Risk Management Strategies Among African-American Slaves at Locust Grove Plantation

African Americans faced a variety of risks under the institution of slavery. The theory of risk management is used as a context for understanding the lives of slaves at Locust Grove Plantation in Kentucky and for deconstructing the common myth that slavery was unusually mild there. African Americans used a diversity of means at Locust Grove to cope with risk, including generalized reciprocity, food storage, religion, and strong kinship/community bonds.     

Production Activities in the Household Economies of Plantation Slaves: Barbados and Martinique,Mid-1600s to Mid-1800s

Formerly British and French colonies, the eastern Caribbean islands of Barbados and Martinique were major players in the early development of European overseas empires dependent on African slave labor and the large-scale production of sugar. Utilizing documentary and archaeological data we discuss and compare the independent production activities or household economies of plantation slaves on these two islands. The household economy was one of the more prominent aspects of plantation slave life throughout the Caribbean, and in this paper we examine the multiple adaptive production strategies slaves employed to ameliorate the poverty of their material and economic lives.     

Rebels without a cause: North Korea, Iran and the NPT

Unchecked nuclear weapons development in North Korea and the incipient nuclear weapons programme in Iran currently pose seminal challenges to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). The disposition of these cases may determine the future of the NPT and will shape non-proliferation and disarmament efforts for the next decade or more. This article assesses these two challenges, focusing on the actions concerned European states might take to leverage and guide the inevitably central US role. The article concludes that, by smoothing the sharper edges of US nuclear and strategic policies, European states can promote political conditions more favourable to non-proliferation solutions in both critical cases and help reduce reliance on nuclear weapons threats in global security relations more broadly.     

Dispossessing Massa: Fugitive Slaves and the Politics of Slavery After 1850

This article investigates how Norwegian immigrants expressed their sense of belonging during the antebellum period. By focusing on the concept of “belonging” rather than “adjustment,” the article attempts an interpretation sensitive to how antebellum immigrants themselves perceived the process of adaptation to American society. The Civil War is usually referred to as a sort of watershed in Norwegians' adjustment to American society, and consequently scholars have downplayed the extent to which antebellum Norwegian immigrants expressed belonging in the United States prior to the Civil War. Identifying three main categories of expressions of belonging available to antebellum Norwegian immigrants – namely land ownership, place attachment, and settler ideology – the article concludes that even if these immigrants did not readily identify themselves as Americans, they became firmly attached to their new home.     

'The Rebels Turkish Tyranny': Understanding Sexual Violence in Ireland during the 1640s

This article analyses gendered violence both in the testimonies of English Protestant settlers displaced during the 1641 Irish rebellion and in the pamphlets written shortly afterwards. It argues that, given the settlers' anxiety to highlight their vulnerability and innocence in the face of perceived native Irish barbarism, sexual violence with its suggestions of possible female acquiescence or complicity had an insecure place in their testimonies. Yet contemporary pamphlet writers described the rape of Protestant women as widespread and indiscriminate, using such narratives to question the masculinity of Catholic Irish men. By investigating personal testimonies of the sexual violence suffered by women, as well as the subsequent use of such information in narratives sensationalising the ordeal of Protestants in Ireland in 1641, the complex meanings attached to sexual violence during the mid-seventeenth century can be better appreciated.