A. V. Dicey and English constitutionalism

The jurist A. V. Dicey’s study of the Law of the Constitution (1885) has been since its publication the dominant analysis of the British constitution and the source of orthodoxy on such subjects as parliamentary sovereignty and the rule of law. This canonical status has obscured the originality of Dicey’s ideas in the history of legal and political thought. Dicey reworked the traditional idea of sovereignty into two separate concepts – legal and political sovereignty – in order to square the common law notion of the sovereignty of parliament with the democratic idea of the sovereignty of the people. He forged a new concept – ‘the rule of law’ – to explain the legal basis of liberty in common law countries in a manner that was both Benthamite and constitutionalist. Finally, he provided a democratic and anti-federalist rationale for maintaining the Union of Great Britain and Ireland. This majoritarian, centralist and utilitarian constitutionalism has been one of the most enduring products of Victorian scholarship. This article seeks to recover it in its original context and, in so doing, to show the value of reintegrating legal thought into the mainstream of modern British history and the history of political thought.     

International labour migration of Asian women

Chris Beyrer. War in the Blood: sex, Politics and AIDS in Southeast Asia. Bangkok: White Lotus Books; London and New York: Zed Books, 1998. £42.50, hardcover; £14.95, paper.

Christine B. N. Chin. In Service and Servitude: foreign Female Domestic Workers and the Malaysian “Modernity” Project. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. xxiv, 299 pp. US$20.50, paper.

Siriporn Skrobanek, Nataya Boonpakdee and Chutima Jantateero. The Traffic in Women: human Realities of the International Sex Trade. London and New York: Zed Books, 1997. vii, 124 pp. £32.95, hardcover.     

‘Our Bantustans are Better than Yours’: Botswana,The United States,and Human Rights in the 1970s

Many historians have upheld the 1970s as the ‘breakthrough’ decade for human rights. Botswana was a notable beneficiary of the efflorescence of these principles, especially as human rights gained greater prominence in the foreign policy of the United States (US). From 1966 to 1980, the government of Seretse Khama upheld one of the strongest human rights records of any African state, using it to acquire vital economic aid and psychological encouragement from the West. This study of US–Botswana relations is significant for showing the capacity of an underdeveloped and vulnerable state, surrounded by white minority regimes, to use internationalist ideals to improve its prospects for greater security and prosperity. The research also reveals the limits of Botswana's approach, particularly when the US could not align its strategic interests in Africa with its professed value for human rights. Botswana was therefore exceptional in perceiving its geopolitical priorities as closely tied to its integrity as a self-proclaimed model for non-racial democracy in Southern Africa. The article helps to show how the 1970s human rights movement was not just a Western one or an American one, but a truly transnational one, with unique, though often underappreciated, contributions from those in Africa.     

Sexualized violence and the gendered commodification of the animal body in Pacific Northwest US dairy production

This article draws on a case study of bovine life in the US dairy industry to observe the power relations and violent networks of commodification involved. I use the terms gendered commodification and sexualized violence to understand the lives of animals in the industry and the discourses that are employed to reproduce its practices. Focusing on sex and gender, concepts which have long been classic in feminist geography, this article explores the sexually violent commodification of both female and male animals in dairy production. In addition to the ways in which both are exploited for their productive and reproductive capacities, male animals are also discursively conceptualized as perpetrators of the violence against the females. This article engages with geographies of the body and animal geographies in order to extend geographies of the body to other-than-human bodies and in order to feature the body more prevalently in animal geographies. This attention to the animal body ultimately reveals the pervasiveness of sexual violence and the consequences of gendered commodification for both nonhuman and human others.     

Integration of use-wear with protein residue analysis – a study of tool use and function in the south Scandinavian Early Neolithic

This study presents research on how an integration of use-wear analysis with protein residue analysis can produce new results on prehistoric tool use and function. Thirty flint artefacts from an Early Neolithic TRB site in south Sweden were analysed for both use-wear and protein residues. The results show a positive correlation between the two methods. The Early Neolithic tools analysed were primarily used to process fish.