From Senegal to Augsburg: Gum Arabic and the Central European Textile Industry in the Eighteenth Century

West Africa’s role in the early modern economy is usually reduced to that of a supplier of forced labour for American plantations while other types of trade — especially direct trade between Western Africa and Europe — are often marginalised in scholarship. This article argues that the West African substance gum arabic played a vital role in the large-scale production of printed cottons and linens in Europe — one of the major areas of popular consumption at the time. Its unique qualities and the fact that it was available in large quantities made gum arabic from Senegal and Mauritania indispensable in producing high-quality prints in large numbers for a reasonable price. The article advances this argument by looking at Central instead of Western Europe, in order to illustrate how pervasive this substance was in the eighteenth century. Even regions far removed from the Atlantic — such as the South German city of Augsburg, in today’s Bavaria — needed to find a way to access this Senegambian product in order to produce their popular textiles. The article thus seeks to contribute to a better understanding of Africa’s role in the development of European textile industries and its contribution to consumption patterns by following a specific material from Western Africa to Central Europe — from Senegal to Augsburg.     

On the Linkage Between the Demographic Processes and Economy of a Region: (with particular reference to Pskov Oblast)

A low rate of natural increase, deriving from a disrupted age-sex structure, and net out-migration combine to account for a steady depopulation of Pskov Oblast. The introduction of industries providing additional male employment is recommended in the two principal cities—Pskov and Velikiye Luki—to correct the present predominance of women in industrial towns. Several measures (modernization of the countryside, promotion of truck-produce farming around the major urban centers) are suggested to keep more young people in rural areas and thus correct the lop-sided age structure there. Economic decision-making is viewed as a key factor in improving the demographic situation of a region.     

EUROPEAN BRIEFING

Much has been made of completing the Single European Market in Europe. Despite movements towards more advanced levels of integration such as currency union, there remains several grey areas in specific industries that are not allowing for open access to the market. These areas include government activities such as electricity and gas along with other industries such as telecommunications. This article sets out to examine whether there is likely to be a free market in these sectors and assesses the progress being made since the introduction of a number of procurement directives post-1998. This will therefore have an influence on land use planning. The article draws on the literature of regulation and industrial organization as well as European integration in order to demonstrate the complexities of these industries and the problems of full compliance with the single market.     

The Effectiveness of Integrated Development of Productive Forces in the New Pioneering Areas of Western Siberia

Coordinated development of industries in Western Siberia is advocated as a way of raising the effectiveness of capital investment in this new pioneering region. Significant savings in investment and operating costs are envisaged through the development of territorial-production complexes and industrial nodes with interrelated industrial enterprises and common service industries, such as water supply, utilities and transportation. Cost-benefit calculations by the Council for Study of Productive Forces, the Soviet Government's preplanning research agency, suggest that the integrated approach to regional development would yield investment savings of up to 20 percent or more compared with the construction of isolated industrial establishments.     

Manufacturing (co)agglomeration in a transition country: Evidence from Russia

We document the geographic concentration patterns of Russian manufacturing using detailed microgeographic data. About 80% of three-digit industries are significantly agglomerated, and a similar share of three-digit industry pairs is significantly coagglomerated. Industry pairs with stronger buyer–supplier links—as measured using Russian input–output tables—tend to be slightly more coagglomerated. This result is robust to instrumental variable estimation using either Canadian or US instruments. Using Canadian ad valorem transport costs as a proxy for transport costs in Russia, we further find that industries with higher transport costs are more dispersed, and industry pairs with higher transport costs are less coagglomerated.     

HISTORY GOES WALKABOUT

Could the methods of history—and not just its objects of study—be decolonized? This essay explores analogous areas of cultural production, such as painting, to determine how historians might begin to produce work that lies outside the Western, Euro‐Christian imaginary. It focuses on the case of Australia and the means by which Aboriginal artists have reanimated and recalibrated traditional forms of knowledge, offering new bases for thinking about the history and temporalities of Australia. The work of the painter Tim Johnson is then presented as an example for history in his demonstration of the ways in which indigenous methods and ways of seeing the world can be deployed by Others. The ethical, theoretical, and practical challenges that accompany such work are detailed, alongside a historiographical account of the way in which these discussions mesh with seminal debates in postcolonialism, subaltern studies, and settler colonialism as they relate to historical theory. Drawing on recent work in History and Theory, the article asks: what might be the consequences for history were it not to develop a meaningful “global turn,” arguing that a critical moment has been reached in which modes of understanding the world that come from outside the West need to be incorporated into historians’ repertoires for thinking and making.     

