Royal slaves in the Danish-Norwegian West Indies 1792–1848: Living in autonomy

A group of slaves owned by the King of Denmark-Norway, termed Royal Slaves, performed essential and specific functions in the urban colonial society of the Danish-Norwegian West Indies. This article traces the development of this group of slaves and examines their standard of living and level of skills compared to plantation slaves in the Danish-Norwegian West Indies. The article argues that the Royal Slaves, through their access to provision grounds, had opportunities for a better life and developed a particular group identity, and that particular Royal Slaves possessed skills which led them to have positions of substantial social status in the social hierarchy of colonial society. Lastly, the article compares the conditions of living of the Danish-Norwegian Royal Slaves to Royal Slaves in other contemporary slave communities in order to further assess how, and if, the Danish-Norwegian Royal Slaves lived and worked under considerably different conditions than other Royal Slaves across the Caribbean.     

Domestic slave trading in St. Croix, 1764–1848

This article deals with domestic slave trading in the Danish (-Norwegian) West Indian colony of St. Croix, focusing on enslaved labourers sold as chattel. It examines the volume and price developments, building upon data on thousands of sales. Crucian slaveholders were willing participants in the domestic slave market, especially during the market’s peak period, c. 1767–1823. Some of them did make a profit from speculation, although evidence of large-scale, professional entrepreneurs is absent. The closing of the transatlantic slave trade did not lead to rising slave prices in the short term, but in the long run it was an important factor in the decline of the market. Finally, the article discusses the impact of the market on enslaved Crucians and their masters, as well as their respective strategies for dealing with it.     

The Antinomies of Black Identity Formation in West Africa, 1820–1848

Abstract

During the mid-nineteenth century, a group of United States-born property-holding free blacks struggled to establish themselves and fashion a new polity on the coast of West Africa. In doing so, these Liberians embraced a pair of simultaneously complementary and opposing aspirations: first, the insertion, entrenchment and expansion of a successful black commercial bourgeoisie into the global Atlantic economy of the nineteenth century, an aspiration tied to and dependent upon the accumulation of capital and the creation of a state which would operate in the interest of this group and no other. Secondly, they aspired to the creation and institutionalisation of a separate and distinct black nationality - a black identity - that covered the entire spectrum of people of African descent, that held out the prospect of solidarity for all black people in republican equality and citizenship, and that subsumed all other classes and categories of black people under the tent of the imagined black nation. In this way they contributed to the uneven, reciprocal and trans-Atlantic work of black identity formation during the middle of the nineteenth century.     

Towards an Archaeology of the Welfare State in Britain, 1945–2009

In this paper I develop an argument for the specific contribution which archaeology might make to the study of the ‘classic’ welfare state in Britain (c. 1945–1975) and its aftermath (c. 1976 to present). This period saw massive state investment in infrastructure which transformed both the material and social worlds of its citizens, through new state policies, new networks of political and social control, the centralisation and nationalisation of a range of existing aspects of civilian life and the construction of housing on a monumental scale. While this is a topic which has been studied in detail by historians and sociologists, despite the massive investment in construction and the accompanying effects on the physical landscape of Britain, there has been relatively little work on the ‘material worlds’ of the welfare state. In developing this argument I focus particularly on public housing, an area which has been the subject of some previous archaeological comment and which provides a clear case study in the contribution which such an approach might make. State subsidised housing policy developed as a brave utopian socialist experiment during the interwar period in Britain, reaching its zenith in the mid-1970s, at which time the state supplied almost a third of the nation’s housing. Public housing projects became an area of experimentation in the realisation of modernist ideals of high density private accommodation and in the use of new building technologies and materials. However, following the demise of the classic welfare state, for various reasons high density public housing has come to be viewed as part of a dystopian social cycle, the buildings and associated landscapes themselves becoming a symbol of poverty, substance abuse and violence. From an early history associated with slum clearance and the development of idealised homes for the nation’s poor, many high rise/high density public housing developments from the classic welfare state are now more often viewed themselves as slums, their design and ‘materiality’ perceived as contributing to, or even creating, a series of social problems. I suggest, following earlier work by Miller (Man (New Series) 23(2):353–372, 1988), Buchli (The Archaeology of Socialism, Berg, New York, 1999) and Buchli and Lucas (Archaeologies of the contemporary past. Routledge, London, 2001) that an archaeological approach to the material world of public housing has the potential to reveal not only the ways in which changing state ideologies are expressed through their design, but also the ways in which individuals have (and continue to) engage with their spaces and material culture to manage the conditions of everyday life, and how such places exist within counter-discursive urban and suburban worlds. I also suggest that part of the role of an archaeology of the welfare state is to consider the circumstances under which the welfare state fails through a focus on the archaeology of poverty and homelessness.     

