction within a group often represented in the literature as homogeneous and powerless.     

French businessmen in the nineteenth-century Mezzogiorno: technical innovation,sociability, networks and negotiation of identities

Abstract

This research examines a group of French entrepreneurs who settled in Naples during the sixty years before the Unification of Italy. It compares the marriage strategies, the professional behaviour, and the relations with the public authorities (the Bourbon government, their own consulate, the local courts, etc.) of these French businessmen with the experience and the life-style of other ethnic-national élites also present in the same period in the Mezzogiorno (Swiss, English, etc.). It highlights the considerable capacity for adaptation shown by the French, their integration in the host society, their collaboration with the indigenous population on a professional level, and their particular capacity to negotiate with the locals even their own status as foreigners. These are the elements that not only make the French case unique in the panorama of entrepreneurial minorities active in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, but also enabled many French entrepreneurs to make an important contribution to the business world in pre-Unification Southern Italy.     

Trust,business groups and social capital: building a Protestant entrepreneurial network in nineteenth-century Naples

Abstract

This article explores the behaviour of a group of foreign entrepreneurs (mainly Swiss and Germans) who settled in southern Italy during the nineteenth century, establishing cotton manufacturing, creating a religious community, importing technologies, machines and patterns of management. These entrepreneurs shared a high level of training and culture and they all belonged to Protestant denominations. In the context of this foreign entrepreneurial community, the article examines the role played by friendship, kinship, origins, education and religion in shaping the network that linked groups of Protestant businessmen across Europe, emphasizing how these manufacturing firms relied on forms of cooperation, solidarity and physical proximity that were consolidated and perpetuated across more than three generations.     

Breeding for insect-resistant cotton across imperial networks, 1924-1950

This paper investigates the elevated expectations and dramatic downturns of the Empire Cotton Growing Corporation’s African experimentation program. It follows the trials of U.4, an insect-resistant variety bred to withstand continental growing conditions, whose expansion through east and southern Africa was filled with promise but ended in disappointment. My argument has two strands. First, U.4 was a product of imperial connections. It was an amalgam of breeding knowledge accumulated in India, specialized training received in Trinidad, and specimens imported from across the empire. Transnational scientific networks were crucial to the Corporation’s initial breeding successes. Second, the story that follows suggests that imperial scientific experts did not impose the Corporation’s research goals monolithically across a wide range of African environments. Rather, Corporation scientists recognized the diversity of African environments and adapted their breeding programs to match local agro-ecological realities. I suggest that the ECGC breeding program is a story of expert knowledge that incorporated rather than undermined ecological specificity.     

Irish Protestant migration and politics in the USA,Canada, and Australia: a debated legacy

In the USA, the rediscovery and celebration of Irish Protestant ancestry has extended in recent years to arguments by some scholars, political journalists, and politicians that there exists today an identifiable Scots-Irish socio-political legacy. This essay explores the history and cultural context of Irish Protestant migration and assesses its contemporary ramifications at the national level and in a critical state-level case (Kentucky). To assist in identifying the factors that have fostered or mitigated Irish Protestant identity/ies, comparisons will be made between the American experience and the very different ones of two other major recipient countries: Canada (and the province of Ontario) and Australia (and the state of New South Wales). Source regions, religious affiliation, the timing and magnitude of mass migration, and settlement patterns have all mattered in determining the socio-political roles played by Irish Protestants in the three former British colonies since the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Even more important have been the local economic and political contexts, including prevailing political party structures and competition. These factors explain why none of the three case countries, the USA included, bears witness to a coherent, identifiable Irish Protestant socio-political legacy.     

Compare and contrast: understanding Irish migration to Britain in a wider context

This article explores the potential for comparative research across different migrant groups. Research on migration is often weakened by the marked tendency to use a single ethnic/national group as the unit of analysis. Analysing migration from the experiences of a particular ethnic group may exaggerate ethnic exceptionalism and understate the extent to which experiences are shared across different migrant groups. My recent experiences on a range of research projects with diverse migrants to London made me think about similarities with the Irish, but each in different ways. However, there is a dearth of comparative analysis in relation to the Irish experience in Britain. On the one hand, there are many studies of Irish migrants, but these tend to focus solely on the Irish or else examine the relationship between Irish migrants and the ‘native’ British population. There has been little work on how the Irish relate to other migrant groups within British society. On the other hand, studies of other migrant communities rarely refer to the Irish as a comparative group. The article explores the reasons for the dearth of comparative work involving Irish migrants in Britain. In so doing, it considers some of the benefits and challenges of going beyond the ‘ethnic lens’. What would be gained but also lost by viewing Irish migration to Britain through a more comparative perspective? I explore how such comparative analysis might contribute, firstly, to a wider understanding of migration processes, experiences and inter-migrant relations, and, secondly, to a fuller appreciation of varied dimensions of migratory experiences in Britain. These issues are considered through a comparison of Polish and Irish migration to Britain.     

Claiming the high ground: theories of imperial authority and the British hill stations in India

By the 1880s, imperial government's practice of ‘retreating’ to the Indian hill stations for much of the year was well established. Despite the strength of this new tradition, such a relocation of colonial administration never lacked its critics. This paper examines the expanding administrative use of the hill stations from the early nineteenth century through the 1880s. As the nineteenth century ‘scientific’ framework for British control of India was formed, conflicting strategies and practices for maintaining imperial control required mediation and contrasting frameworks for defining duty and loyalty between government and subject vied for dominance. The significance of Utilitarian thought, changing appraisals of climate and constructions of race are evaluated in an analysis of the imperial hill stations.     

Land-holding,participation in agriculture and short-term migration in rural India

ABSTRACT

We analyse a nationally representative data set from India for the year 2013 in order to provide evidence on how short-term migration is affected by household ownership of land and participation in agricultural activities. We estimate a recursive-bivariate-probit model recognising the simultaneity between short-term migration and the decision to operate the land. The results of the likelihood ratio test imply that it would be incorrect to ignore this simultaneity. Households with less than 1?ha of land and those leasing out land are more likely to have a short-term migrant. Households leaving their land fallow, a common occurrence in South Asia, are also more likely to have a short-term migrant. Moreover, the choice of crops and livestock farming has a significant role to play in the migration decision. Current initiatives to increase coverage of irrigation and facilitate access to formal finance could improve the livelihoods of small and marginal farmers, thereby reducing the probability of distress-related short-term migration.     

Mapping social relationships: geophysical survey of a nineteenth-century American slave cemetery

The goal of this project is to identify unmarked burials inside the known limits of a historic cemetery and unmarked slave burials adjacent to the cemetery to answer questions regarding variability in treatment of slaves by slave owners. This project used three geophysical prospection methods (electromagnetic induction/conductivity, ground penetrating radar, and magnetic susceptibility) to image the subsurface and locate unmarked graves. The results indicate that up to 21 possible unmarked graves exist at the Prior Cemetery. The survey detected 17 with two or more geophysical techniques and four with a single technique. Nine possible unmarked graves were tested with a metal probe. Every tested anomaly revealed less compact soils indicative of an unmarked grave.