Geography and development

Economic development and underdevelopment is one aspect of theuneven spatial distribution of economic activity. This paperreviews existing literature on geography and development, andargues that rigorous theoretical and empirical analysis is neededto increase understanding of the role of geography in developmentand to better design development policy. The analytical issuesare: why does economic activity cluster in centers of activity?How do new centers develop? And what are the consequences ofremoteness from existing centers? Empirical evidence comes bothfrom the international context and from studies of internaleconomic geography and urbanization.     

LOCATION AND SPATIAL PRICING FOR PUBLIC FACILITIES

ABSTRACT. Past analysis of public facility location has generally assumed a single goal, such as cost minimization or welfare maximization, and exogenous spatial pricing. This paper considers optimal facility location under a variety of goals. Furthermore, the facility manager is allowed to engage in freight absorption so that the delivered price to consumers need not reflect actual transportation costs. A systematic interaction among management goals, freight absorption, and the optimal size and spacing of public facilities is found.     

Will Historical Archaeology Escape Its Western Prejudices to Become Relevant to Africa?

A major problem facing North American approaches to historical archaeology is the exclusionary manner in which the discipline is defined. By confining historical archaeology to the era of capitalism and colonialism, we declare that the indigenous histories of many areas of the globe are of no interest to such an intellectual agenda. If we practice an historical archaeology that only valorizes the colonial experience, then what happens to history making that engaged cultures in the pre-capitalist and pre-modern era? Such approaches separate the histories of people in Africa from those of the West, and, is in effect, academic apartheid. To remedy this disjuncture, we interrogate how historical archaeology may escape the bounds of implicit racism in its denial of historicity before literacy. We suggest that breaking the chains of exclusion is the only way to realize an inclusive archaeology sensitive to all history making projects.     

Political freedom in Byzantium: the rhetoric of liberty and the periodization of Roman history

ABSTRACT

This paper proposes an intellectual history of the idea that the later Roman empire and, subsequently, the whole of Byzantium were less ‘free’ in comparison to the Roman Republic. Anxiety over diminished freedom recurred throughout Roman history, but only a few specific expressions of it were enshrined in modern thought as the basis on which to divide history into periods. The theorists of the Enlightenment, moreover, invented an unfree Byzantium for their own political purposes and not by examining the facts about its political culture. The second part of the paper proposes that the Byzantines valorized a model of positive freedom as legal-institutional protection against arbitrary oppressive power, including against both barbarian domination and domestic abuses. In contrast to modern thought, which tends to see the imperial position as the chief threat to liberty, the Byzantines viewed it as its bulwark. Yet they too had remedies for oppressive emperors, suggesting that the otherwise well-attested invocations of freedom were not a mere rhetorical trope for them but an actionable cultural norm.