Decentring international and institutional famine relief in late nineteenth-century China: in search of the local

This article uses rural gazetteer biographies to examine village and household-level famine relief during the great North China Famine of 1876–9 to deepen our understanding of past relief methods and dynamics at the most local level. Despite the appearance of major works recently on famine in modern China, particularly on the Great Leap Forward, knowledge of Chinese famine relief remains thin and scattered considering the enormity of the subject. Nineteenth-century China saw intensifying international relief activity as well as the emergence of a vibrant charity-relief sector based in China's major cities, leading to the rise of prominent relief institutions in the twentieth century, such as the Chinese Red Cross. But the increasingly intense disasters of China's modern period also saw a surprising persistence of local humanitarian traditions still barely covered by historians.     

Food and famine: Looking for answers

White, Philip, and Nancy Selvey, eds. Current Topics in Nutrition and Disease, Volume 10: Malnutrition—Determinants and Consequences. New York: Alan R. Liss, 1984. xvi + 494 pp. including references, index. $96.00 cloth.

Robson, John R. K., ed. Famine: Its Causes, Effects, and Management. New York: Gordon and Breach, 1981. x + 170 pp. including photographs, references, index. $30.95 cloth.     

Conquest,pestilence and demographic collapse in the early Spanish Philippines

Documentary evidence for the demographic impact of Spanish conquest and colonial rule in the Philippines suggests that the pre-Spanish population was about 1.5 million. This is higher than previous estimates and implies that the decline in the early colonial period was greater than often supposed. However, the decline was lower than that associated with Spanish conquest in the Americas. The more moderate impact of Old World diseases in the Philippines cannot be attributed to immunity that Filipinos had acquired through contacts with Asia in pre-Spanish times, but to the low population density and difficult communications between and within the islands that impeded their spread. Despite new colonial policies aimed at the more peaceful acquisition of new territories, conquest in the Philippines was accompanied by considerable bloodshed. However, in the longer term the impact of colonial rule was moderated by the limited Spanish presence that resulted from the remoteness of the islands from Spain and the limited opportunities there for wealth creation, notably in the form of precious minerals.     

Extracting sovereignty: Capital, territory, and gold mining in Tanzania

In contemporary discussions of “resource nationalism,” sovereignty is often imagined as the exclusive control of national states over internal resources in opposition to external foreign capital. In this paper, we seek to draw attention to the specifically national territorial forms of sovereignty that - rather than hindering the flow of capital - become constitutive to the accumulation of resource wealth by states and capital alike. Drawing from political geographical theorizations of sovereignty, we argue that resource sovereignty cannot be territorially circumscribed within national space and institutionally circumscribed within the state apparatus. Rather, sovereignty must be understood in relational terms to take into account the global geography of non-state actors that shape access to and control over natural resources. Specifically, we engage national-scale state sovereignty over subterranean mineral resources in the form of legal property regimes and examine the mutually constitutive set of interdependencies between mining capital and landlord states in the accumulation of resource wealth. Using Tanzania as a case study, we argue that national-scale ownership of subterranean mineral resources has been critical to attracting global flows of mining capital from colonial to contemporary times. We first examine the history of the colonial state in Tanganyika to illustrate how land and mineral rights were adjudicated through the power of the colonial state with the hopes of attracting foreign capital investment in the mining sector. We then examine contemporary efforts on the part of the independent United Republic of Tanzania to again enact legislation meant to attract foreign mining companies - and the consequences for local populations living near sites of extraction.     

Saddam Hussein,Islam, and Just War Theory: The Case for a Pre-emptive Strike

Abstract

America and its allies face a world that has become more and more dangerous with its weapons of mass destruction and a shadowy world of terrorists more than willing to use them. The wisdom of the past does not have the prescience or universal insight to deal with this new threat. America and its allies must change direction if they wish to respond to the challenge in an effective manner, even if it means employing policies that seemed dubious in the past. The state is called to protect its citizens in a Machiavellian world, filled with depravity and compromise. The church is called to submit to the superior wisdom of those who have the special intelligence, experience and expertise to handle the current crisis.     

Girlhood,participation and empowerment in Tanzania: climbing material and discursive walls

In this paper I reflect upon encounters with ‘young people’s participation’ during ethnographic research on girlhood and sexual agency with teenage girls in Tanzania. I argue that methodology which centralises participants’ experiences is particularly important in research on issues related to sex and sexuality, where young people’s voices are often disregarded or downplayed. However, such an approach might run up against a number of practical challenges. This paper draws on fieldwork conducted in two sites during 2014 and 2015 to show that attention to the networks of relationships within which young people are embedded and the structural conditions which might generate or obstruct sexual agency is essential for research which seeks to promote their meaningful participation.