Atlantic consumption of French rum and brandy and economic growth in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Caribbean

Why did the production of rum in the French West Indies not achieve the same success within the French Atlantic as it did in the British Atlantic world? Surveying the history of rum production in the French Caribbean in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this article contends that the reason why no regional trade in rum developed in French North America resulted from fierce industrial and institutional competition from brandy producers in metropolitan France. Rum, nevertheless, remained significant within the culture and economy of Native Americans and African Americans. This article seeks to add nuance to the wider debate of the ability of the trans-border diffusion of new ideas to stimulate and institutionalize industrial and economic growth in the Atlantic world. French entrepreneurs were no less ‘entrepreneurial’ than their British counterparts, but real constraints on consumption on both sides of the Atlantic created insufficient demand.     

Relative frequency of butchering cutmarks produced by obsidian and flint: an experimental approach

An experimental approach was used to determine how stone tool materials affect the frequency of observed cutmarks. Five whitetail deer were butchered by an expert butcher using flint and obsidian tools and the skeletons were prepared and analyzed. The authors found that the deer butchered with obsidian tools generally displayed fewer incidents of cutmarks than their flint-butchered counterparts. Consideration of this variable may prove to be important to archaeologists attempting to answer questions of specialization or when making comparisons of cutmark data between sites.     

Beyond the Local Trap: New Municipalism and the Rise of the Fearless Cities

The Fearless Cities summit, coordinated by Barcelona en Comú in June 2017, marked the first global gathering of the nascent “new municipalist” movement. Responding to the “imperative that geographers engage critically and creatively with the way localism is being articulated”, this paper argues that the new municipalist initiatives are developing urban political strategies that successfully avoid the Local Trap. Rather than essentialising cities as inherently progressive or democratic, the municipal is instead becoming framed as a “strategic front” for developing a transformative politics of scale. Given this critical awareness, this nascent movement demonstrates how local loyalties can be mobilised as part of a progressive scalar strategy without falling into the trap of a “particular localism”. What remains to be seen is whether these initiatives are able to develop a variegated scalar strategy of transformation that retains the democratic essence that underpins them.     

Paleoanthropology Read in Tooth and Nail

Crump, Thomas. The Anthropology of Numbers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. x + 201 pp. including bibliography and index. $49.50 cloth.

Ascher, Marcia. Ethnomathematics: A Multicultural View of Mathematical Ideas. Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole Publishers, 1991. ix + 203 pp. including notes and index. $36.95 cloth.