The shaping of the American Empire

This paper creates a traditional, counterfactual, historical geography that proposes the rise of an American Empire in the 1800s instead of the British. The industrialization of the British world-economy of the early 1800s, victory in the Napoleonic Wars, and the consequent success of the British Empire fundamentally depended on cotton textiles, thus on American cotton agriculture. Cotton was, to the economies of the nineteenth century, very much like oil is to those of the late twentieth and early twenty-first enturies. The development of the American cotton South after 1800 was based heavily on the reproduction of slaves within the South. Had Jefferson ended slavery, as he at one time considered, I suggest that an alternative America would have arisen in which Jeffersonian idealism would have encouraged family farms as the principal units of agricultural production. I further argue that, absent the availability of cheap British manufactures, the Philadelphia School of Protectionists would also have likely triumphed early and an American industrial development based on internal growth fueled by cotton grown on family farms would have allowed America to come to dominate the world-economy of the late 1800s. Protectionist policies would have similarly excluded French manufactures and the industrial development based on cotton the French were also attempting in the late 1700s would have failed just as did that of Britain. French military victory in the Napoleonic Wars would not have produced a French world-economy. An America without serious global opposition would not have resisted annexing all of Mexico and Canada in the 1840s and expanding aggressively into Asia via the Pacific basin and Hawaii to create an American Empire.     

Diet,social differentiation and cultural change in Roman Britain: new isotopic evidence from Gloucestershire

This study uses stable isotope analyses (δ¹³C and δ¹⁵N) of human bone collagen to reconstruct the diet of three Romano-British (first to early fifth century AD) populations from Gloucestershire in South West England. Gloucestershire was an important part of Roman Britain with two major administrative centres at Gloucester (Glevum) and Cirencester (Corinium) and numerous smaller settlements and farmsteads. To investigate potential dietary differences between the rural and urban populations of Roman Gloucestershire, we compared human bone collagen stable isotope values from 32 individuals from urban Gloucester with those of 46 individuals from two rural cemeteries at Horcott Quarry and Cotswold Community, respectively. Seven individuals from urban Gloucester were buried in a mass grave; all others were buried in single inhumations. Results show small but significant differences in stable isotope ratios between the urban and rural populations which indicate that the urban population might have consumed slightly more marine and/or freshwater resources than the people living in the rural communities. We interpret this difference as a direct reflection of Rome’s influence on Gloucester’s population and the town’s economic status. Subtle differences in stable isotope ratios were also observed at the site level, as burial practice does correlate with diet in some cases. Overall, the results from this study demonstrate that diet, as reconstructed through stable isotope analysis, is a very sensitive, if settlement-specific, indicator of social differentiation and culture change.     

Reconstructing Iron Age Community Dynamics in Eski?ehir Province, Central Turkey

Current understanding of the Iron Age polity of Phrygia in Central Anatolia is primarily based on excavations and survey in the region of the Phrygian capital of Gordion. In order to expand our knowledge of the Phrygian polity, we assess the scale and nature of Iron Age communities in the western (Eski?ehir) region of Phrygia. We address the challenge of interpreting ceramics derived from large-scale archaeological survey by utilizing Neutron Activation Analysis (NAA) of ceramics from 12 sites across the region collected by the Eski?ehir archaeological survey project as well as an excavated assemblage from ?ar H?yük. While the uniformity in ceramic technology and styles suggest the region is part of the larger Phrygian community, NAA results reveal that (a) ceramic production was regionally highly localized with limited evidence of standardization during the Iron Age and (b) based on evidence of community interaction it is possible to establish a partial chronological sequence of development. These results have implications not only for understanding the internal dynamics within the Phrygian core but also for developing a methodology for comparing ancient polities using commensurate units of interacting communities. The present study is part of the larger Anatolian Iron Age Ceramics project (http://www.une.edu.au/a-ia).     

