The Catholic Church,religious Revival,and the nationalist movement in East Timor, 1975–98

’We have nothing left to lose. We are human beings and they have treated us like insects. We will never accept them here. Even if we have to die resisting, we will resist. We have our dignity and our own identity. And God is with us!‘     

The Colonial Sinews of Imperial Power: The Political Economy of Jamaican Taxation, 1768–1838

This article uses a new data-set to calculate the ‘political economy’ or nature and purpose of taxation and spending in Jamaica between 1768 and 1839. It argues that these levels increased considerably, both in absolute terms and relative to the size of the population and economy of the island, and that the assembly raised taxes mainly to protect the white elite and the plantation economy against slave revolts and foreign invasion. Although the balance of spending shifted after Emancipation in 1834, the purpose did not, since military spending was simply redirected to subsidise policing and the cost of public order. Depending on how the national income or gross domestic product of the island is calculated, levels of taxation rose from 2 per cent in peacetime to about 4–6 per cent in wartime, peaking at 6–8 per cent in moments of crisis. White elites therefore made a significant contribution to the cost of their own defence, and to the wider projection of imperial power, and were willing to tolerate increasingly high levels of taxation because it was spent in ways that suited their interests. They thereby formed the colonial sinews of imperial power.     

The Orthodox Church of Crete, 1645–1735: a case study of the relation between sultanic power and patriarchal will

Abstract

The Ottoman policies towards the Orthodox patriarchate and its clergymen have been discussed in a number of articles. For some scholars the relationship is one of purely financial character, with the patriarch being a mere tax collector, whereas for others the patriarch is acting as ethnarch of his millet, as defined by supporters of the millet theory. In this case study, the re-establishment of the Orthodox Church on the island of Crete testifies to the complexity of the relationship between the patriarch and the sultan. The struggle of the metropolitans of Crete to establish their authority from 1651 to 1735 is connected to the history of the Greek Orthodox patriarchate in the Ottoman capital.     

The emergence of Baltic Moorkultur: visions of scientific-technological mastery of peatlands in the age of great social change, 1850–1914

ABSTRACT

This article looks at the imaginaries of progress through technology and new activities by tracing the emergence of Baltic Moorkultur in Estonia and Livonia from the 1850s to the early 1910s. Baltic Moorkultur, a set of modern drainage and peat extraction techniques, has been viewed as part of a modernisation process and evolving visions of future, which touched the identity of Baltic German landowners, scientists and entrepreneurs. General reasons for an impetus for the large-scale reclamation of peatlands were the growth of population, economic liberalisation, growing demand for fuels and the fact that the basis of manorial economy gradually crumbled and led to increasing urge to modernise its source of livelihood. Baltic Moorkultur can be thought as a high-tech response of that time to the exploitation of peatlands. This article explains why it became adopted and how it altered the appraisal of environments that had been perceived as suboptimal.