Māori “Conversion” to the Rule of Law and Nineteenth‐Century Imperial Loyalties

Missionaries were among the first Europeans to interact with the New Zealand Māori, bringing an evangelical message with a strict set of “laws” for Māori to follow. Māori, whose own religious beliefs required rigid observance to ritual, took time to convert to missionary Christianity but, like many Oceanic peoples, did so with fervour, regulating their daily lives according to the Laws of the missionaries’ God. With the advent of British rule in New Zealand in 1840, the Treaty of Waitangi gave Māori the same rights as British subjects, but also (in the Māori‐language version) guaranteed tribal autonomy. As the British administration established itself, it slowly attempted to bring Māori under the authority of the Queen's Laws, using persuasion rather than force. This article, using Māori‐language newspapers of the mid‐nineteenth century, discusses how some Māori approached the question of Law in a similar way to how they had converted to Christianity. This was partly due to their own, now Christianised, worldview, but it was also due to how the colonial authorities presented the principles of Law to them.     

The temporary as the future: Ready‐to‐use therapeutic food and nutraceuticals in South Africa

The reconfiguration of food as a pharmaceutical in biomedical regimes has been considered by scholars along two axes: (1) food supplementation as humanitarian intervention, based on a specific value of life and delivered in ‘crisis’ situations with a short temporal horizon; (2) food supplementation as commodity, marketed as enhancing ‘wellness’ or potential, based on notions of risk in broad temporal frames. We consider nutraceuticals and ready‐to‐use‐therapeutic foods as they are deployed by state and commercial actors in South Africa in relation to two key figures: the pregnant woman and the HIV‐positive population. These biopolitical expressions of post‐apartheid regimes of knowledge, care and governance reveal how state distribution and the corporate marketing of supplements employ a future‐oriented logic that appeals to notions of power, energy and potential. Therapeutic foods in this context are thus not merely humanitarian technologies that reconfigure crisis as a chronic condition – the temporary becoming permanent – but are premised on new potentialities, in which the temporary may (re)shape the future.     

‘Pleading for Help’: Gender Relations and Cross‐Cultural Logic in the Early Modern Mediterranean

Religious conversion cases involving women constitute an important aspect of early modern Mediterranean history. Various Muslim women left their homes in the Ottoman Empire, came to Venice and attempted to convert to Christianity. While some women found male protection and established themselves as Christians, others were pursued by male relatives and found themselves in contested cross‐cultural struggles. In this regard, gender relations surrounding female conversions also involved questions of private power, honour and legal jurisdiction. Framed by complex power relations and by complicated gender dynamics, males exercised control over female converts in a variety of ways.     

The Making of “World‐Class” Delhi: Relations Between Street Hawkers and the New Middle Class

Urban India is undergoing transformation as formal electoral politics increasingly favors the new middle class. Scholarship tends to compartmentalize the politics of the new middle class and the poor, and this article focuses on inter‐class relations. By focusing on relations between street hawkers and the new middle class in Delhi, I show that rather than engaging in zero‐sum conflicts over urban space, conflict is typically over the terms of its use. The analysis shows that these classes are interdependent; the poor depend on the new middle class for their livelihoods, and the lifestyles of new middle class are enabled by services provided by the poor. While the poor enable and participate in Delhi's transformation into a so‐called “world‐class” city, the reconciliation of competing visions of urbanization—one geared toward social reproduction and the other subsistence—is what is at stake in contemporary inter‐class relations.     

‘Beer and Britannia’: public‐house culture and the construction of nineteenth‐century British‐Welsh industrial identity

Prior to industrialisation, there was a nebulous and fragmented Welsh national character or mass collective identity. Industrialisation engendered significant sociocultural upheaval and change, and for this ‘new’ society to function effectively a cohesive Welsh identity had to emerge. Because the impetus behind industrialisation had occurred primarily in a British context, any newly formed Welsh identity would ultimately have to be reconciled to the nation's industrial import within a ‘United Kingdom’. Mass cultural commonalities and the role played by leisure in this procedure is a core element in the establishment of industrial modernist nation‐states. Therefore, this article argues that public‐house culture played a central role in the construction of a new industrial Welsh national ideology that was ultimately allied to, and a constituent of, a British imperial agenda designed to exploit both the natural resources and workforce of the area to its maximum extent.     

