We Know Not God's Designs in Permitting a Separation: Women Religious,the Consolidation Controversies,and the Nineteenth-Century American Catholic Church*

This article bridges the fields of Catholic history, Women's history, and American religious history to propose a new perspective for studying the development of the American Catholic Church, termed by me as the consolidation controversies. Previous historians have focused on the development of the local parishes and the dioceses, focusing on the power conflicts between the lay trustees and the local bishops that accompanied this institutional growth. However, an often-forgotten aspect of Catholic history is the simultaneous rise of religious congregations and orders. As these communities developed, their leaders clashed with the local bishops over questions of property and authority over members of the communities. Often at the centre of these power struggles were the women religious. Rather than allowing themselves to be manipulated, women religioudemonstrated their own autonomy, navigating larger institutional politics. Should these women fail, they faced losing their place in the diocese as well as their position and vocation as women religious.     

Cattle Before Crops: The Beginnings of Food Production in Africa

In many areas of the world, current theories for agricultural origins emphasize yield as a major concern during intensification. In Africa, however, the need for scheduled consumption shaped the development of food production. African cattle were domesticated during the tenth millennium BP by delayed-return Saharan hunter-gatherers in unstable, marginal environments where predictable access to resources was a more significant problem than absolute abundance. Pastoralism spread patchily across the continent according to regional variations in the relative predictability of herding versus hunting and gathering. Domestication of African plants was late (after 4000 BP) because of the high mobility of herders, and risk associated with cultivation in arid environments. Renewed attention to predictability may contribute to understanding the circumstances that led to domestication in other regions of the world.     

Re‐evaluating otherness in genocidal ideology

Ideas of otherness in both nationalism and genocide studies do not sufficiently explain genocidal levels of policy and ideological development, nor do they help identify groups that may be selected in the future for this particular kind of destruction. This article sets out to introduce the typology of ‘anti‐nation’ to the dialogue of nationalism studies in order to more aptly identify prospective groups at risk of future possible genocidal aggression. This article looks to the Armenian genocide to provide analysis for a greater understanding of the way radicalising ideology evolves regarding the anti‐nation during the early years of identity development in states radicalising towards genocide.     

Politics of scale: Colossal containerships and the crisis in global shipping

This article addresses overcapacity and crisis in global shipping through the case of the HMM Algeciras, the world's largest containership inaugurated in 2020. When she left the South Korean shipyard where she was built, the HMM Algeciras (with a size of two soccer fields) could carry 24,000 twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs) across the world's oceans. By following the mega-containership's links to two South Korean shipping companies, Hyundai Merchant Marine and Hanjin Shipping, and her connections to a southern European port, the authors unpack some of the current flip sides of global maritime shipping. In this article, the authors argue that the promise of profit and endless growth, which has led to overcapacity in global maritime shipping, is spurred on by what they call ‘false economies of scale’. Claims of the future profitability of colossal containerships are, they argue, state-driven political performances of scale.