Commerce and Empire in the Borderlands： How do Merchants and Trade Fit into Qing Frontier History？

As our understanding of the Qing empire and its various borderlands has evolved, so too have we come to appreciate China＇s early modem commercial sophistication. In recent North American studies of the Qing, the links between commerce and conquest have come under investigation, and we are increasingly urged to pay attention to merchants and merchant capital. But how should we understand the relationship between merchants and the Qing empire in the borderlands？ This article surveys selected work on the borderlands and commercialization, primarily in the Northwest and Southwest. The goal is to initiate a more comprehensive discussion of how to understand the intersection of commerce and empire while also making some suggestions for ways that borderlands history might shape future work on China.     

Mormon Masculinity: Changing Gender Expectations in the Era of Transition from Polygamy to Monogamy, 1890–1920

During the period from 1890 to 1920, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter‐day Saints (LDS) perceived a crisis in the lives of their boys. Like their Protestant contemporaries, Latter‐day Saints spent much time attempting to find a solution. At the same time, the LDS church was experiencing its own unique set of upheavals. In 1890, one of the central tenets of Mormonism – polygamy – had to be replaced with sexual practices that aligned the LDS with wider American society. It was during this transitional period that members and authorities of the LDS church sought to gain respectability in American culture by emphasising the morality and value systems they shared with their middle‐class Protestant contemporaries. As Mormons restructured marriage around the practice of monogamy, they placed the burden of the refashioned religious identity almost exclusively upon men and their bodies. The new Mormon man ushered the LDS church into the American mainstream while maintaining an acceptable difference from that mainstream culture.     

Enlightenment and Empire,Mughals and Marathas: the Religious History of India in the work of East India Company servant,Alexander Dow

This article situates the work of East India Company servant Alexander Dow (1735–1779), principally his writings on the history and future state of India, in contemporary debates about empire, religion and enlightened government. To do so it offers a sustained analysis of his 1772 essay ‘A Dissertation Concerning the Origin and Nature of Despotism in Hindostan’, as well as his proposals for the restoration of Bengal, both of which played an influential part in shaping the preoccupations with Mughal history that dominated the contemporary crisis in the Company’s legitimacy. By linking these texts to his earlier work on ‘Hindoo’ religion, it will argue that Dow’s analysis of the relationship between certain religious cultures and their civic qualities was rooted in a deist perspective. It doing so it restores the enlightenment components of Dow’s thought, and their impact on the ideology of empire, in a crucial period of British expansion in India.     

Modelling the Neolithic transition in a heterogeneous environment

The Neolithic transition, involving the change of subsistence from foraging to agriculture, can fruitfully be modelled mathematically, as, e.g., in the three-population model of Aoki et al. (1996). Here that model is modified to include some features of population dynamics in a realistic, two-dimensional environment, and including population pressure, competition for resources between farmers and foragers, and the dependence of the population carrying capacities and diffusivities on the environmental conditions. This modified model allows for the survival of foragers in regions where environmental conditions do not favour farming. The model is tentatively applied to the Indian subcontinent, which is a complicated example of this transition involving multiple domestication centres. The results are briefly compared with published archaeological data.     

Gender,Slavery and the Making of New World Identities

Books reviewed in this article: David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine (eds), More Than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas Maggie Montesinos Sale, The Slumbering Volcano: American Slave Ship Revolts and the Production of Rebellious Masculinity