Intimate Mediations of For‐Profit Conservation Finance: Waste,Improvement, and Accumulation

How to understand the marriage between accumulation and conservation? The paper draws from extensive research into one value chain, from the advisor in New York City to a wildlife‐friendly cattle business in Kenya. Making this enterprise return in money requires intimate and relentless efforts to transform wasteful conduct across a range of institutions and people; we focus on the attempted production of NGO economicus, homo economicus plus, and bos Taurus economicus. Drawing from feminist and postcolonial theorists of capitalism, we emphasise how green capitalist value production does not always hinge on extinguishing other‐than‐capitalist‐social relations but rather attempts to mobilise and harness such differences, including non‐profit‐seeking values, logics and relations. The paper concludes by reflecting on the temporal challenges facing for‐profit conservation finance, including those posed by previous regimes of accumulation that it relies on but also wants to overcome.     

The escape from famine in the Northern Netherlands: a reconsideration using the 1690s harvest failures and a broader Northwest European perspective

A long historiography has concluded that the Northern Netherlands was famine free by the seventeenth century. However, this view has been established on limited grain price data and an unclear chronology, lacking a broader comparative perspective, and relying heavily on the explanation that Amsterdam was the centre point of the international grain trade. Using newly compiled burials data for the Northern and Southern Netherlands and Northern France, and integrating these with rye prices, we confirm empirically that price spikes had reduced mortality effects in the Northern Netherlands compared to the Southern Netherlands and Northern France, though the escape was greater in the cities than the countryside. The only time in the period 1551–1699 that a strong and generalized association between price spikes and mortality occurred across wide areas of the Northern Netherlands was in the famine of 1556/7. However, the international grain trade cannot explain everything. Markets in the Northern Netherlands were no more effective at smoothing out food crises than in the Southern Netherlands or Northern France. We offer alternative explanations: the reduced role of famine-related diseases spread by warfare, and the interaction (especially in the cities) between wages and poor relief.     

Panlongcheng,Zhengzhou and the Movement of Metal in Early Bronze Age China

Journal of World Prehistory - The role of Panlongcheng—a walled settlement on the Yangtze River with obvious links to the Erligang capital at Zhengzhou, ~?500 km to the...