Anti-Ballistic Missiles and the Liberal–Conservative Internationalist Divide in Cold War Canada, 1966–1970

Shortly following Canada's controversial adoption of nuclear weapon roles in NORAD and NATO in 1963, the focus of nuclear debates shifted to the potential impact on Canadian and international security of the construction of US anti-ballistic missile (ABM) systems. This article expands the focus of scholarship on the ABM issue from the political and policy-making settings to include members of the attentive elite and the news media, and finds these groups deeply divided between liberal and conservative internationalists. On the one hand, supporters of liberal internationalism believed that AMB systems would destabilise the international security environment and ultimately increase the likelihood of nuclear war. Conservative internationalists took the opposite position, arguing that the systems represented a necessary addition to the Western nuclear deterrent and would make nuclear war less likely. In other words, the ABM debate exposed deep divisions in Canadian society between those who preferred diplomatic and multilateral versus military means of achieving middle power goals in the international system.     

Morality and the Concept of the Market Seller among Gehamo

This paper examines the negative moral evaluations of people who buy and resell fresh food by Gahuku and Gehamo people in and around Goroka, the capital of Eastern Highlands Province, Papua New Guinea. During my fieldwork from 2010 to 2015, vendors in the Goroka fresh food market argued that the value of fresh food should be based on the work that people did to produce it rather than on price competition, or on supply and demand. An examination of market vendors’ practice of ‘giving extra’ to customers, and the responses of vendors who resold food to negative moral evaluations of their activities, led me to an examination of the morality of production in relation to land, ancestors, and social relations; the morality of the marketplace; as well as ideas about what makes someone a good social person. Drawing on Erik Schwimmer's (1979) discussion of the concept of work in Melanesian societies, I argue that vendors in the Goroka market continue to emphasize use value and their own identification with the food that they are selling rather than the exchange value of alienated produce. While marketplaces are the apparent locus par excellence of capitalist economic activity, a consideration of the morality of Goroka market vendors leads to the caution that just because one sees something that looks like a marketplace in which people are engaging in commodity transactions does not necessarily mean that it is a marketplace in which people are engaging in commodity transactions. Similarly, just because something looks like a price does not necessarily mean that it is a price. Those considerations, in turn, lead to a re‐examination of Kenneth Read's (1955) characterization of morality and personhood among Gahuku in light of contemporary market exchange.     

Marketplaces and Morality in Papua New Guinea: Place,Personhood and Exchange

In Papua New Guinea (PNG) more rural people, and especially rural women, earn cash from selling in marketplaces than from any other source. PNG's marketplaces are critical for food security, and for the redistribution of wealth. They are also important meeting places where people gather to see friends, hear the latest news, attend court cases, play cards and be entertained. This introduction to this special issue on ‘Marketplaces and Morality in Papua New Guinea’ reviews the history of PNG marketplaces and their contemporary forms. It charts their transformation from introduced colonial spaces into dynamic Melanesian places, which, as places to buy, sell and socialise, have become pervasive institutions in the lives of both urban and rural Papua New Guineans, and places where people interact with both known and unknown others. From this, marketplaces emerge as important spaces of moral evaluation and contestation in relation to what constitutes morally acceptable exchange and what practices are acceptable in these places. The paper demonstrates that exchange in the marketplace should not be reduced to commodity transactions, and questions assumptions about the types of people marketplaces create. It argues that the country's marketplaces are productive sites to consider ideas of exchange, social relations and social personhood, and that there is a critical need to understand the concrete details of what takes place in contemporary marketplaces.     

Recent discoveries at Ely Cathedral,Cambridgeshire: Aetheldreda’s Gate,the church of Holy Cross and the possible boundary of the Anglo-Saxon monastery

Recent fieldwork ahead of construction in Ely Cathedral precinct has identified two documented but ‘lost’ medieval buildings, in addition to a large boundary ditch and other deposits which potentially relate to the monastery founded by St Aetheldreda in the late seventh century. The excavations provide an opportunity to review the currently limited state of knowledge regarding the location and layout of the Anglo-Saxon monastery at Ely and to put forward some models to be tested through future fieldwork.     

Oppressive Rhyming: George Orwell on Poetry and Totalitarianism

In George Orwell’s 1984, the poet Ampleforth observes that “the whole history of English poetry has been determined by the fact that the English language lacks rhymes.” In this article I connect Ampleforth’s observation to Orwell’s many other writings on language and political control and then show how Orwell’s discussion of poetry’s resistance to political manipulation enhances Tocqueville’s and Burke’s accounts of totalitarianism. Specifically, Orwell illustrates how an easily “rhyming” polity is particularly vulnerable to totalitarian politics, while a society containing considerable disorder in its language and politics can be strongly resistant to such tyranny.