A Crisis of Confidence? Parliament and the Demand for Hospital Reform in Early‐15th‐ and Early‐16th‐Century England

This article examines attempts made by the Commons in the parliaments of April 1414 and 1512 to address the corruption, neglect and poor administrative standards deemed endemic in the nation's hospitals and almshouses, and to remedy a perceived lack of facilities for the care of sick paupers. Despite early (but short‐lived) support from the crown, the first initiative failed, partly because of its association with heretical demands for the disestablishment of the English Church. Although the underlying reasons for institutional decline were often more complex than the reformers cared to suggest, their campaign did inspire a number of hospitals and their patrons to rectify abuses. At the same time, individuals and organisations throughout society invested in new foundations, generally under lay management, for the residential accommodation of the elderly and reputable poor. These measures sufficed until the arrival of endemic pox, along with mounting concerns about vagrancy and disorder, prompted another parliamentary petition for the investigation and reform of charitable institutions. Notable for its emphasis upon the sanitary imperative for removing diseased beggars from the streets, and thus eliminating infection, the bill of 1512 also attacked the proliferation of fraudulent indulgences, which raised money under false pretences for houses that were hospitals in name only. This undertaking also failed, almost certainly because the lords spiritual had, again, drawn the line at the prospect of lay intervention in overwhelmingly ecclesiastical foundations. Both bills are reproduced in full in an appendix, that of 1512 appearing in print for the first time.     

Are rocks still water‐wet in the presence of dense CO2 or H2S?

The various modes of acid gas storage in aquifers, namely structural, residual, and local capillary trapping, are effective only if the rock remains water‐wet. This paper reports an evaluation, by means of the captive‐bubble method, of the water‐wet character in presence of dense acid gases (CO₂, H₂S) of typical rock‐forming minerals such as mica, quartz, calcite, and of a carbonate‐rich rock sampled from the caprock of a CO₂ storage reservoir in the South‐West of France. The method, which is improved from that previously implemented with similar systems by Chiquet et al. (Geofluids 2007; 7 : 112), allows the advancing and receding contact angles, as well as the adhesion behavior of the acid gas on the mineral substrate, to be evaluated over a large range of temperatures (up to 140°C), pressures (up to 150 bar), and brine salinities (up to NaCl saturation) representative of various geological storage conditions. The water‐receding (or gas‐advancing) angle that controls structural and local capillary trapping is observed to be not significantly altered in the presence of dense CO₂ or H₂S. In contrast, some alteration of the water‐advancing (or gas‐receding) angle involved in residual trapping is observed, along with acid gas adhesion, particularly on mica. A spectacular wettability reversal is even observed with mica and liquid H₂S. These results complement other recent observations on similar systems and present analogies with the wetting behavior of crude oil/brine/mineral systems, which has been thoroughly studied over the past decades. An insight is given into the interfacial forces that govern wettability in acid gas‐bearing aquifers, and the consequences for acid gas geological storage are discussed along with open questions for future work.     

What is national self‐determination? Nationality and psychology during the apogee of nationalism*

Abstract. The idea of national self‐determination propounded at the 1919 peace conference centred in Paris marked a new era in international relations. In this article I re‐examine the history of the idea of national self‐determination in this period by situating it in the context of ‘the psychological turn’. I argue that national self‐determination came to serve as a popular philosophical basis for post‐war democracy among Entente liberals at a time when the Enlightenment equivalence between democracy and ‘self‐determination’ was under challenge from new scientific depictions of the unconscious and irrational, and the biologically determined self. The focus of my discussion is the psychological discourse that threaded through the versions of national self‐determination articulated by British and French intellectuals during World War I.     

Critical review of desalination in Spain: a resource for the future?

