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.     

Business Failure,Capital Investment and Information: Mining Companies in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, 1900–13

Investment in mining enterprises in the British Empire was popular in the period 1880–1914 despite the high-risk nature of the business and the presence of unscrupulous company promoters who sought only pecuniary gain; most mining companies failed. This article examines the reasons for the failure of mining companies in Sudan to 1913, using this analysis to explore the importance of information for mining investment, the role of business and social networks in the formation of mining companies, the relationship between business and colonial government, and the ‘gentlemanly’ nature of the City of London as a financial centre with reference to the provision of capital and related specialist mining services. The main reason for the failure of mining in Sudan was deficient information on which investment decisions were based, related to inaccurate notions of mineral wealth located in the colony. Nevertheless, the dynamism of the City at this time can partly be explained by the ability to tease out commercial opportunity in the most marginal of locations with the minimum of capital outlay.     

Liquid Assets: Madeira Wine and Cultural Capital among Lowcountry Planters, 1735–1900

This article explores the history of the South Carolina and Georgia elites’ passion for madeira wine. It describes the nature of madeira and the characteristics that made the wine unique. By historical accidents, planters and merchants developed an ardent taste for madeira and over time this fondness became elevated to a tradition for collecting. Employing Bourdieu’s concepts of multiple forms of capital, the article demonstrates that madeira became an important form of cultural capital as an elite consumer good. However, reduced circumstances resulting from the economic disruptions of the Civil War brought an end to madeira culture by 1900.     

Intergenerational Inequality? Labour,Capital, and Housing Through the Ages

This article examines the relevance of generational relations to emerging patterns of inequality in advanced capitalist societies, with a particular focus on inequalities related to housing wealth. At its heart is a critique of the increasingly prevalent argument that generational difference is a crucial axis of inequality today. It argues that while contemporary capitalist societies are certainly characterized by marked inequalities between generations and that the latter are manifested inter alia in housing ownership, understanding such inequalities principally in generational terms is problematic because they reflect deeper, more fundamental, structural inequalities and should therefore be conceptualized as such. The article suggests that the principal significance of generational relations to contemporary inequality dynamics actually concerns economic transfers rather than differences between generations. Within‐family transfers of wealth, especially housing‐related wealth, from older generations to younger ones tend to reproduce pronounced, structurally generated existing patterns of intra‐generational inequality.     

Du ‘géant remueur de terre’ à ‘Monsieur jardine’: valorisation et dévalorisation des images de la terre à la Belle Époque

Images of the Earth in Belle Époque fiction are frequently called upon to express an author's view of what defines an individual's relationship to self, history, and society. This article focuses on two examples whose significance is highlighted by the fact that the authors have radically opposed ideologies. In Diary of a Chambermaid (1900), Octave Mirbeau uses the provincial backyard garden satirically, as a site where society's repressed, sadistic and anal impulses are let loose. By contrast, René Bazin's highly conservative Donatienne (1903) illustrates the author's Catholic belief in the biblical sanctity of the relationship between a man and his native place. How uniquely relevant to the representation of the fictional Subject these images are is further demonstrated by the fact that women are unapologetically excluded from them. As it happens, these novels' female protagonists are both domestic servants, whose defining relationship is not to the Earth where they were born, but—second in the order of Creation—to the home where they live.     

Indigenous migrants negotiating belonging: Peticiones de cambio de fuero in Cajamarca,Peru, 17th–18th centuries

Prehispanic corporate social units in northern Peru, the pachacas or ayllus and the guarangas, continued to structure social life in Cajamarca throughout the Spanish colonial period. They were restructured by Spanish rule, as they had been by the Inca conquest before. Spanish rule also reshaped indigenous migration and the social categorization of the migrants, which was closely intertwined with the regime of land tenure. This article takes a look at the integration of new and old migrants and their descendants into the local social structure and examines how they negotiated their belonging in petitions to change or defend their fuero. The petitioners successfully argued on the basis of their ancestry, whether legitimate or not, and activated personal networks on their behalf. In that, they paralleled mestizo and mulatto petitioners who, like migrants, benefited from fiscal prerogatives, which were however challenged during the course of the 18^th century, leading to a partial re-categorization. The redistribution of land was an important motive in these late colonial re-categorizations, but also earlier in the colonial period the absence of bonds to the land was an essential characteristic of being categorized as a ‘migrant.’     

China＇s Contested Capital： Architecture,Ritual, and Response in Nanjing

After over a decade of civil war, the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek established something of a national government in 1928. This marvelous book explores how they built up Nanjing as China＇s new capital city over the following decade. Musgrove argues that the Nationalists＇ city planning, public building architecture, mausoleum of Sun Yat-sen and other memorials, and new state rituals all promoted the new government＇s legitimacy, even though that government remained relatively weak and divided. In line with more favorable views of the ＂Nanjing Decade＂ that have come to replace an earlier generation of historiography, Musgrove believes that the government＇s accomplishments in building up Nanjing were real and significant, albeit limited.