Urban development,redevelopment and regeneration encouraged by transport infrastructure projects: The case study of 12 European cities

This paper attempts to describe the potential of urban transport infrastructure projects such as metro, regional rail and tram, to indirectly work as a catalyst for the development and redevelopment of urban areas as well as the regeneration of declining areas. The paper presents the outcome of research on a sample of 12 European cities—Athens, Bratislava, Brussels, Helsinki, Lyon, Madrid, Manchester, Newcastle upon Tyne, Stuttgart, Valencia, Vienna and Zurich. This research is part of the Transecon project which was funded by the European Commission under the competitive and sustainable growth programme of the fifth framework— and concerned with all kinds of different indirect effects (economic, social and spatial) of new transport infrastructure investments in European cities. The outcome of the research points out that urban transport infrastructure may have a catalytic effect on the development, redevelopment and regeneration of urban areas but there are a lot of other influencing factors which make such re-urbanization processes a successful or unsuccessful story.     

Pathological Evidence in Newborn Children from the Sixteenth Century in Huelva (Spain)

Archaeological infant remains rarely appear in the palaeopathological literature; above all there are few references to neonatal individuals. This work presents four infant pathological specimens from the crypt of the Ermita de la Soledad (sixteenth to nineteenth century, Huelva, Spain). The bones analysed—one right hemifrontal, two humeri and a femur—belong to at least two individuals of between 0 and 6 months of age. The differential diagnosis of the lesions—mainly detachments of the outer layer of cortical bone, areas of juxtametaphysial osteolysis and epiphysial destructuralization—supports the hypothesis of an infectious aetiology, such as congenital treponematosis and haematogenous osteomyelitis, although illness caused by a deficiency, such as scurvy or rickets, cannot be ruled out.     

乡村产业地域分异格局研究——以南京都市圈典型区域为例

本文以南京都市圈"东山—茅山"样带作为研究区域,基于乡村产业POI数据,利用圈层分析、核密度分析等方法,对乡村产业及其多样性分异格局进行研究.结果表明,当前农旅、文创等新产业新业态开始在乡村布局,在近郊区和乡镇中心周边组团集聚、沿交通放射布局特征明显,总体上呈现"距离衰减"趋势,且不同产业分布存在明显差异.分类研究发现...     

Middle pleistocene adaptations in Central Europe

The biological evolution documented in the fossil and archaeological record of Central Europe between about 700,000 and 100,000 years ago reflects the transition fromHomo erectus to the earliestHomo sapiens. These populations created different types of industries, ranging from assemblages of small artifacts and industries with simple pebble tools to standardized units such as the Evolved Acheulean and the Early Mousterian. The industries of the Last Interglacial (Taubachian) show some regression in technological standardization and a reappearance of small artifacts. Other aspects of cultural adaptation (settlements, dwellings, hunting activity, symbolic and aesthetic expressions) are also summarized. It is suggested that the impact of climate and climatic changes on human settlement and behavior was greater in Central Europe (where two glaciations advanced from both north and south) than in the Mediterranean and Western Europe. The general trend of cultural veolution was toward greater technological and social complexity, but its course was not unilinear.     

Cities,Racialized Poverty,and Infrastructures of Possibility

This essay argues that the study of urban poverty is too often characterised by the disappearance of specific people and bodily politics from our analytic frames, rendering modes of life and politics illegible to scholars. We call for attention to the embodied politics of knowledge production, as neighbourhoods surrounding universities are exploited first as laboratories for poverty scholarship—exemplified in the relationship between the Chicago School’s theory of human ecology and the racialised real estate markets—and then as devalued spaces for creative industries. Following work at the intersection of urban studies and American studies, we call for a relational reading of the archives of dominant poverty scholarship, and for scholarship attentive to the body—as a knowledge project only ever partially recorded in fieldnotes or the archives—as a key site for politics.     

