Town founding in seventeenth-century North America: Jamestown in Virginia

Jamestown in Virginia provides a case study of one facet of the geography of England's overseas expansion in the seventeenth century. Recent discussions of not only Jamestown but all early North American settlements have laid stress on two points. The first towns were founded as entrepôts for international trade in raw materials and were located at central points on colonial coastlines to exert monopoly control over trade. But Jamestown fulfilled neither of these objectives. It was conceived by its promoters, at least initially, as a trading station similar, in many ways, to the Kontors of the Hansa towns and the fondachi of Italian city states. In English institutional terms Jamestown was to be a staple. Its location was off-centre with respect to pre-settlement boundary lines. Its founding was influenced partly by perceptions of the Chesapeake and partly by rivalries in the imperial contest for North America. Jamestown's settlers also had a comprehensive list of town site criteria that included references to trade routes, to site defensibility, and to the physical environment. Although not a prototype for later colonization of the Atlantic Seaboard, Jamestown represented the first settlement form.     

FGM or FGMo? Cross‐cultural dialogue in an Italian minefield (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

On 20 December 2012 the United General Assembly unanimously passed a resolution banning the practice of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM). In this article, Mara Mabilia aims to draw attention to the lives of immigrant women in Europe, and more specifically Italy, from some of the 30 or so chiefly Islamic countries of Africa, where what she prefers to call ‘female genital modification’ (FGMo) is practised. Her aim is neither to advocate the practice, nor to challenge the bans instituted in the West. Rather, her aim is, more broadly, to probe how women, having undergone these practices, live in host societies that interpret these chiefly as human rights violations through the prism of unacceptable violence. To condemn FGM should not imply condemnation also of the 100–140 million women that the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates have undergone this practice.