There have been significant territorial changes in the Spanish Mediterranean in the last few decades because of the important growth of residential tourism functions. The Spanish National Hydrological Plan ( 2001 ) and, to a greater extent, the Action for Management and Use of Water Programme ( 2004 ) advocated large‐scale desalination of seawater to guarantee a supply for urban, tourism, and even future agricultural demands. The paralysis of urban development planning caused by the financial crisis (2007/08), together with the downward trend in the consumption of drinking water in the last decade, highlighted a capacity to produce desalinated water that was far superior to actual needs. This study reviews the current context in which desalinated water is produced in Spain, weighs up the advantages and disadvantages of this method of water management, and considers the potential role that this non‐conventional source of water could play as a strategic resource in the future. The main findings of the study are that desalination is not a panacea; rather, it should be considered in terms of technological parameters tailored to the circumstances of each geographical and socioeconomic environment.     

Respacing for Peace? Resistance to Integration and the Ontopolitics of Rural Planning in Post‐War Burundi

This article investigates the politics and social impact of post‐war ‘respacing for peace’ strategies in Burundi from within a set of contested spatial arrangements — or rather, post‐war socio‐spatial experiments — including peace villages, IDP site clearances and land sharing. The author takes a critical look at these reconfigurations, and the resistances and manipulations that result when people (or their remains) are moved or placed in the name of coexistence, integration and sharing after the war. In this way, the article contributes to a post‐conflict planning literature that is mostly concerned with overcoming segregation and cleansing through integration, by exploring some of the complexities and problems that can arise with unquestioned embrace of the latter. It shows that a very particular and problematic logic of ethnic coexistence and physical integration drives post‐war respacing in Burundi and that people resist it with strategies in both physical and reflexive space. Proceeding through a set of paradoxes — such as the refusal to return and staying put, or re‐emigration as a response to settling — the article explores how and why respacing‐for‐peace might produce, or fail to prevent, the opposite outcome: community conflict, social tension and segregation.     

Sold Futures? The Global Availability of Metals and Economic Growth at the Peripheries: Distribution and Regulation in a Degrowth Perspective

In recent years, the strategic role certain metals play is seen as central to the geopolitics promulgated by state agents in the North. While a switch to renewable energy and an increase in energy efficiency might be instrumental to reducing dependence on fossil energy, it increases dependence on metals. This paper starts from an analysis of the likely availability of metals in the near future and then proceeds to investigate political concerns raised by considering the geological fundamentals of social development at the peripheries of the capitalist world‐system. The inequality of metal stocks, future metal requirements and the ensuing political challenges are investigated, taking copper as an example. The final section is dedicated to the discussion of regulatory challenges in view of multiple constraints on metal extraction. This section also highlights the preconditions of a socially legitimate transition to a renewable energy system in the coming period of socio‐ecological transformation.     

Youthful Creativity in Regional Australia: Panacea for Unemployment and Out‐Migration?

This paper addresses the theme of youth out‐migration from rural Australia, in the context of recent policy discussions about creativity and its role in regional development. Ethnographic fieldwork in one rural location – the New South Wales Far North Coast – is drawn upon to highlight how creative industries are being cast as a potential way of promoting cultural activities and jobs for young people, and in turn, how they might be imagined as a means to mitigate youth out‐migration. Yet, creative industries have contradictory employment and social outcomes. Creative industries are likely to generate higher rates of youth participation in economic activities than public data reveal. However, strategies for future job growth should also consider the limitations and instabilities of creative industry employment. Second, and more broadly, the paper discusses those socio‐cultural dimensions of nascent creative industries that may have a more substantial impact when conceived as part of strategies to stem youth exodus from rural areas. Creative activities may contribute to rural development in indirect ways, especially if linked to policy goals of increased tolerance of youth activities, better provision of cultural services, and improved well‐being for young people. While formal job‐creation may be limited, creative industries could mitigate some of the impacts of youth migration to cities by enriching regional social life and mediating perceptions of the advantages and drawbacks of rural versus urban life. This kind of policy imagination requires a shift in attitudes towards young people and a more genuine commitment to encourage young people to feel that they belong in non‐metropolitan areas.     