Identification of Employment Concentration Areas

This article presents a method to identify “Absolute and Relative Employment Concentration (AREC) areas” for a particular industry. Two novel characteristics of the method are that it simultaneously analyses AREC, and that it combines spatial concentration per area with the spatial concentration in neighbouring areas. The method is easy to understand and apply. It is developed to assist regional policy makers and corporate decision-makers with their investment decisions related to new infrastructure or plants. The identification of concentration areas also allows for analysing the performance of these areas in relation to characteristics such as infrastructure availability and the housing and labour market. This can yield new academic insights that are relevant for regional planners. An application of the newly developed method to five industries in a Dutch province subdivided into 502 areas illustrates the value of the method in comparison to other methods.     

PRODUCTIVITY GROWTH IN THE OLD AND NEW EUROPE: THE ROLE OF AGGLOMERATION EXTERNALITIES

As Europe is currently characterized by huge disparities in the economic performance of “old” and “new” states, we investigate whether this is the result of local agglomeration—specialization and diversity—externalities. Our spatial econometric analysis focuses on total factor productivity dynamics over the period 1996–2007 for 13 industries located in 276 European regions. Consistently with the “nursery cities” theory, we find that diversity exerts a positive effect in the knowledge‐intensive services of the “old” Europe urban areas, while specialization is still effective in the “new” Europe low‐tech manufacturing. Human and technological capital has also a positive impact.     

Understanding Spatial Differentiation in Urban Decline Levels

The economic and demographic changes currently manifest in many Western cities—referred to as urban decline or urban shrinkage—are receiving increased attention in public and academic debates. Although the general processes driving these changes have been identified, such processes cannot explain why regions and cities which have been exposed to similar processes still differ in their economic and demographic developments. This Western European and US-based literature review attempts to answer the question of how this interregional and intraregional variation in levels of economic and demographic decline can be understood. It is argued that the degree to which wider societal forces (such as deindustrialization, changes in international and domestic migration and changing fertility levels) impact on a particular area depends on how these forces are filtered, first, through the institutional and, second, the spatial context that the region or city is located in. To understand the differences between the cities within one region (being part of the same institutional and spatial contexts), we need to descend to the city level and take account of the local (dis)amenities, comprising its physical, social and economic assets, and the influence of (the place characteristics of) other cities in the vicinity and the socio-political framework.     

The case of specialized towns in Guangdong,China

The illustration of some preliminary results of an ongoing research on the industry in Guangdong, China, is the core of this article. In particular focus is on the so called ‘specialized towns’ and the industries that characterize them as complex actors of Chinese industrial development. The evidence on these specialized towns is quite interesting as such, being not yet well acknowledged in the international literature. However, it is also believed that an investigation of these realities may contribute to the understanding of new engines of industrial development in the context of contemporary global economic relations—what is called the ‘new industry’. Furthermore, some light is shed on the nature of the competitive challenge that China poses to traditional European industry: it is not only cheap labour, cheap land, dumping, and the like. In the new emerging China government visions, policies and industrial organization architecture seem to play a central role. In this context, the authors conclude proposing a framework of questions relevant to some of the most industrialized areas of Europe, that is the Italian regions characterized by a great diffusion of industrial districts.     

They're here—I can feel them: the epistemic spaces of Indigenous and Western Knowledges

Indigenous Knowledges (IK) are continually contrasted with Western positivist sciences. Yet the usual conception of IK—as a translatable knowledge about things—renders incomprehensible its discussion as a spiritual or ethical practice. A practice taking place within what we call an epistemic space. A moose hunting event can demonstrate how IK is produced through the epistemic spaces within which hunting is performed. Part of the performance is becoming-animal; as practiced by Koyukon Athabascans, a moose hunt reproduces the social relations between hunter and prey, spiritual relations that demonstrate an ontology and ethics seemingly distinct from those of the Western wildlife sciences founded upon Enlightenment humanism. Yet such ‘Western–Indigenous’ dichotomies falsely indicate entirely separable spaces within which to produce accounts of reality. Instead, this account of a moose hunt demonstrates an assemblage of actors within one space, who together become more than the authors' individual positions and selves, and becomes an event. We additionally argue that more faithfully representing this assemblage requires changing the form of the usual academic paper. Thus tacking between a narrative and theoretical approach that switches from each of our first-person points of view, we aim to depict how knowledge of one hunting event becomes assembled.     