The Life and Poetry of Yun Sŏn-Do 尹善道, the Greatest Poet in the Sijo Form

Abstract

This essay, beginning with the proposition of Confucius being born with knowledge, aims to illustrate the sacred imagination Zhu Xi has on Confucius, as well as how the former utilizes specific hermeneutical strategies to maintain the image of the latter. The essay first places in order theories from scholars in the past, regarding “sages being born with knowledge,” then goes on to examine the exegesis Zhu had on the fact that Confucius has “Inborn Knowledge”; followed by a revelation on how Zhu has made use of the concept of “Expression of Modesty” to resolve textual conflicts caused by the affirmation of such knowledge. Finally, limitations of Zhu's hermeneutical strategies are critically examined, so as to exhibit the correlation between commentators of the Classics and the time they live in. The investigation can deepen our understanding on the hermeneutical tradition of Confucianism, hence producing a complementary effect on recent studies.     

Politics and Public Policy

Abstract

Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others has been widely praised as the first German film to confront the horrors of the East German communist regime. But the film's politics may be ambiguous. As critical as it is of East Germany, it does not offer a ringing endorsement of West Germany. For example, the film's playwright-hero seems to have artistic problems in the West, just as he did in the East. The film's equivocal attitude toward communism is epitomized by its apparently positive view of the Marxist author Bertolt Brecht. This essay compares The Lives of Others with Brecht's play The Good Person of Szechwan in an effort to understand Donnersmarck's attitude toward his East German predecessor and what it means for his larger view of communism and its relation to art.     

Mirrors of the Nation: The Construction of National Character and Difference in the Historical Writings of E. G. Geijer

This article suggests that marriageable young upper-class women can be taken as indicators of the longue durée of the ancien régime mentality and the stepwise advancement of the bourgeois mentality. This is so because of factors that made such women particularly prone not to break with established conventions. Source materials in this analysis are taken from contemporary non-fiction texts in which 19th-century St Petersburg and Helsinki serve as the scenes and in which marriageable young women feature as the protagonists or objects of appraising gazes. It is suggested that the differences emerging around the mid-19th century between the two societies with regards to the habitus and education of upper-class girls and marriageable women can at least in part be explained by different institutional settings vis-à-vis land, labour and the status of the bourgeoisie.     

Cultural dynamics and ceramic resource use at Late Bronze Age/Early Iron Age Troy,northwestern Turkey

Changes in resource use over time can provide insight into technological choice and the extent of long-term stability in cultural practices. In this paper we re-evaluate the evidence for a marked demographic shift at the inception of the Early Iron Age at Troy by applying a robust macroscale analysis of changing ceramic resource use over the Late Bronze and Iron Age. We use a combination of new and legacy analytical datasets (NAA and XRF), from excavated ceramics, to evaluate the potential compositional range of local resources (based on comparisons with sediments from within a 10 km site radius). Results show a clear distinction between sediment-defined local and non-local ceramic compositional groups. Two discrete local ceramic resources have been previously identified and we confirm a third local resource for a major class of EIA handmade wares and cooking pots. This third source appears to derive from a residual resource on the Troy peninsula (rather than adjacent alluvial valleys). The presence of a group of large and heavy pithoi among the non-local groups raises questions about their regional or maritime origin.     

Dating the Trollesgave site and the Bromme culture – chronological fix-points for the Lateglacial settlement of Southern Scandinavia

The Bromme culture belongs to the Lateglacial, the period when people settled in the recently deglaciated Southern Scandinavia. Until now there have been only a few imprecise fix-points relating to the chronological position of this archaeological culture. This situation can now be improved with the aid of research results from a Bromme culture settlement at Trollesgave in SE Denmark. Using pollen and plant macrofossil data, Lateglacial lacustrine deposits containing waste material from the settlement can be assigned to the end of the climatically mild Allerød period. A series of ¹⁴C dates establishes the age of the settlement as c. 10 826 ± 49 ¹⁴C years BP (12 871–12 590 cal yr BP). By correlation with climate data from the Greenland ice cores, the occupation can be assigned to the early part of the cold climatic zone GS-1, thus demonstrating that the global ice-core climate zones are not absolutely synchronous with the regional division into biozones.