The Passenger Cases Reconsidered in Transatlantic Commerce Clause History

The Supreme Court's 5–4 decision in the Passenger Cases (1849) overturned two Northern states' taxes on poor foreign immigrants. The Court's eight opinions disputed whether destitute transatlantic immigrants arriving in U.S. ports were legally and constitutionally “persons” like fugitive slaves fleeing the South, free African Americans residing in the U.S.‐Canadian borderlands, and black seamen working on ships entering Southern ports. The eight opinions issued in the case, as Charles Warren noted, raised fundamental constitutional questions concerning whether U.S. congressional or state authority was exclusive or concurrent over persons moving in interstate and international business, reflecting wider sectional struggles fostering the Civil War. ¹ More recently, Mary Bilder and others examined connections among indentured contract labor, race‐based American slavery, and the Court's antebellum Commerce Clause decisions to establish that foreign immigrants were commercial objects subject to regulation through the Constitution's Commerce Clause. ² Southerners and Northern pro‐slavery supporters argued, however, that fugitive slaves and free blacks crossing interstate and international borders were “persons” who could be regulated or altogether excluded under state police powers. ³     

John Robinson's ‘State’ for the General Election of 1774

This note prints two documents of the 1774 general election compiled by John Robinson, secretary to the treasury. One is a list of the old house of commons in the summer of 1774, prior to its dissolution. MPs are listed, from the government standpoint, as Pro, Hopeful, Doubtful and Con. The other document is a list of the constituencies with the same political designations for MPs, both for the existing house of commons and the expected new House: no names are given for actual or prospective MPs. The election saw an unusually large number of contests, with 183 seats at stake in 102 constituencies, a higher total than has hitherto been known.     

Conservatives,the Constitution and the Quest for a ‘Representative’ House of Lords, 1911–35*

This article presents a new interpretation of Conservative attitudes towards house of lords' reform in the early 20th century. Coinciding, as it did, with the introduction of universal adult suffrage, the campaign to reform and strengthen the second chamber has traditionally been understood as a reaction against democracy. Conversely, this article, emphasizing the politics rather than policies of reform, argues that many Conservatives sought to establish a legitimate role for a second chamber within the new democratic settlement and that the campaign for reform is, consequently, better understood as a constitutional means of ‘making safe’, rather than resisting, mass democracy. The account sheds new light on how the impulse behind reform was frequently rooted in a commitment to democracy, how reform commanded the support of a wide cross section of the Conservative parliamentary party, and why the reform campaign had folded by the early 1930s. In doing so, it reframes an important episode that helped close the long‐19th‐century tradition of constitutional reform in British politics.     

The temporary as the future: Ready‐to‐use therapeutic food and nutraceuticals in South Africa

The reconfiguration of food as a pharmaceutical in biomedical regimes has been considered by scholars along two axes: (1) food supplementation as humanitarian intervention, based on a specific value of life and delivered in ‘crisis’ situations with a short temporal horizon; (2) food supplementation as commodity, marketed as enhancing ‘wellness’ or potential, based on notions of risk in broad temporal frames. We consider nutraceuticals and ready‐to‐use‐therapeutic foods as they are deployed by state and commercial actors in South Africa in relation to two key figures: the pregnant woman and the HIV‐positive population. These biopolitical expressions of post‐apartheid regimes of knowledge, care and governance reveal how state distribution and the corporate marketing of supplements employ a future‐oriented logic that appeals to notions of power, energy and potential. Therapeutic foods in this context are thus not merely humanitarian technologies that reconfigure crisis as a chronic condition – the temporary becoming permanent – but are premised on new potentialities, in which the temporary may (re)shape the future.     

ANATOMY OF A TOMB-WEST KENNET REVISITED

Summary. The primary and secondary uses of the West Kennet long barrow are reconsidered. In the first phase, dating perhaps to a late period of the Earlier Neolithic, the monument was used for a variety of burial rites, including bone circulation. The patterned deposits may have belonged to a small social group, and detailed knowledge of the tomb contents may have been restricted to such a group. The secondary phase is seen as covering a long span of time from the end of the Earlier Neolithic to the developed stage of the Later Neolithic represented by Avebury and Silbury Hill. The secondary filling of the monument was both gradual and patterned, and the ritual involved may have been part of continued social competition in the area.     

WHEN THE BOUGH BREAKS: CHILDHOOD MORTALITY AND BURIAL PRACTICE IN LATE NEOLITHIC ATLANTIC EUROPE

Towards the end of the fifth millennium BC, a new funerary tradition developed in Iberia and elsewhere in Atlantic Europe involving the use of megalithic tombs and natural or artificially constructed caves for the collective burial of the dead. Ancestor worship has been the most common theoretical framework used to explain this Neolithic burial tradition, despite demographic information which indicates that these burials house the remains of a significant percentage of children and adolescents. Using data from Late Neolithic (3500–2500 BC) tombs in south‐western Iberia as a departure point, in this paper we suggest that by reconsidering the impact that childhood mortality had upon burial and grave visitation practices in Neolithic communities, archaeologists can gain valuable phenomenological information which will allow for a more robust, multivocal interpretative approach.