Ransoms of non-combatants during the hundred years war

Although we know a great deal about the captivities and ransoms of noble prisoners during the Hundred Years War, the ransoms paid to soldiers by non-combatants, though far more common, received less publicity in contemporary chronicles and less notoriety in the courts of law. In consequence, we learn about them largely through the generalized, and perhaps rather routine, complaints of the preaching clergy. This article examines some of the permutations of ransom which non-combatants - particularly peasant non-combatants - were obliged to pay to men-at-arms during this war. They vary from ransoms agreements like those negotiated by noble prisoners to protection rackets and slavery which many contemporaries considered to be more appropriate to the circumstances of crusade against Islam than to the wars between Christian peoples.     

‘Pillagers’ and ‘brigands’ in the hundred years war

The sufferings of French non-combatants, particularly peasants, during the Hundred Years War have been described and deplored from the fourteenth century to the twentieth. A concern for the victims has often left little room for a careful study of the aggressors, thepillars andbrigands of the contemporary records. This article seeks to identify these latter, to distinguish them from each other and from the noble warriors, often called ‘men-at-arms’. It will be shown that the first, brutal, contact between armed men and unarmed ‘civilians’ was not, as the contemporary moralists suggested, between noble and non-noble, but between non-noble and non-noble: between common soldiers and bandits, on the one hand, and peasant victims, on the other. The chivalrous and adventurous war of knights and squires was sustained on the day-to-day level, by the activity of foraging pillagers. Brigandage was a consequence of their activity, not another name for it.     

鸦片战争时期的战俘问题

战俘问题一直是人类文明史上一个值得关注的问题:不同文明冲突过程中,如何对待和处理战俘,体现着冲突双方的观念、相互认知和交往方式.鸦片战争史研究中,战俘问题一直是被忽略的战争组成部分.鸦片战争时期战俘的获取、处置、交涉,以及其中反映出的观念,是我们了解这场战争的一个侧面,也是由此观察清王朝的一个视角.     

Unmaking the fascist man: masculinity,film and the transition from dictatorship

This essay examines the recasting and renegotiation of Italian masculinity during the war and during the transition from dictatorship to democracy. Film is my privileged source for understanding the complexities of male experience during this period of dramatic change, but I also rely on war crimes charges, diaries and memoirs. While not explicitly comparative in nature, the essay considers whether we can speak of a ‘crisis of masculinity’ in postwar Italy akin to that diagnosed by historians of postwar Germany and France. Within this broad frame, the essay focuses the experiences and representations of one category of men who evoked particular anxieties about the legacies of defeat and the redemption of Italian men for democratic models of fatherhood and citizenship: veterans, in particular returned prisoners of war. The 1946 film Il bandito (The Bandit, Alberto Lattuada), which I analyze in the last section of the essay, dramatizes the situation of these returned prisoners and the problem of a generation of men raised according to fascist norms that linked masculinity to the performance of aggressive acts.     

The folding of sport space into carceral space: On the making of prisoners’ experiences and lives

Sport and exercise are prominent activities in the daily routines of prisoners around the world, yet the spatial significance of these activities in carceral environments has not been deeply investigated. With a focus on the experiences of former federal prisoners in Canada, this paper addresses this scholarly gap by bringing together emerging trends in the literatures on sociology of sport, sports geography, and carceral geography to investigate the complex social meanings of prison sport and exercise. Specifically, we explore the folding of sports space into carceral space, often with the effect of reinforcing violent and exclusionary situations, but which also helps construct alternative spatial and temporal realities. Indeed, our overarching theoretical analysis considers how prisoners use sport to produce space in ways that assert a limited degree of agency over their daily lives and temporarily transcend their unpleasant conditions of confinement. By drawing from diverse theoretical frameworks and literatures, we advance novel arguments about the socio‐spatial significance of sport in prisons and raise some important questions for further research.     

The Battle of Saipan in Japanese Civilian Memoirs: Non-combatants,Soldiers and the Complexities of Surrender

In Japan, ‘Saipan’ refers both to a nearby tropical holiday, and to the site of a battle that annihilated Japanese troops, embroiled the large population of Japanese residents on the island and ultimately spelled the end of the Japanese empire, now within the reach of bombers. In other places, and particularly amongst the Allies, Saipan conjures up images of civilians jumping to their death rather than facing capture, leading to simplistic assessments about fanaticism being rife across all sections of Japanese society; to a focus on suicide that overshadows the true extent of the battle’s collateral damage; and to largely unexamined statements about military exploitation of civilians and the murder of civilians in extremis. This article uses the memoirs of civilian survivors of the battle to reflect on the civilian experience of the battle of Saipan, relationships between Japanese combatants and non-combatants during the fighting, and the complexities of surrender.     