The idea of peace in the West, 500–1150

Most of the numerous peace traditions of the early middle ages developed within a framework of three dimensions: monastic, ecclesiastical, imperial. But after 1150 the equilibrium among these three views of peace became upset. The pax ecclesiae and the imperial peace were channeled into papal jurisdiction and the public peace of the lay powers. The monastic peace began to lose its influence upon society at large.     

Negotiating race and religion in the West Midlands: narratives of inclusion and exclusion during the 1967–69 Wolverhampton bus workers’ turban dispute

This article considers the 1967–1969 Wolverhampton Transport turban dispute in the context of increased anxiety over immigration to the area and Wolverhampton South West MP Enoch Powell’s April 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. We trace the narratives of the dispute through letters to the Editor in local newspaper The Express & Star, and argue that the letters column was a site of community construction for writers and readers, which elevated the issue from a trivial industrial dispute to a symbol around which the deep anxieties of race and nation coalesced.     

Securing the Sinews of Sea Power: British Intervention in the Baltic 1780–1815

This article argues that Britain's standing as a maritime nation must be considered if we are to fully understand the objectives behind British foreign policy in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It focuses on one of the most important challenges successive British governments faced during this period; the need to secure shipbuilding resources. Both British economic prosperity and national security depended upon the continued supply of naval stores. These resources could only be procured from the Baltic region, which meant the region took on a crucial strategic importance for policy-makers. This article will focus on Britain's relationship with the Baltic between 1780 and 1815 tracing Britain's sensitivity to the changing political environment in Sweden, Denmark, Prussia, and particularly Russia, and outlining how this came to dictate foreign policy. Britain hoped to rely on diplomacy and economic interdependence to maintain the movement of naval stores from the Baltic; however intransigence from the Baltic powers forced Britain to resort to military measures on three occasions between 1800 and 1815, such was the importance of these shipbuilding resources.     

Politics of place: political representation and the culture of electioneering in the Netherlands,c.1848–1980s

Abstract

This article is a first attempt to explore how a politics of place has manifested itself in Dutch electoral culture since the middle of the nineteenth century. It aims to move beyond a narrow interpretation of a politics of place as an ‘old-fashioned’ feature of electoral politics to be associated with a distinct, long-gone era of political representation. Instead, this article shows how it was continuously negotiated. This gives us a better understanding of the changing nature of political representation in the Netherlands. Compared to Britain at the turn of the nineteenth century, local senses of community and their clash with ideology-based party politics were far less prominent. There was, however, on-going debate about the degree to which Parliament should reflect the various regions of the country, so that local party associations and voters could feel represented and address ‘their’ MP for issues pertaining to their locality. Moreover, after 1918 parties were concerned about the need to maintain political communication on the spot to counter lack of political involvement and feelings of alienation among the electorate. The article ends with a call for further reflection on the nature of clientelism in the Netherlands by exploring direct interaction between voters and their representatives.     

Elusive Security in the GDR: Remigrants from the West at the Faculty of Journalism in Leipzig, 1945–61

Abstract

This article explores how the GDR dealt with intellectual remigrants, in particular ‘bildungsbürgerlich Marxist intellectuals’, who had survived the Third Reich in Western exile. It analyses the political biographies of three such remigrants, namely the journalist Hermann Budzislawski, the publisher and author Wieland Herzfelde, and the journalist and party functionary Hans Teubner. In the late 1940s and 1950s, these three men were appointed to professorships at the Faculty of Journalism at Leipzig University, a future training school of party journalists, and thus ?lled important strategic positions at the intersection of higher education, mass media, and politics. However, their biographies testify to more than just individual success stories. They point to the dif?culties of returning Communists in adapting to the political realities of the GDR in the 1950s, marked by widespread distrust and coercion. Behind the scenes, the remigrants in question here were put under enormous pressure to bow to Party command. As Budzislawski and Herzfelde were Jewish, the article also discusses to what extent their problems were related to antisemitic prejudices in the Stalinist period of the GDR. Regardless of individual differences, this article demonstrates that one of the central hopes of the remigrants, that is, to erase the scars of emigration, remained unful?lled.