Forging a Frontier: Social Capital and Canada's Mounted Police, 1867–1914

This article examines the role of the North West Mounted Police in creating communities in the Canadian Prairies during the first decades of Confederation. Despite being created as an institution of law enforcement, the Mounted Police acted more often as a social bonding agent, creating the necessary conditions and organizations required to establish permanent communities otherwise isolated from one another. As the only federal presence in the frontier, the force evolved into an autonomous institution of cultural stability, performing vital services and advocating for frontier objectives to the government in Ottawa.     

Cotton,climate and colonialism in Dharwar,western India, 1840–1880

Focussing on the cotton improvement projects in Dharwar, western India, that exemplified the modernising aims of colonial agriculture in nineteenth-century India, this article interrogates the architecture of cotton imperialism in the colonised world through the conceptual lens of political ecology. In particular, it brings to the fore the crucial dimension of climate both as an element in colonial thinking and planning, and as a dynamic force impacting on the cultivation of transplanted American cotton. The climate of Dharwar was not quite what the cotton authorities had constructed it to be, and it was, moreover, undergoing change due to the impact of regional deforestation. Furthermore, the article shows how this failure to come to terms with local climate conditions and changes was symptomatic of a broader failure to consider the overall agricultural livelihoods of peasant cultivators. Apart from a brief period when prices were artificially high, peasants much preferred growing the accustomed indigenous cotton rather than the new exotic variety. In turn, cotton was less of a priority than the production of millet food crops. By exploring the ways in which climatic conditions interacted with the economic, social and technological processes of cotton production in Dharwar, this article highlights why American cotton cultivation failed to meet colonial expectations during this period while also revealing the fragile architectural edifice of colonial power.     

Reinventing the penitentiary: Punishment in Florida, 1868–1923

This study of the origins and development of Florida's state prison system, and the shift from the penitentiary to convict leasing in the 1880s, examines the relationship between penal practice in one Southern state and Foucault's conception of penal modernity, and the connections between race and gender and leasing. It argues that convict leasing which emerged from the failure of the penitentiary in Florida, reflects the continuity of an older model of punishment centering on punishing the body physically. Discipline and surveillance were essential features of Florida's convict lease system, but the absence of massive walls, individual cells and regimes of silence meant this Southern model conducted on private turpentine farms and phosphate mines was very different from the original Auburn and Pennsylvania penitentiaries.