A Switzerland of the north? The Nationalistes and a bi‐national Canada*

Abstract. Nationalism is frequently associated with the break‐up of states. This article seeks to demonstrate that nationalism, through the guise of bi‐nationalism, can be compatible with the creation and maintenance of a multinational state. The political vision of the Nationalistes of Québec provides the focus. In the early twentieth century these individuals believed that Canada could emulate states such as Switzerland and Belgium, which were marked by a degree of power‐sharing. They sought the adoption of practices which have since become associated with the doctrine of ‘consociationalism’. The research suggests that these nationalists were conscious that federalism, on its own, is not sufficient to accommodate a significant national minority.     

Is “Threat” in the Eye of the Researcher? Theory and Measurement in the Study of State‐Level Immigration Policymaking

This study initiates a methodological critique of the state‐level immigration policy literature through the lens of the racial threat and group power perspectives. First, I highlight the conceptual problems related to the application of such theories to legislature‐level data analysis. Next, I demonstrate the methodological and analytical problems that raise concerns about ad hoc theorizing in this field. Using counts of hostile and welcoming immigration legislation (2005–2011), I demonstrate that outgroup size measures correlate positively with both dependent variables while measures of population growth rate yield null results unless used on their own. These results suggest that the use of legislature‐level models with demographic indicators does not allow us to gain a clear understanding of whether and how population dynamics influence immigration policymaking. Based on these findings, I recommend that when using demographic indicators as key explanatory variables, researchers provide evidence of result consistency across multiple model specifications and also test the models with both hostile and inclusive policy variables. Such protocols would help avoid ad hoc theorizing.     

Deterritorialising the nation? Internet and the politics of the Greek‐American diaspora

In this article, analysis focuses on the websites of Greek‐American diaspora organisations. The aim is to study these media outlets on two levels: (1) with regard to their communication function(s), in order to understand the spectrum of usages they offer to their visitors; and (2) with regard to the way they signify identity specificity at the crossroads of a parallel ethnic or national adherence. The low interactivity constitutes one of the general features of the media analysed. The persistence of the nation as the framework to apprehend collective belonging and the interaction with the ‘other’ is another recurrent and important element. The ‘identity specificity’ of the Greek diaspora community is not presented in articulation to the host society, but in terms of a continuous attachment to a ‘mother‐nation’, as a historic and cultural entity. The nationhood claimed and promoted in this manner is ethnic and cultural, and it espouses the form of an ecumenical and transcendent Hellenism.     

Nation‐building policies in the Balkans: an Ottoman or a manufactured legacy?

Are post‐Ottoman nation‐building policies in the Balkans a legacy of the millet system? Some contend that the discriminatory nation‐building policies along religious lines employed by Balkan nations ruling elites are a legacy of the Ottoman era millet system (administration by religious affiliation); others argue that the Ottoman legacy is palpable in the millet‐like features preserved in the minority rights protection system resulting from World War I, and yet other scholars see the millet system as a critical antecedent. Studying closely the policies towards non‐core groups in the post‐Ottoman Balkans, one finds that the ‘Ottoman legacy’ is much more differentiated than is commonly assumed and that effects vary widely from place to place. Moreover, I argue that the persistence of certain features from one period to another may be an actual legacy in some cases, but there is also a possibility that we are dealing with a manufactured legacy, where elites choose to intervene and perpetuate an institution or a particular feature of it. I empirically demonstrate this distinction in a crucial case using archival sources.     

A pretext for plunder? Environmental change and state‐led redevelopment in the Peruvian Amazon

In 2014, the Peruvian federal government declared the low‐income neighbourhood of Pueblo Libre de Belén in the Amazonian city of Iquitos to be in a state of emergency. A federal decree stated that ‘constant inundation’ from the Itaya River had put residents and their homes in jeopardy. Following this declaration, the federal government proposed to resettle residents in a planned community, 13 km outside the city. Drawing from interviews with 77 households in the neighbourhood, this article examines residents' responses to the relocation plan as well as their deep scepticism over the motivations driving it. Considering the state's plans for redeveloping the area as a tourist zone, this case study illustrates how concerns about the future impacts of environmental change – and flooding specifically – can be exploited by state actors for economic and political gain while further disenfranchising vulnerable urban populations.     

