STONE AXES OF THE CHANNEL ISLANDS: NEOLITHIC EXCHANGE IN AN INSULAR CONTEXT

Summary. The petrology of stone axes found in the Channel Islands is examined. Recent research has resulted in the identification of an axe production centre at Le Pinacle, Jersey, and axes produced there have been recorded on Guernsey, Alderney and Sark. The Channel Island assemblages also include axes of Type A dolerite, flint, jadeite, eclogite and fibrolite, produced at known centres on the European mainland: together, these 'exotic' axes account for around 32% of the total Channel Island sample. A marked fall-off is noted between Jersey and the other islands in terms of the occurrence of these imported axes, and this can perhaps be explained in relation to factors affecting navigation. The social significance of inter-island and island/mainland interaction is explored.     

SITING A WOMEN'S HEALTH FACILITY: A LOCATION-ALLOCATION STUDY OF BREAST CANCER SCREENING SERVICES IN EASTERN ONTARIO

Women's health care has been a neglected area of study in geography. Access to health care has generally been treated as gender-neutral in the medical geography literature. In this paper, access to a women's health care service is examined using a location-allocation approach. We argue for the utility of a location-allocation approach to the informed siting of breast-screening facilities for two reasons. First, the readily available sex- and age-specific data are truly representative of need for breast-screening services. Second, there is a need to ensure geographic accessibility to women's health care services where the outcomes such as decreased mortality and improved quality of life have been demonstrated. A commonly used location-allocation approach with distance constraints is employed to evaluate the service provided by mammography facilities in the Ontario Breast Screening Program Kingston Centre's catchment area. The existing catchment area is found to leave many women with impossibly long travel distances. The results demonstrate the importance of taking a gender-informed geographic approach to the siting of women's health care services. Le bien-être des femmes a été négligé dans le domaine de la géographie. L'accès á l'aide médicale a été, généralement, traité sans tenir compte du problème ‘sexe’ dans la littérature médico-géographique. Dans cet écrit, l'accès des femmes á un service médical est analysé au moyen d'une approche qui tient compte de la disponibilité du corps médical sur l'ensemble de la région désservie. ll y a deux raisons pour lesquelles nous argumentons l'utilité des ‘médecins désignés’ concernant l'information distribuée sur les cliniques offrant, aux patientes, des examens amenant au dépistage du cancer du sein. Premièrement, les dernières statistiques disponibles sur le sexe et les âges spécifiques, montrent clairement la nécessité de services pour les examens mammaires. Deuxièmement, il est important de dèmontrer qu'il y a un besoin de réassurer l'accessibilité géographique au centre médical pour les femmes dans les cas où le taux de mortalité décroît ce qui amène, comme résultat, á une meilleure qualité de vie. Le service offert concernant la mammographie du ‘Programme Ontarien de Dépistage du Cancer du Sein’ au Centre Médical de Kingston est employé pour évaluer l'efficacité du corps médical malgré les problèmes de distances. Les régions désservies existantes ont malheureusement le désavantage d'être trop loin, ce qui ne favorise pas les patientes qui ne peuvent faire de longs voyages. Pour conclure, les rèsultats démontrent que l'approche géographique par le facteur de sexe dans la location des centres médicaux pour les femmes doit être, de préférence, revue.     

Three's a Crowd?: Government, Owners, and Workers during the Nationalization of the British Coalmining Industry 1945-47

The passing of the coalmining industry into public ownershipon 1 January 1947 should have been an occasion for rejoicingby the Labour Party and its supporters, yet celebrations weremuted by the looming shadow of critical coal shortages Despitethis concurrence of nationalization and coal crisis, littleattention has been focused on possible linkages between thetwo events. More generally, scant consideration has been givento the question of what happened to the industry when facedwith nationalization. This article's principal argument is thatthe fuel crisis was rooted not (as other historians have argued)in the atrocious weather, but in the very process of nationalization—or,rather in the combination of a lack of preparation for publicownership and (even more importantly) in the preoccupation withnationalization at the expense of the ‘stabilization’of the industry before entering the uncharted waters of publicownership. The chief conclusion is that during the run-up toVesting Day neither miners nor owners had any substantial incentiveto improve industrial productivity and output The period wasat best a standstill, and in many ways—as the crisis indicated—wastedmonths that a fuel-starved Britain could ill afford ^*This article is based on my MA thesis, ‘Fresh Start orFalse Dawn⁷ the coalmining Industry and Nationalisation, 1945–7'I would like to thank my supervisors, Ranald Midne and PhilipWilliamson for their continued support, and also David Howelland the referees of Twentieth Century British History for theirvaluable comments on earlier drafts of this work.     

The new resource politics: can Australia and South Africa accommodate China?

The material transformation of the Chinese economy is forcing a concomitant process of political adjustment—and not just in China. Other states are being forced to accommodate the ‘rise of China’. In this context, this article first presents a comparative analysis of China's impact on two countries, Australia and South Africa, which have little in common other than a wealth of natural resources and a possible status as middle powers; this is a particularly useful exercise because these states are geographically distant and have very different political structures and general developmental histories. Second, the authors consider how China's bilateral ties look from a Chinese perspective in these two very different relationships. Such an analysis serves as a reminder that resource dependency is a two‐way street. The article argues that underlying material realities are constraining and to some extent determining the domestic and foreign policies of three very different states that otherwise have little in common.     

The UN Arms Trade Treaty: arms export controls,the human security agenda and the lessons of history

The UN conference to negotiate an Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) concluded on 27 July 2012 without reaching consensus on the text of a draft treaty and saw both the US and Russia calling for more time to negotiate. The ATT process marks the latest in a series of attempts to insert human security concerns into arms export controls. The setback in July raises questions about the current level of international support for the human security agenda, as well as the relative power of different actors to shape global governance structures. This article locates the ATT negotiations in the broader history of multilateral efforts to regulate the international arms trade, from the 1890 Brussels Act to post‐Cold War initiatives. The historical record shows that such efforts are more likely to succeed if they are negotiated or imposed by major arms exporters. The introduction of human security concerns, as well as the merging of export control and arms control agendas, went some way towards reversing this trend. In particular, it created a broad international coalition of supportive states and NGOs from the global North and South. Yet disagreements over the purpose of an ATT remained. The draft ATT included human security provisions, but China, Russia, the US and a number of emerging powers ensured that state security considerations remained paramount in decision‐making on arms exports. The US was the first major actor to announce its unwillingness to sign the draft ATT in July 2012 and two alternative interpretations of US actions are considered. The article concludes by considering the options available to supporters of the ATT process following the 2012 conference and examines the notion that the ATT campaign has become an initiative ‘out of its time’, one that might have had success in the 1990s but not in current circumstances.