近十年晚清财政史研究综述

晚清财政史研究是晚清经济史研究的重要领域之一。近十年来,学术界的目光主要集中于晚清财政状况、财政收支、财政制度等方面,在论和资料整理上均取得了丰硕成果。学们从纵向与横向两方面着笔,对晚清财政状况进行了宏观考察。财政收入研究侧重于外债、关税与厘金,而对外赔款仍是财政支出研究的热点。财政制度与体制方面,学界论述较多为中央与地方的财政关系问题。至于财政思想,学们对重要人物的财政思想研究较多,对总体性财政思想的研究则相对薄弱。此外,他们还对太平天国政权的赋税制度与政策予以客观分析和评价。     

Characterization of New Zealand obsidian using PXRF

New Zealand has some of the most active areas of rhyolitic volcanism in the world and this has produced numerous obsidian sources in the northern half of the North Island. In total archaeologists have recognized 27 named locations from which obsidian can be obtained scattered across 4 geological source regions. Shortly after colonization in the late 13th century AD Polynesian settlers began transporting this material some thousands of kilometers throughout the country and across the sea in small quantities to distant neighbors in the Kermadecs and Chatham islands. Although considerable research has been conducted on obsidian sourcing in New Zealand the complexity of geochemical source discrimination and the lack of a practical method of non-destructive geochemical analysis has hindered progress. We present the results of our use of PXRF to provide geochemical data on New Zealand obsidian sources and to compare the use of discriminant analysis and classification tree analysis to discriminate among sources and attribute archaeological samples to sources. Our research suggests that classification tree analysis is superior to discriminant analysis in sourcing studies. A large case study using an important settlement phase site (S11/20) from the Auckland region demonstrates the utility of the methods and the results support a model of high degrees of mobility and interaction during the early settlement of New Zealand.     

Walking with preschool‐aged children to explore their local wellbeing affordances

An increasingly well‐developed body of research uses neighbourhood walks to better understand primary school children's experiences of local environments, yet virtually nothing is known about preschool‐aged children's connections to their neighbourhoods. A reason for this omission is the commonly held view that preschool children lack competency to reflect on lived environments beyond playgrounds, kindergartens, and other confined settings that dominate early childhood. However, preliterate children walk around, use, and create intimate relationships with local environments as shown by 10 children aged 3–5 years from Dunedin in New Zealand during go‐along interviews. We asked each to walk us around their locale, explaining and pointing out favourite and less beloved places and activities. In this article, we advance two arguments: first that preschoolers are knowledgeable meaning makers of place; second that walking with them is a key step to understanding their life worlds and provides a way for preliterate and preverbal children to demonstrate knowledge and understanding of their spatial worlds, including as research participants. We challenge the idea that children of this age lack large‐scale spatial competency and understanding. Walking with them generated an in‐depth appreciation of their experiences of environments and revealed deep connections they had with their locales at varied scales. The work enables us to offer novel insights into spatial competency, sociospatial complexities, and the multiple dimensions of young children's wellbeing affordances in urban environments. Such insights are highly relevant for geographers, planners, and others who shape children's urban environments.     

Politicisation but not Responsiveness: Preferences and Experiences of New Zealand Councillors

This article reports the responses of New Zealand local government councillors concerning their preferences for, and experiences of, council officer employment; and the values councillors perceive that council officers adopt in their dealings with councillors. This study received responses from slightly fewer than one hundred councillors in New Zealand local government out of 247 and therefore, the results presented here should be viewed as indicative only because of the small sample. Nevertheless the survey found that 54 per cent to 77 per cent would prefer to have influence over council officer employment, with council officers displaying deference to the authority of councillors. Councillors prefer to have frank and fearless advice but they prefer not to be under pressure from council officers to accept that advice. This ensures that they obtain the type of support they need to carry out the tasks and responsibilities that have been conferred on local authorities; and they – the councillors rather than council officers – remain in control of the council affairs.     

Household Incomes in Cuban Agriculture: A Comparison of the State,Co-operative,and Peasant Sectors

This article presents the results of a 1991 household income survey of the three main groups in Cuban agriculture: wage workers on state farms, members of production co-operatives, and peasant producers. It is shown that since the 1959 revolution household income levels in the agricultural sector have improved dramatically, while regional differences have been ameliorated considerably. Households in the private sector of Cuban agriculture have fared the best. It is also demonstrated that agricultural households rely on multiple sources of income to generate their livelihood. Rather than being strictly proletarian, collective, or petty commodity producers, these households are best characterized by the multiple class relations in which they participate.     

