Production and Consumption of Copper-base Metals in the Indus Civilization

We review the existing data sets for the production and consumption of copper-base objects at Indus sites, outline a working typology for metal objects, and provide new data from on-going analytical work on the copper assemblage from Harappa. The role of metals in the economic and social networks of the Indus tradition is examined in terms of patterns of use and technological style. We note that Indus metalsmiths apparently relied more on procurement of metal ingots or scrap than on primary ingot production through smelting, which would have affected other aspects of Indus metallurgy. Object production did not involve elaborate forms, but may have involved complex alloying. Finally, we conclude that there is no evidence for elite control of metal production, and that access to metals was relatively widespread.     

Intergenerational Inequality? Labour,Capital, and Housing Through the Ages

This article examines the relevance of generational relations to emerging patterns of inequality in advanced capitalist societies, with a particular focus on inequalities related to housing wealth. At its heart is a critique of the increasingly prevalent argument that generational difference is a crucial axis of inequality today. It argues that while contemporary capitalist societies are certainly characterized by marked inequalities between generations and that the latter are manifested inter alia in housing ownership, understanding such inequalities principally in generational terms is problematic because they reflect deeper, more fundamental, structural inequalities and should therefore be conceptualized as such. The article suggests that the principal significance of generational relations to contemporary inequality dynamics actually concerns economic transfers rather than differences between generations. Within‐family transfers of wealth, especially housing‐related wealth, from older generations to younger ones tend to reproduce pronounced, structurally generated existing patterns of intra‐generational inequality.     

‘The miserable remnant of this ill-used people’: colonial genocide and the Moriori of New Zealand's Chatham Islands

Genocide scholars have not engaged with the killing of the Moriori people of New Zealand's Chatham Islands by two Māori iwi (tribes). New Zealand historians who have discussed Moriori have not used the paradigms and language of genocide studies. This article argues that Moriori were victims of genocide, and that their experience both challenges and deepens how colonial genocide is understood. Narratives of colonial genocides that assume the destruction of an indigenous people by a colonizing power are inadequate for understanding events on the Chathams, as are genocidal frameworks that assume perpetrators must be state actors. The colonial role was important but indirect: the encounter of Māori with Britain and Australia provided the physical and ideological tools that made the Moriori genocide possible. Māori behaviour on the Chathams diverged from tradition, with the racial tropes, destructive behaviours and justification for invading the Chathams all acquired through the colonial spread of British people into Polynesia. More recently, the use of imported imagery and politicization of the Moriori experience has revealed the consequences of successive generations’ failure to properly remember or even identify the genocide.     

‘Westward on the high-hilled plains’: the literature of Shropshire and the early twentieth century imagination, 1896–c.1939

This article explores English national identities in the early twentieth century through the regional case study of Shropshire. Building on existing research on English regions, this article addresses the scarcity of border case studies. I argue that Shropshire was perceived as a border region that, at the same time as being incorporated into the model of the South Country, was also powerfully shaped by its proximity to Wales. Shropshire was valued as an escape from commercial modernity through its countryside landscapes, as a gateway to the past through its buildings, place-names, and folk customs, as a borderland of medieval conflict with Wales, and as a mysterious region of superstitions and the supernatural. This article suggests that the motifs and themes which worked through the images of ‘Shropshire’ and ‘England’ supported an imagination of diversity, multiplicity and contradiction—not solely one of national unity.     

Retrieving the Partisan History of Australian Citizenship

Current debates on Australian citizenship overlook its partisan dimension. Until very recently, the term citizenship fitted more comfortably into nonlabour's discourse than into Labor's. Nonlabour's understanding of citizenship is embedded in Australia's constitutional framework. As well, in the first half of the century the term was as much moral as political, concerned not so much with the rights and entitlements which dominate contemporary understandings but with individuals' duties and obligations to their fellow citizens. For nonlabour, citizenship was linked to ideas of service and the national interest, and explicitly opposed to Labor's commitment to sectional, class-based interests. This conception of citizenship was realised in the meeting procedures of voluntary associations in which there was a clear line of implication from the government of the self through the government of the community to the government of the nation. The working man is not merely a working man, nor can all his interests be subsumed (classed) under the term Labour. The working man is and knows himself to be, the citizen of a great State. ( The Liberal 2 December 1912, 114)