The Developmental State Is Dead—Long Live Social Capital?

At the same time that the World Bank appears to be going through a process of replacing the Washington consensus with the Post-Washington consensus, the notion of social capital is coming to the fore both in development studies and social science more generally. These developments are closely connected to one another analytically: they are liable to stake out a new development agenda based on new Keynesianism and social capital in place of state versus the market; and they reflect more generally the growing influence of mainstream economics over other social sciences.     

‘No distinction exists as to religion,profession, or sex’: Imperial Reform and the Electoral Culture of the East India Company's Court of Proprietors, 1760–84

As contemporaries frequently pointed out, and often in disparaging terms, the governing institutions of the British East India Company contained an almost unprecedented ‘democratical’ element. By this, they were referring to the Company's General Court of Proprietors, its sovereign deliberative body, composed of all East India stockholders. Ownership of certain proportions of stock conferred the rights to participate in debate, to vote on policy, and to elect on an annual basis the directors who governed the day-to-day affairs of the Company. These electoral rights were granted solely by virtue of stock-ownership and made no distinctions based on sex, social status, nationality or religion. This article examines the ways in which women, non-Britons and religious minorities, in particular, took advantage of the opportunities for political participation opened up by the politicisation of the East India Company's general court in the 1760s, as well as the ways in which this was discussed and debated by contemporaries both in parliament and the press. Tracing the political activities of Mary Barwell, William Bolts and Joseph Salvador provides a unique window into a variety of ways in which the Company offered an alternative venue for political activity for groups often otherwise excluded from the formal politics at Westminster. In doing so, it also shows how the democratic elements of the Company's general court played a significant role in shaping the reform of the East India Company between 1767 and 1784, a process which ultimately led to their curtailment.     

Book reviews

Ravi Arvind Palat (ed.). Pacific‐Asia and the Future of the World System. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press. 1993. vii + 206 pp. $US55.00 (cloth).

Eric Jones, Lionel Frost and Colin White. Coming Full Circle: An Economic History of the Pacific Rim. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993. xv + 188 pp. $US49.95 (cloth), $US12.95 (paper).

Andrew MacIntyre (ed.). Business and Government in Industrialising Asia. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1994. xi + 312 pp. $29.95 (paper).

Michael C. Howard (ed.). Asia's Environmental Crisis. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993. ix + 293 pp. $44.95 (paper).

Richard W. Baker (ed.). The ANZUS States and Their Region. Regional Policies of Australia, New Zealand, and the United States. Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, 1994. xiii + 228 pp. $US57.95.

Stephen Chee (ed.). Leadership and Security in Southeast Asia: Institutional Aspects. Singapore: ISEAS, 1991. xii + 187 pp. $US25.00 (cloth), $US17.00 (paper).

Gerald L. Curtis (ed.). Japan's Foreign Policy After the Cold War. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1993. xxvi + 382 pp. $US60.00 (cloth), $US22.50 (paper).

Taichi Sakaya. What is Japan? Contradictions and Transformations, trans. Steven Karpa. New York, Tokyo and London: Kodansha International, 1993. xxii + 312 pp. No price given.

Bill Brugger and Stephen Reglar. Politics, Economy and Society in Contemporary China. London: Macmillan, 1994. vii + 367 pp. $36.55 (paper).

Sung Chul Yang. The North and South Korean Political Systems: A Comparative Analysis. Boulder, CO: Westview/Seoul: Seoul Press, 1994. xiii + 983 pp. $US64.95 (cloth).

Mark L. Clifford. Troubled Tiger: Businessmen, Bureaucrats and Generals in South Korea. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1994. xiii + 357 pp. $US19.95 (paper).

Thongchai Winichakul. Siam Mapped. A History of the Geo‐Body of a Nation. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994. xvi + 228 pp. $US34.00 (cloth).

Derek Tribe. Feeding and Greening the World — The Role of International Agricultural Research. Wallingford: Centre for Agriculture and Biosciences International, 1994. xiii + 274 pp. $35.50 (paper).

Ernst Ulrich von Weizsacker. Earth Politics. London: Zed Books, 1984. xii + 234 pp. $US59.95 (cloth), $US25.00 (paper)

Neil Middleton, Phil O'Keefe and Sam Moyo. Tears of the Crocodile: From Rio to Reality in the Developing World. London: Pluto Press, 1993. xii+ 228 pp. $US66.50 (cloth), $US19.95 (paper).

Boris Kagarlitsky. The Disintegration of the Monolith, translated by Renfrey Clarke. London and New York: Verso, 1992. x + 169 pp. No price given.

George Schöpflin. Politics in Eastern Europe, 1945–1992. Oxford, UK and Cambridge, USA: Blackwell Publishers, 1993. viii + 327 pp. $39.95 (paper).

Andrei S. Markovits and Philip S. Gorski. The German Left: Red Green and Beyond. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993. xiii + 393 pp. $45.00 (paper).

Raymond L. Garthoff. The Great Transition: American‐Soviet Relations at the End of the Cold War. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1994. xiv + 834 pp. $US44.95 (cloth), $US14.95 (paper).

Richard N. Haass. Intervention: The Use of Military Force in the Post‐Cold War World. Washington, DC: The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1994. x + 258 pp. $US24.95 (cloth), $US12.95 (paper).

United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). The State of the World's Refugees: The Challenge of Protection. New York: Penguin Books, 1993. ix + 191 pp. $19.95 (paper).

Francis M. Deng. Protecting the Dispossessed: A Challenge for the International Community. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1993. xii + 175 pp. No price given.

Paul Wehr. Heidi Burgess and Guy Burgess (eds). Justice without Violence. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1994. ix + 300 pp. $US45.00 (cloth), $US18.95 (paper).     

Non-invasive on-site method for thickness measurement of transparent ceramic glazes based on depth from focus

Glazed ceramics are a common material analyzed through geochemistry, whether in the form of tableware collected during excavations or tiles observed as part of architectural features. Within the framework of these studies, measuring the thickness of the transparent glaze is one of the useful variables available for the characterization of the ceramic, contributing to searches for provenance as well as serialization. However, this task often requires invasive methods performed in the laboratory, which may not always be possible. This paper develops a non-invasive and portable on-site system for measuring the thickness of ceramic glazes. Based on the depth from focus technique, this method makes use of a classical camera, a macroscopic lens, a translation stage, and a laptop for system control. In this article, we test this method through the measurement of glaze for ten samples as compared to results obtained for sections through scanning electron microscopy.