Politics of Debt,War and Peace: Scandinavia 1800–1830

This article explores the dynamic relationship between war finance and economic and political developments in Scandinavia during the period 1800–1830. By comparing the organization of government debt in Denmark-Norway and Sweden, it is shown that the Danish system relied on revenues from trade and consumption, while the Swedish system was heavily influenced by internal political factors such as a divided fiscal authority. The leadership in Copenhagen was committed to maintaining existing relationships with creditors even when faced with severe fiscal constraints, while the Swedish government chose partial defaults as the politically expedient option when faced with fiscal difficulties.     

The Neuropathology of Morality: Germany 1930–1960

This article analyzes brain scientists’ attempts to trace morality in the brain in Germany from 1930 to 1960. The debate around Karl Kleist's localization of the Gemeinschafts-Ich [community-I] in the 1930s is depicted in order to illustrate the central arguments for and against localizations of morality. The focus of this article is on the period 1936–1960 in which experts put forth specific ideas on morality's cerebral underpinnings that mirror the larger theoretical shift from strict localization doctrine to a more holistic understanding of the brain. As a result of this shift, experts avoided exact localizations of morality. Instead, they posited correlations between brain areas and morality. The analysis illustrates the dependence of neuropathological research on morality on general theories of brain functioning and marks a first contribution to the history of the neuroscience of morality for the time after 1930.     

Acts of severity: colonial settler massacre of amaXhosa and abaThembu on the eastern frontier of the Cape Colony,c.1826–47

Colonial massacre of the amaXhosa and abaThembu on the Cape Colony's eastern frontier between the 1820s and 1840s appears to be neglected compared to the extermination of the Khoisan. Whereas revisionist histories—most of which use an indigenous-resistance framework—have concentrated on Xhosa resistance to settler expansion, little attention has been paid to settler massacre. This article examines selected massacres between 1826 and 1847, considers their etiology, situates them within current debates on colonial settler genocide, and questions the success of Buxton's Select Committee on Aborigines in ending them.