Force-feeding and Mapuche Autonomy: Performing collective rights in individual prison cells in Chile

In August 2010, the decision was taken to feed thirty-two Mapuche prisoners spread throughout prisons in Chile's southern regions intravenously and against their will. Imprisoned Mapuche activists had in the years previous turned to the hunger strike to protest their conviction under anti-terror legislation and the conditions of their incarceration, and the Chilean government eventually responded by force-feeding or threatening to force-feed starving inmates. This paper examines the performativity of the confrontation between prisoners refusing food and the authorities seeking to feed them against their expressed wishes. It analyzes how the strategy of self-starvation and the debate about the hunger strikers' right to make choices about their own bodies enabled starving prisoners to embody the broader struggle for Mapuche autonomy. The distinction between the individual and the collective eroded as the debate moved between, and overlapped, international conventions on the ethical treatment of prisoners and the rights of indigenous peoples. As a result, the collective struggle of the Mapuche people was performed in individual prisons cells, as the Chilean penal system emerged as an important new front line in a centuries-old conflict.     

别样风情的女真金耳饰

金代的女真耳饰出土和收藏不算多见,但在素有金源内地之称的黑龙江地区的几处金代贵族墓葬中,都发现有金耳饰。金代耳饰以耳环多见,耳坠较少,在金代贵族墓葬中多成套出土,并分为男用耳饰和女用耳饰,其中差别虽不是很明显,但还是可以区分出来的。     

Field of Fire: Evidence for Wartime Conflict in a 17th-Century Cottier Settlement in County Meath,Ireland

Abstract

Much of conflict archaeology is focused on battlefields and the material culture of military troops, but what about civilians caught up in warzones? Can archaeology contribute to our understanding of how such people fared during troublous times, and the manner in which political and social turmoil affected them?

By considering the recently excavated, late 16th–17th century A.D. settlement of 'Cleglin', this article will examine the evidence for wartime conflict: whether poor inhabitants were subject to violence such as armed raids and the razing of buildings; whether they were forced to abandon their homes for any extended period; and whether there is evidence for the occupation or billeting of soldiers, or for the enrolment of male inhabitants in militias. A more comprehensive—and historically accurate—conflict archaeology should not just scrutinize the evidence for overt violence, or it risks excluding non-combatants from such historical endeavour (except, perhaps, as hapless victims). Instead the material culture of certain related events associated with warfare—market price fluctuations, famine, plague—needs also to be considered. At Killegland, scrutiny of household economies yielded some of the most profound and intriguing data: relating to wartime economy and risk-averse behaviour in agricultural practice.     

近代早期法国贵族附庸关系初探

近代早期法国贵族间的附庸关系与中世纪的封臣制不同,它是以血缘和亲族关系构建起来的依附性网络,婚姻联盟则进一步加强了这种关系。然而,在法国宗教战争和福隆德运动的危机时期,贵族附庸关系受到政治势力、宗教信仰、双方政见、个人利益等多重因素的影响与挑战,其稳定性不断削弱,王权则在此时乘机渗透到贵族附庸关系中,为后来中央集权、绝对君主制的兴起奠定了基础。     

Not told by victims: genocide-as-story in Aboriginal prison writings in Canada, 1980–96

When criminalized Aboriginal peoples serving time in Canadian prisons wrote in penal presses, they often used genocide as a framework to discuss both their personal life histories and the colonial history that led to overrepresentation of Aboriginal peoples in prisons. Genocide, though, is not a straightforward idea, and the ways that Aboriginal prisoners wrote about genocide differed significantly from how scholars or politicians used the term. By interpreting these writings within Aboriginal storytelling traditions, this article illuminates the lived experience of genocide, how those experiencing incarceration viewed genocide within their belief structures, the ways that genocide became a critique against the Canadian government, and the spiritual basis for discussion of genocide. By reading Aboriginal prison writings as valuable intellectual pursuits, we can begin to interpret genocide within frameworks that differed from the insights from academia. First, genocide was experienced as part of both colonial and personal processes, meaning it was experienced at the community level and in personal violence in pre-carceral lives. Second, by telling stories of genocide, prisoners asserted their own survival, which reflected the goals of their organizations and functioned as a political critique against the Canadian government. Third, genocide became an identity-shaping force in the lives of criminalized Aboriginal peoples, which in turn shaped their experience of incarceration. Finally, genocide was not uniformly experienced, as it had important gendered differences. This article shows the nuance in prisoners' discussions of genocide by proposing a new way of interpreting genocide within Aboriginal history in Canada by analysing penal publications as part of Aboriginal storytelling traditions, what the author refers to as ‘genocide-as-story’.     

Soundscapes of the Everyday in Ancient Oaxaca, Mexico

In ancient Mexico, sensory engagement in the form of oratory, music, and performance were major components of state-sponsored festivals and noble feasts. We think far less, however, about the soundscapes associated with rituals and everyday life in household contexts. Drawing on contextual, iconographic, and acoustic analyses of flutes, whistles, bells, costume ornaments, and ceramic vessels with rattle supports from the site of Río Viejo in coastal Oaxaca, Mexico, we argue that sound-production created a shared spatial landscape that linked community members to one another. Even in the absence of visibility or participation, soundscapes were prominent, celebrated elements of everyday life that purposely blurred the boundaries between the natural, cultural, and spirit worlds.     