The Emergence of International Studies in New Zealand*

With acceptance of the responsibilities of a founder member of the League of Nations - including assuming an international mandate in the Pacific - the prospect of a distinctive New Zealand international role and awareness emerged, thus laying the foundation for a local version of international studies. The early figures in the field were a group of intellectuals trained in history, law, or economics, often with experience of British higher education. Members of the League of Nations Union, the Institute of Pacific Relations, and later the New Zealand Institute of International Affairs, their activities and publications sometimes challenged the boundaries of Empire-centric discourse. An avowed Internationalism - though sometimes compromised by racial anxieties - was a strong theme in their work; the impact of US foundations especially stimulated a knowledge of the importance to New Zealand of extra-Imperial issues in the Pacific and Asia. Although only intermittently engaged with policy, their influence is nevertheless discernible, especially from 1935.     

Victories from Insurgency: Re‐Negotiating Housing,Community Control,and Citizenship at the Margins

This article considers how insurgent campaigns for housing the poor in New York City and Chicago succeeded in engaging the local state, non‐profits and financial institutions in the creation of community land trusts. These campaigns had long arcs in which victories and losses built from each other, neither as permanent as they initially seemed. The campaigns moved iteratively between spaces of “invited citizenship” (courtrooms, planning committees) and “invented” spaces of collective action (property takeovers). They found their greatest success when, exploiting state incapacity to defend abandoned property, they elicited a degree of complicity from local governments in their takeovers of housing and land. The article thus contests dichotomised accounts of social movements that oppose losses to victories, cooptation to resistance, and movements to institutions. Instead, we call for situated and dynamic accounts of insurgent practice, capable of theorising the long, messy, co‐constituted evolution of political contexts and popular struggle.     

On the importance of an international exploration of the Atlantic ocean in respect to its physical and biological conditions

Acclimatisation Societies have been responsible for most of the exotic species entering the native flora and fauna of New Zealand. The development of these Societies is traced and the influence of their past activities on wildlife establishment and maintenance is demonstrated. An examination of the present role of the Societies within the evolving pattern of wildlife management in New Zealand reveals them as important environmental pressure groups at both local and national level.     

Women and Money: Lessons from Senegal

This article examines the complexity and diversity of women's informal financial practices using data from surveys conducted in Senegal. It suggests that these practices are at the centre of a constant dialectic between short‐term and long‐term horizons, between the requirements of daily survival and the demands of community solidarity, and between personal aspirations and collective constraints. These practices also clearly illustrate a desire among the women in Senegal to impose a form of financial self‐discipline, and to create situations that will oblige them to earn income. The socio‐economic diversity among these entrepreneurs is also underscored. Informal financial arrangements are both a product and producer of gender inequalities and inequalities among women, as reflected in the research. This has direct policy implications, especially for microfinance products. If they are to be effective, microfinance services must develop beyond a standard, one‐size fits all model and become more innovative and adaptable to the diverse demands of women. They must be combined with complementary measures that challenge the systemic causes of inequality. Microfinance programmes should draw on informal financial arrangements while challenging their tendency to perpetuate inequality.     

Financialization and Global Commodity Chains: Distributional Implications for Cotton in Sub‐Saharan Africa

Restructuring of global and local markets has led to an increased influence of commodity derivatives markets on commodity price setting. This has critical implications for price risks experienced by actors along commodity chains. Commodity derivatives markets have undergone significant changes that have been referred to as the ‘financialization of commodities’, which we define as an increase in trading activity by financial investors and the reorientation of business strategies by commodity trading houses towards risk management and financial activities. This article assesses how these global financialization processes affect commodity producers in low‐income countries via the operational dynamics of global commodity chains and national market structures. It investigates how prices are set and transmitted and how risks are distributed and managed in the cotton sectors in Burkina Faso, Mozambique and Tanzania. It concludes that uneven exposure to price instability and access to price risk management have important distributional implications. Whilst international traders have the capacity to deal with price risks through hedging, in addition to expanding their profit possibilities through financial activities on derivatives markets, local actors in producing countries face the challenge of increased short‐termism — albeit to different extents depending on national market structures — with limited access to risk management.     