What's in a name? Possible names for a legislative body and the birth of national sovereignty during the French Revolution, 15-16 June 1789

Historians disagree over the meaning of the declaration on 17June 1789 by Third Estate deputies, along with a few clergy,that they constituted a ‘National Assembly’, onethat could act in place of the Estates General and despite theabsence of most Noble and Clerical deputies. This article reconstructsthe debates of 15–16 June 1789 leading up to this declaration,finding in deputy memoirs, letters and newspaper accounts fifty-eightspeeches given by thirty-eight deputies supporting several alternativeproposals. Careful analysis of the speeches demonstrates thatselection of the title National Assembly was a result of contingentevents and political compromise, primarily chosen as a meansto end the stalemate between the Orders over verification ofdeputy credentials and over whether voting in the Estates Generalwould be by head or by Order. It thus calls into question argumentsthat the declaration was the necessary outcome of a pre-revolutionaryprocess.     

The Levanzo I Wreck,Sicily: a 4th‐century AD merchantman in the service of the annona?

Between 2005 and 2009 a deep‐water shipwreck was located, mapped, and partially excavated by a joint team from RPM Nautical Foundation and the office of the Soprintendenza del Mare, Sicily. Located off Levanzo Island, one of the Egadi Islands off north‐west Sicily, this wrecked merchantman revealed a mixed cargo of foodstuffs, coarseware, glass, and construction materials. The nature of the wreck‐site, its cargo, operational date, and find‐location indicate its likely association with the annona service which supplied Rome. © 2012 The Authors     

Change and the Corporeal in Seventeenth‐ and Eighteenth‐Century Gender History: Or,Can Cultural History Be Rigorous?

This essay is a methodological evaluation of the procedures and presuppositions informing the social and cultural history of gender, as exemplified in recent scholarship about the transformations of sex and gender in Britain from the early modern period through the long eighteenth century. It suggests answers to two questions: how can we write the cultural history of gender while maintaining both rigour in the enterprise and an awareness of its limits? And where might we go when these limits suddenly appear to undermine the very foundational presuppositions on which the whole cultural‐historical project is built?     

‘Saving the Solomons’: a New Geopolitics in the ‘Arc of Instability’?

The recent crisis in the Solomon Islands is reviewed in the context of historical and regional antecedents. In the past two decades political and ethnic disputes have flared in several parts of Melanesia and nearby parts of the ‘arc of instability’. Tensions and violence in the Solomon Islands, based on social, economic and political issues, exemplify regional development concerns. The collapse of the economy and civil order resulted in the Solomon Islands being characterised as a ‘failed State’. Localised warfare brought external military intervention, with a regional assistance mission led by Australia, which paralleled other involvement in the region. Involvement has emphasised renewed Australian interest in the region, in the light of global geopolitical shifts, and a more controversial approach to regional security and development.     

Visual artists: counter‐urbanites in the Canadian countryside?

Professional visual artists have always enjoyed considerable latitude in the selection of a place of work and residence. Recent decades have witnessed their growing presence within the Canadian countryside. This paper seeks to provide an interpretation of this phenomenon by exploring two sub-objectives. First is to determine whether artists who establish themselves in rural communities can be considered to be part of the counter‐urbanisation movement, involving the relocation of urban residents down the settlement hierarchy. Second is to identify what types of migration are occurring and why. Our surveys of visual artists residing in the southern Ontario communities of Elora and Parry Sound reveal that most participants are part of a movement involving the decision to take up both residence and employment in a rural locale. We further find that the relocation of visual artists is driven to some extent by a strong attachment to natural landscapes. By way of conclusions, we briefly speculate about the broader population of urban residents. We remind ourselves that artists often have been harbingers of new movements and that today there are growing numbers of workers outside the artistic community who also have increasing latitude in regards to choosing where to live and work. Overall, our findings suggest that there is ongoing blurring of geographic boundaries—between space and place, between place of work and place of residence and, of course, between rural and urban.