The selected representation of contested prison history: memorial exhibitions and tourist experiences

The Jing-Mei Detention Centre, Taipei, is one of the primary sites associated with the ‘White Terror’, which took place during the imposition of Martial Law in Taiwan (1949–1987), by the authoritarian post-war regime of Chiang Kai-shek. Taiwan’s intelligence agencies violated civil rights and liberties. Suspects suffered arrest, interrogation, torture, trial, and imprisonment. The former detention centre has become Jing-Mei Human Rights Memorial and Cultural Park, which is one of two penal facilities dealing with the processing of political prisoners and for the suppression of activists who struggled for human rights. This study focuses on the interpretation by visitors of exhibitions at the site and the process of historical representation at the memorial park. The roles of the relevant parties were identified through interviews with former prisoners. The selection criteria, and the approaches to interpretation employed by the exhibition planners to represent a contested history, were examined. An analysis of visitor experiences and interaction with historical interpretation and layout in the exhibition demonstrated the visitors’ disoriented, yet unified, perceptions. A model of prison history has been developed that selects the memories and materials used to depict the past, unifying the multiple layers of histories during the ‘White Terror’.     

‘Slowing down the going-away process’ — Tom Stoppard and Soviet Dissent

Tom Stoppard is a playwright most noted for his ferocious wordplay and playful approach to reality. In the 1970s and 1980s, his concern for like-minded prisoners of conscience in the Soviet bloc informed his activism on their behalf, utilising his public profile in an attempt to reposition their plight in the West. Stoppard’s activism was largely informed by his involvement with a number of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) working to publicise human rights violations in the Soviet Union, who provided him with the most up to date information on these abuses, and gave him access to dissidents. This article explores Stoppard’s activism on behalf of Soviet prisoners of conscience, highlighting the impact that these organisations had on his activism. Through an assessment of Stoppard’s efforts, it highlights the important role that NGOs and celebrity politics played during the cold war.     

Blurred lines: the home front,the battlefront,and the wartime relationship between citizens and government in the Republic of Vietnam

In the Republic of Vietnam, the blending of the home and battle fronts shaped the relationship between citizens and their government. Civilians viewed the national government as the institution responsible for various forms of social welfare related to the war and the resulting militarisation of non-combatants’ lives. An examination of citizens’ letters to its ministries shifts the focus from questions of political legitimacy to citizens’ expectations of their government. The role of gender in family and social structures also shaped how Vietnamese civilians perceived their war experiences and their relationships to the government.     

'You Cannot Hate the Bastard Who is Trying to Kill You...'Combat and Ideology in the British Army in the War Against Germany, 1939-45

During the Second World War the British Army faced a difficulttask when it tried to transform recruits who were mostly peace-lovingcivilians, into men prepared to kill. This article examineshow it went about doing so and how front-line soldiers respondedto the demand that they kill their German (and Italian) oppositenumbers. It also analyses the extent to which front-line soldiersin the British Army retained a sense of a shared common humanitywith their enemies that transended the political divisions ofthe war. It does so by analysing the ways in which they treatedtheir enemies when they were completely at their mercy, eitheras prisoners of war or as civilians in occupied territory. ¹N.McCallum, Journey with a Pistol (London,1959), 105.     

Affamer les prisonniers de guerre: entre mythes et réalités, 1914–54

Since the end of the nineteenth century, prisoners of war must be taken in care by their guardians, in terms of food. Sometimes this food is not good enough and leads to cases of starvation. Considering ideological conditions as well as material and chronological evolutions, this paper tries to explain how the prisoners are very often hostages in hands of their guards and how starvation can be an ideological tool.     

Figuring the Prison: Prerequisites of Torture at Abu Ghraib1

This article presents a critique of prevailing left‐of‐center journalism and academic scholarship on the revelation of torture of Iraqi prisoners of war by United States military personnel at Abu Ghraib in the spring of 2004. We argue that the resulting discourse suffers from a certain critical bankruptcy in its failure to think about the nature of imprisonment as such. This failure is an effect of two procedures: (1) a narrowing of the field of inquiry that relies on the metonymic reduction of imprisonment through and as the practices of torture, and (2) a reification of the prison that both relies upon and displaces the racialization of imprisonment as an institution of black spatial containment and social control. In response, we call for a renewed understanding of and appreciation for the singularity of racial slavery and its afterlife in future research on carceral formations in and beyond the US.     

Climate shocks and conflict: Evidence from colonial Nigeria

This paper offers a historical micro-level analysis of the impact of climate shocks on the incidence of civil conflict in colonial Nigeria (1912–1945). Primary historical sources on court cases, prisoners and homicides are used to capture conflict. To measure climate shocks we use the deviation from long-term rainfall patterns, capturing both drought and excessive rainfall. We find a robust and significant curvilinear (U-shaped) relationship between rainfall deviations and conflict intensity, which tends to be stronger in agro-ecological zones that are least resilient to climatic variability (such as Guinean Savannah) and where (pre-) colonial political structures were less centralized. We find evidence that the relationship is weaker in areas that specialize in the production of export crops (such as cocoa and palm oil) compared to subsistence farming areas, suggesting that agricultural diversification acts as an insurance mechanism against the whims of nature. Additional historical information on food shortages, crop-price spikes and outbreaks of violence is used to explore the climate–conflict connection in greater detail.