Beyond Punitive Regulation? New Zealand Local Governments' Responses to Homelessness

Abstract: This article investigates the ways in which New Zealand local authorities respond to homelessness. It finds that while some punitive bylaws targeting homeless people exist, they are not widespread, and in three case study cities are accompanied by efforts to support social service providers. This indicates that New Zealand local authorities are prepared to look at alternatives to address homelessness, as opposed solely to following trends towards the increasing persecution of homeless people. However, cities' attitudes are subject to political whim, and on occasion they articulate an exclusive vision of public space linked to concerns for public safety and city image. Such thinking has led, for example, to homeless people being served with trespass notices by local authorities asserting “ownership” of public space. Nevertheless, the actions of New Zealand cities depart significantly from the dominant approaches seen elsewhere. This may be explained in part by the relative invisibility of homelessness in New Zealand, and by a popular distinction between “good” and “bad” homeless individuals. The net result is a generally positive approach to reducing homelessness by providing appropriate housing and support to those on the streets, complicating any direct application of the critical geographical literature on this issue to the New Zealand context.     

Restructuring the Architecture of State Regulation in the Australian and Aotearoa/New Zealand Cleaning Industries and the Growth of Precarious Employment

This paper examines changes in the commercial cleaning industry in Australasia which are occurring against a backdrop of significant transformation in the mode of labour market regulation in both countries. Specifically, whereas for most of the twentieth century both Aotearoa/New Zealand and Australia had systems of labour market regulation in which the state provided minimum wage and work protections through the interventions of arbitration courts, in the past few years these courts have either been abolished (in the case of New Zealand) or severely restricted in their ambit (in the case of Australia), all as part of a neoliberal effort to introduce “flexibility” into labour markets. The result has been an erosion of wages and a worsening of conditions of employment for cleaners and many other groups of workers. At the same time, this transformation in the architecture of labour market regulation poses significant challenges to unions seeking to represent cleaners and other low‐paid service sector workers.     

‘I Do Not Work: I Do Commercial Sex Work’. Ambiguities in the Discourse and Practice of Selling Sex in Mombasa,Kenya

Building on the narratives of women selling sex in Mombasa, this article shows how the livelihoods and strategies of women who self‐identify as sex workers are influenced by the discourses and activities of the NGO sector, the sex workers’ movement, and international tourism on the one hand, and by their struggle for survival and personal advancement on the other hand. More specifically, while the term ‘sex industries’ or ‘sex workers’ — as used by a number of local and international actors — is partly internalized by women selling sex, these terms obscure the more complicated realities of women who seek to secure income for their households.     

Women's and Men's Work: The Production and Marketing of Fresh Food and Export Crops in Papua New Guinea

Fresh food markets have been a fixture of the social and economic landscape of urban and rural PNG since colonial times. They were often the first points of engagement with the market economy, especially for women, who as small‐scale producers, sold surplus produce from their food gardens located on communally‐owned land. Although local food markets have remained an important livelihood for women, the later adoption and expansion of perennial export cash crops like coffee and cocoa overshadowed food production for local markets as men dominated export crop production on land alienated from communal ownership for decades or permanently. New forms of social relations of production and more exclusive forms of land tenure emerged to accommodate export crop production that were very different from those governing the production and marketing of fresh food. Market values and a trend towards individualisation of production with less capacity to mobilise labour through reciprocal labour exchange networks have characterised export crop production. With the income benefits captured largely by men, women began redirecting their labour to fresh food production where they were able to exercise more control of production and income while still mobilising labour through indigenous labour exchange arrangements. Attempts by men to appropriate the income of women and sons’ labour in export cropping were greater during flush periods when income levels were high, and they were less likely to attempt to appropriate this income in low crop periods when incomes were lower. However, with the recent emergence of female entrepreneurers earning relatively large sums of money in large‐scale, profit‐driven vegetable production, the moral frameworks governing food production are coming to resemble those governing export crops, and making labour more difficult to mobilise. Despite women being key players in these changes, we argue there is an emerging risk that men will attempt to assert control over this income or move into vegetable production themselves and possibly marginalise women in the process.     

PHYSICOCHEMICAL COMPOSITIONAL ANALYSIS OF CERAMICS: A CASE STUDY IN KENTING,TAIWAN*

The composition of ceramics does not just reflect the component of some specific, unprocessed, geological, raw material source, but also certain forms of human behaviour involved in its manufacture. The purpose of this research project is to apply the acid‐extraction chemical method, complemented by a thin‐section petrographic study, to the compositional analyses of certain local ceramic collections (mainly from several sites in the southern Taiwan area). The results present the raw materials that the ceramic manufacturers of the two cultural traditions (O‐laun‐pi Phase II and Phase III–IV), which overlapped temporally, used. These materials came from the same sources, but the ceramics were manufactured in different ways. Particularly, the people of O‐laun‐pi Phase III–IV also procured certain materials from either local sources or from somewhere in eastern Taiwan to make their pots. The results also indicate that there might have been a variation in terms of their manufacture among sites of the same cultural tradition.     

