British Imperialism and Cyprus 1878–1914: The Inconsequential Possession

In recent decades historians have devoted considerable attention to the historical treatment of indigenous title in Anglophone settler colonies. These scholarly accounts have tended to emphasise the role metropolitan legal and intellectual discourses played in the dispossession of indigenous peoples. In this article I present a critical analysis of an influential example of such work in respect to the British denial of Aboriginal rights in land in the colony of New South Wales before providing an alternative account of the manner in which Aboriginal title was treated, which focuses on the nature of the relations on the ground between sojourners, settlers and Aboriginal people, the ways in which these encounters were represented by the British and the local practices regarding the transfer of land.     

Presentation is Everything: Foodways, Tablewares, and Colonial Identity at Presidio Los Adaes

Ceramics and zooarchaeological remains are commonly used as indicators of status and wealth at colonial-period sites, yet colonial expectations with regard to cuisine were often difficult to meet within the rigors of frontier life. In this paper, we juxtapose faunal and ceramic assemblages from Presidio Los Adaes and, informed by ethnohistorical and visual data, investigate how social expectations with regard to foodways were negotiated on the Spanish colonial frontier. While ceramic evidence suggests that tableware varied among households, the zooarchaeological assemblage indicates that Los Adaes residents shared the same basic diet.     

Opium smoking,anti‐Chinese attitudes,and the American medical community, 1850–1890

During the 1870s and early 1880s, members of the American medical community sought to exclude the Chinese from immigrating to the United States because these physicians believed that the Chinese opium smoking habit threatened the moral system of the country. Doctors were especially concerned about the supposed effects of opium smoking on sexual behavior, arguing that it both heightened male and female desire and endangered the nation's reproductive capacity. They also feared that opium smoking and Chinese prostitution would encourage miscegenation, and that use of the drug could ultimately harm America's socio‐economic progress. The conclusions of these physicians fed into the anti‐Chinese campaign that resulted in the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882.     

The Newer New Life: A.S. Byatt,E. Nesbit and Socialist Subculture

This article considers the political implications of Victorian language-study for Thomas Carlyle's The French Revolution (1837) (reprinted and edited by K.J. Fielding and David Sorensen (Oxford: Oxford World's Classics, 1989)). I investigate how Carlyle responded to the scientific study of language with what he termed a ‘bodied word’, a reading of language based in the word-become-flesh or the doctrine of the Incarnation. I show how this bodied word reflects wider changes in modern conceptions of the polity in the wake of the French Revolution, in the shift from a hereditary body politic towards what critics have termed a ‘social body’ or a more broadly inclusive model that incorporates the working classes. I then offer a reading of The French Revolution to show how Carlyle's French history was crucial to the linguistic and conceptual production of this liberal notion of the social body, even as he worked both to acknowledge and contain its political agency.     

The Earth of the Modern

One of the central questions in comparative studies of colonialism is what makes more recent variants of imperial extension so culturally distinctive, aside from the more obvious political-economic dimensions? This set of papers focuses on how European and Euro-American promulgated variants of colonialism can be viewed as embodying central tenets of modernism, such as progressivism, technocentrism, and hybridity. Moreover, the authors demonstrate how colonial practices in the era of the modern were not merely the result of policies emanating from imperial capitals, but were an outgrowth of conflict, mediation, and accommodation between colonizer and colonized. Thus, archaeological research is important for stressing that the past five centuries have seen a time of contested modernities, rather than the growth of ‘a’ modernist sensibility.     

Reforming Cuban Agriculture

This article focuses on the two major reforms undertaken in the Cuban agricultural sector during 1993 and 1994: the re-organization of the state farm sector into worker-managed production co-operatives and the opening of free agricultural markets for above-plan production. It is argued that the Cuban agricultural sector is now characterized by multiple forms of organization of production and land tenure or a ‘mixed economy’, and that the two reforms have produced a turn-around in agricultural performance. Still, the macro-economic impact is likely to depend on a deepening of the reforms in two directions: the development of a free market in agricultural inputs and a reform of the food rationing system.     

“It is loved and it is defended”: Critical Solidarity Across Race and Place

Since 2010, the Wixárika (Huichol) indigenous people of western Mexico have struggled against transnational mining activity in their sacred pilgrimage site of Wirikuta in the semi‐desertic plateaus of San Luis Potosí. This struggle has been accompanied by a multitude of non‐indigenous and largely urban actors who have joined the Wixárika, bringing with them their own cultural, political and geographic registers for understanding and mobilising against mining in the region. Taking Wirikuta as a contemporary demonstration of interracial and cross‐geographic alliance building, I analyse how social movements that express solidarity and affective ties with the territories and cultures of indigenous peoples struggle to unsettle entrenched racial and spatial relations.