The Role of Personal Factors in the Location Decision of Software Services Start-up Firms

This paper explores the factors which influence the business location decisions of start-ups, focusing in particular on the role of personal factors. Established explanations of industry location emphasize proximity to firms in the same or related industries and proximity to a wider set of business services, though recent research suggests that personal factors may play an important role in explanations of industry location—particularly in technology-enabled sectors. A survey of 97 new firms, founded between 2008 and 2012, in the Irish software services sector, shows that the business location decision is influenced by the personal motivation of entrepreneurs to attain a desired quality of life, and that this outweighs economic factors such as proximity to firms within the same or related industries, proximity to a broader set of supporting business services, infrastructure or the availability of government support schemes. Personal factors are particularly important to firms located outside the Dublin metropolitan area and to home-based businesses. This has important policy implications for national and regional governments seeking to encourage entrepreneurship in technology-enabled service sectors.     

The “New Urban Europe”: Global Challenges and Local Responses in the Urban Century

Modern cities in the open European space-economy are powerhouses of creative ideas, smart technologies, sustainable developments and socio-economic wealth. They play a pivotal role in the future of an urbanized Europe, but they are also confronted with grand challenges, notably far-reaching demographic transformations, environmental decay and climatological change, unequal social participation and ever-rising mobility trends. The challenges for urban environments may be turned into new opportunities, in particular, in such domains as advanced infrastructure and logistic systems, environmental and climate-neutral facilities, creative and knowledge-intensive strategies for socio-economic prosperity and well-being. Cities—and in particular metropolitan areas—may thus act as spearheads of sustainable economic growth for European countries. These observations call for appropriate long-range policy strategies for metropolitan areas—and networks of cities—in the highly diversified European space-economy. Such policy actions would need to be supported by solid, multidisciplinary and evidence-based research on the challenges and opportunities of urban environments in Europe. The main contribution of this paper lies in the systematic strategic approach to transform urban megatrends and challenges into research and policy concerns for Europe. The analytical framework employed to highlight and better understand such research and policy response in Europe from a typological perspective is built around four interconnected pillars (cornerstones) that form the focal points for identifying strategic future images that may be instrumental in mapping out the research and policy challenges for the “New Urban Europe”.     

Civil Society in African Contexts: Reflections on the Usefulness of a Concept

This article considers the usefulness of the concept of civil society — both as an analytical construct and as a policy tool — in non–Western contexts, drawing on a selected review of literature on Africa from anthropology and development studies. Rejecting arguments that the concept has little meaning outside its Western origins, but critical of the sometimes crude export of the concept by Western development donors seeking to build ‘good governance’, the author examines different local meanings being created around the concept as part of an increasingly universal negotiation between citizens, states and markets. The article seeks to clarify different theoretical traditions in thinking about civil society, and suggests distinguishing the use of civil society as an analytical term from the set of actually existing groups, organizations and processes which are active on the ground. The concept is therefore useful in the analysis of contemporary politics, but is also important because it has a capacity to inspire action.     

美国大都市区尺度上的工业区位研究

工业化和城市化之间的互动关系体现在都市区尺度上的工业区位上。本文在新经济地理学和城市地理学所揭示的产品差异化和城市集聚效应相互关系的基础上,通过区位熵分析、赫芬达尔-赫希曼指数,对美国工业区位与大都市区间的耦合关系进行实证研究。结果显示:集聚于大都市区核心区的往往是产品个性化和定制化程度较高的行业;位于大都市区外围区的大都是产品依赖于城市市场,但标准化程度较高的行业;传统制造业则往往位于非大都市区。多数都市工业的市场集中度较低,而大部分传统工业的市场集中度较高。这不仅印证了新经济地理学的理论推演和城市地理学的行业分析,而且对包括中国在内的转型国家城市及其产业发展具有重要的参考意义。