Finance and Industrial Policy in Unsuccessful Developmental States: The Case of Pakistan

While a large body of research indicates that state‐directed finance worked for successful East Asian developers, the dominant assumption remains that countries with a weak state capacity, where corruption is rife, should not ‘try this at home’. In this article, that narrative is questioned through a case study of the role of the financial sector in Pakistan, which is widely considered to be a successful case of financial liberalization, contrasting the role of the publicly controlled financial system in the 1970s and 1980s with that of the liberalized financial system in the 2000s. Utilizing archival firm‐level and aggregate data, historic government documents, and interviews with policy makers, financial sector employees and industrialists, it is argued that in the Pakistani case, the withdrawal of state control over the financial sector led to a deterioration of outcomes. This resulted in the allocation of credit away from the productive sectors, namely industry and agriculture, towards unproductive sectors, for speculative purposes; and in the health of the financial sector not improving as expected, with non‐performing loans and corruption remaining a problem, and banks actually becoming a greater burden on government finances. This indicates that even states with weak capacity and flawed industrial policy may be better off with some degree of public control over finance.     

The 2010 Cultural Olympiad: playing for the global or the local stage?

Increasingly, local cultural communities are called upon to support global mega‐events such as the Olympic games with the promise that this global occurrence is a ‘once in a lifetime opportunity’ for an urban artistic community. What evidence exists to support the premise that hosting a Cultural Olympiad provides a professional arts sector with positive and substantive legacies, sustained material and financial benefits, or increased national and international profile? Data collected on the Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad suggest that the local arts sector did not enjoy any of the claimed global benefits. However, it is also clear that some arts organizations, by virtue of the artistic and operational decisions they took, were able to exert influence over and upon the outcome; this outcome ultimately depending on whether they elected to play for a global or a local stage.     

Success,swing and gender: The performance off women candidates for parliament in New Zealand, 1946–87

New Zealand was the first country in the world to give women the vote, and it has a higher proportion of women as Members of Parliament than any of the other Anglo‐American first‐past‐the‐post democracies. An examination of the vote‐pulling powers of women candidates for Parliament in all the general elections in New Zealand since the end of the Second World War finds that female candidates for the Labour Party have done statistically significantly better than their male counterparts, but for National Party candidates the reverse is the case — men perform better than women. Various reasons for these findings are canvassed, including the possibilities that Labour in New Zealand is benefitting from its initiatives with respect to women's affairs, and from the female equivalent of an ‘old boys’ network.     

2Precious2Mine: Post‐politics,Colonial Imaginary,or Hopeful Political Moment?

Radical democrats and geographers have argued that democracy requires a vibrant contestatory politics to challenge the contemporary “post‐political” conjuncture. Despite suggestions of post‐political processes in Aotearoa New Zealand, there are signs of a more vibrant politics. In 2010 an environmental campaign called “2Precious2Mine” captured the national geographic imaginary. Drawing on this example, we argue that although a space was opened for a vibrant contestatory politics, its effects were paradoxical. The campaign both reinforced the hegemonic narratives of neoliberal (post)colonial Aotearoa New Zealand, and simultaneously produced moments that challenged this apparent post‐politicising trajectory. While we argue that such frameworks are useful, there is a risk that without cognisance of the situated nature of politics and closure, they both lose their political and academic explanatory purchase. Post‐politics becomes at risk of constructing that which it seeks to describe, while radical democracy ends up falling short of its aims.     

The Gender of the Gold: an Ethnographic and Historical Account of Women's Involvement in Artisanal and Small‐scale Mining in Mount Kaindi,Papua New Guinea

The Kaindi area of Papua New Guinea is home to a large community of Anga small‐scale miners. While they constitute nearly half of the local population, women do not participate in mining to the same extent as the men. Drawing on ethnographic data this paper shows that this is not just due to personal choice but also to a series of limiting factors that include pollution beliefs, land tenure practices, the unequal control of household resources, and the gendered division of labour. Far from being simply intrinsic to Anga culture, these impediments also relate to the gendered history of the colonial goldfields and to contemporary national law and company practice in the extractive sector. Similarly, they are neither unambiguous nor resistant to change. Indeed, since the Anga first entered the mines their women have engaged in resource extraction in ever increasing numbers, both independently and alongside male relatives and partners. Through an analysis of this historical trend, my paper will show that historically conscious ethnography can help specify not only the main obstacles women face in entering artisanal and small‐scale mining (ASM), but also the conditions that lead to their strengthening or weakening through time, thus identifying factors to be stimulated or countered in policies and strategies for equitable development within the sector.