Sulfosalt melts and heavy metal (As‐Sb‐Bi‐Sn‐Pb‐Tl) fractionation during volcanic gas expansion: the El Indio (Chile) paleo‐fumarole

High‐sulfidation vein gold deposits such as El Indio, Chile, formed in fracture arrays <1000 m beneath paleo‐solfatara in volcanic terranes. Stable isotope data have confirmed a predominance of magmatic vapor during the deposition of arsenic‐rich sulfide–sulfosalt assemblages in this deposit. These provide a unique opportunity to analyze the processes and products of high‐temperature volcanic gas expansion in fractures that form the otherwise inaccessible infrastructure deep inside equivalent present‐day fumaroles. We provide field emission scanning electron microscope and LA‐ICP‐MS micro‐analytical data for the wide range of heavy, semi‐metals and metalloids (arsenic, antimony, bismuth, tin, silver, gold, tellurium and selenium) in the complex pyrite‐enargite‐Fe‐tennantite assemblages from Copper Stage mineralization in the El Indio deposit. These data document the progressive fractionation of antimony and other heavy metals, such as bismuth, during crystallization from a sulfosalt melt that condensed from expanding vapor at about 15 MPa (150 bars) and >650°C following higher temperature vapor deposition of crystalline pyrite and enargite. The sulfosalt melt aggressively corroded the earlier enargite and pyrite and hosts clusters of distinctive euhedral quartz crystals. The crystallizing sulfosalt melt also trapped an abundance of vugs within which heavy metal sulfide and sulfosalt crystals grew together with K‐Al silicates and fluorapatite. These data and their geologic context suggest that, in high‐temperature fumaroles on modern active volcanoes, over 90% of the arsenic content of the primary magmatic vapor (perhaps 2000 mg kg^?1) was precipitated subsurface as sulfosalt. Subsurface fractionation may also account for the range of exotic Pb‐Sn‐Bi‐Se sulfosalts observed in fumarole sublimates on active volcanoes such as Vulcano, Italy, as well as on extra‐terrestrial volcanoes such as Maxwell Montes, Venus.     

Tales from the Other Side of the Bridge: YMCA Manhood,Social Class and Social Reform in Turn‐of‐the‐Twentieth‐Century Philadelphia

This article examines the interplay of gender and class ideologies at University House, a settlement house run by University of Pennsylvania Christian Association students in Philadelphia. University House exemplified a pioneering national movement to inculcate social responsibility in college youth. As an initiative sponsored by a campus Christian Association that joined a national YMCA movement to evangelise college campuses, the settlement had a unique agenda. The settlement's advocates intended to reform the neighbourhood's working‐class Irish Catholic boys, but also to forge character and manhood in the students who worked there. Moreover, settlement leaders and volunteers preached a brand of manhood steeped in the rhetoric of evangelical Protestantism, an ideal that guided their actions among city boys. Though their publicly stated mission was to make men of city youths, they turned manhood into a tool for preserving class distinctions and cementing their own place among the country's educated élite. Meanwhile, they modified their own definitions of manhood through the practice of social reform.     

Military Nationalism and the State: the Case of Fin‐De‐Siècle Spain

Abstract. Military culture can play an important role in the rise of modern nationalism, as developments in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Spain demonstrate. Like many Europeans, Spanish army officers turned increasingly to nationalist ideology as they lost faith in the ability of liberal institutions to meet their needs. Because Spain, where army officers had much influence on politics and society, lacked other strong movements of modern, Castile‐centred nationalism, military culture had a significant and long‐lasting influence on the subsequent development of notions of Spanish national identity. The case of turn‐of‐the‐century Spanish military nationalism lends credence to a general understanding of nationalism as a political phenomenon in which the state plays a central role.     

System failure: the underlying causes of US policy‐making errors in Afghanistan

The United States intervention in Afghanistan since 2001 has brought progress in some areas, but the conflict has expanded, the Taliban remains powerful, and misgovernance and predation are widespread. Afghan national security forces—the linchpin of the coalition's exit strategy—offer no guarantee of future stability. Many accounts describe the mistakes that led to this predicament. This article attempts to explain why these mistakes were made by examining their underlying or structural causes. Based on 51 interviews with officials and experts, it identifies major US policy‐making errors with respect to state‐building, military activities and diplomacy. It argues that there are four principal underlying causes of such errors, relating to organizations, leadership and strategic thinking, psychology, and domestic politics. It finds that there were severe shortcomings in the acquisition and processing of information and a lack of institutional self‐evaluation; civilian and military leaders made major strategic misjudgements in mistaking the strategy for the goal, overestimating the efficacy of military force or resources, and drawing false lessons from history or analogous cases such as Iraq; leaders were predisposed to overconfidence and oversimplification; and, at the highest level, policies were distorted by domestic politics. The article contends that the cumulative impact of these shortcomings was sufficient to seriously disrupt the functioning of the foreign policy‐making system. It argues that action is required to improve US information gathering and assessment, systematize institutional self‐evaluation, build regional expertise, establish mechanisms to understand the motivations and perceptions of other actors, and increase awareness of decision‐makers’ cognitive flaws and biases.