Construction Sacrifice,Kidnapping and Head-hunting Rumors on Flores and Elsewhere in Indonesia

Three recent articles have examined head-hunting and kidnapping rumors in connection with construction sacrifice on Borneo and Flores. This paper presents further information on such rumors on Flores and elsewhere in Indonesia which largely confirms their interpretations. However, the argument is made that rather than being a new phenomenon and a product of the colonial era, these rumors may well have been characteristic of Indonesia from ancient times and have typically been associated with offices of political and military potency. Policies and activities of the Dutch near the Solor islands since the seventeenth century may have strongly reinforced suspicions that they were capable of taking heads through local agents.     

Lancashire's ‘War’ with Australia: Rethinking Anglo-Australian Trade and the Cultural Economy of Empire, 1934–36

Following the recent cultural turn in economic history, this article resurrects a neglected imperial trade war between Lancashire and Australia to explore the nature of the cultural economy of the British Empire in the interwar period. New work has emphasised the importance of Britishness as the basis for co-ethnic networks that helped underwrite imperial expansion through the nineteenth century. However, this welcome new focus on culture’s significance for economics has, curiously, tended to obscure its dynamic interaction with the economy. Economic activity did not simply benefit from culture, as concepts like co-ethnicity suggest, but also helped to produce that culture. As result, the meanings of Britishness mobilised by trade were never stable, even in the heart of empire itself. This article focuses on a boycott of Australian produce started by grocers in Lancashire cotton towns in 1934, in response to new Australian tariffs on imported cotton goods. Tracing the cultural meanings constructed from the very first planting of cotton in Australia, through to the boycott and its aftermath, exemplifies the dynamic and contingent nature of Britishness generated through trade.