Money and robbers, 900–1100

To robbers and thieves money is more tempting than other commodities. There was more money in Europe in 1100 than in 900. So we should expect, other things being equal, an increase in robbery in these two centuries. This expectation is confirmed by a survey of recorded cases; and it finds further corroboration in the fortunes of hagiographical motifs relating to thieves.     

To Make Live or Let Die? Rural Dispossession and the Protection of Surplus Populations

Abstract: A biopolitics of the population, when it succeeds in securing life and wellbeing, is surely worth having. It has become urgent in rural Asia, where a new round of enclosures has dispossessed large numbers of people from access to land as a way to sustain their own lives, and neoliberal policies have curtailed programs that once helped to sustain rural populations. At the same time, new jobs in manufacturing have not emerged to absorb this population. They are thus “surplus” to the needs of capital, and not plausibly described as a labour reserve. Who, then, would act to keep these people alive, and why would they act? I examine this question by contrasting a conjuncture in India, where a make live program has been assembled under the rubric of the “right to food”, and Indonesia, where the massacre of the organized left in 1965 has left dispossessed populations radically exposed.     

Australia and the European Union: conflict,competition or engagement in agricultural and agri-food trade?

Many scholars have mounted convincing cases that the engagement of Australia and the European Union (EU) has been characterised by skirmishes regarding the Common Agricultural Policy and its distortion of world markets, and lack of Australian access to EU markets. This article illustrates that agricultural and agri-food trade constitutes a relatively small portion of Australia–EU trade flows; that Australia exports more goods to the EU than in the past; and that, in some agri-food sectors, it exports more goods to the EU than the EU does to Australia. Further, it argues that conflict and competition regarding the Common Agricultural Policy need to be understood in the broader context of world trade and in the context of a new and deeper engagement between the two interlocutors.     

On the applicability of post-IR IRSL dating to Japanese loess

Recent work on infrared stimulated luminescence (IRSL) dating has focussed on finding and testing signals which show less or negligible fading. IRSL signals measured at elevated temperature following IR stimulation at 50°C (post-IR IRSL) have been shown to be much more stable than the low temperature IRSL signal and seem to have considerable potential for dating. For Early Pleistocene samples of both European and Chinese loess natural post-IR IRSL signals lying in the saturation region of the laboratory dose response curve have been observed; this suggests that there is no significant fading in nature. As a contribution to the further testing of post-IR IRSL dating, we have used 18 samples from two Japanese loess profiles for which quartz OSL and tephra ages up to 600 ka provide age control. After a preheat of 320°C (60 s), the polymineral fine grains (4–11 μm) were bleached with IR at 50°C (200 s) and the IRSL was subsequently measured at 290°C for 200 s. In general, the fading uncorrected post-IR IRSL ages agree with both the quartz OSL and the tephra ages. We conclude that the post-IR IRSL signal from these samples does not fade significantly and allows precise and accurate age determinations on these sediments.