Complex Strands: Changing Textile Trades in Western Madagascar and the Mozambique Channel in the Nineteenth Century,Evidence from Nosy Be Island

This article examines the textiles trades of the west coast of Madagascar through the commercial relations and connections of Nosy Be with East Africa, the Comoro islands, the Mascarenes, India, French and other European imperial and metropolitan interests. It argues that, despite having been overlooked by historians in favour of Madagascar’s east coast economy centred on Tamatave, the island of Nosy Be in the far north-west of the island provides a critical vantage point from which to study the commercial exchange dynamics centred on a variety of textiles in the nineteenth century, a period of marked upheaval in the western Indian Ocean. Despite competition from European and American cloths — involving state perquisites granted to French textiles — Indian and other regional cloth continued to maintain important markets amongst Malagasy consumers into the early twentieth century.     

Combining growth and level data: An estimation of the population of Belgian municipalities between 1880 and 1970

Economic historians that study long-term changes during the nineteenth and twentieth century are fundamentally restricted by the availability of qualitative data. As a result, researchers are forced to either impute missing data, or otherwise combine datasets in some way. In this article, we demonstrate the versatility of state-space models in addressing these problems. Not only do they enable us to compose large data series of high quality, they also provide a clear estimate of how reliable this data is, allowing any subsequent analyses to take this reliability into account. We illustrate the advantages of a state-space model using the population of Belgian municipalities as a case study. By combining growth and level data, we are able to compute yearly population statistics of over 2600 municipalities from 1880 to 1970.     

Between Ecclesiology and Ontology: A Response to Chris Allen on British Food Banks

The sociologist and theologian Chris Allen develops aspects of both Liberation and Postliberal theologies to launch a critique of the two dominant contemporary Christian responses to British food insecurity: food charity and food justice campaigning. Allen maps an alternative approach: a land activist Church that draws on its own historical counter-cultural practices and takes an oppositional stance to the contemporary state and market nexus. Drawing on the work of the Italian philosopher and political theorist Roberto Esposito, this essay argues that Allen's goals could be more fully realized by investigating with greater nuance Christian ontology, ecclesiology and the role of the state. Turning again to Allen's sources in this essay, the variety and potential of foodbank volunteering along with the legitimacy of food justice campaigns are critically reintegrated into a more radical project, a project which includes but is not limited to the sphere of the ecclesia.     

J.G.A. Pocock and the idea of the ‘Cambridge School’ in the history of political thought

This article offers a reinterpretation of the origins and character of the so-called ‘Cambridge School’ in the history of political thought by reconstructing the intellectual background to J.G.A. Pocock's 1962 essay ‘The History of Political Thought: A Methodological Enquiry’, typically regarded as the first statement of a ‘Cambridge’ approach. I argue that neither linguistic philosophy nor the celebrated work of Peter Laslett exerted a major influence on Pocock's work between 1948 and 1962. Instead, I emphasise the importance of Pocock's interest in the history of historiography and of his doctoral supervisor, Herbert Butterfield. By placing Pocock's intellectual development in these contexts, I suggest, the autonomy of diverse versions of the ‘Cambridge’ approach can more readily be perceived.     

Liberation Theology and Zombies: Paralysis and Praxis

In Fredric Jameson's formulation it may now be “easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.” What Jameson suggests is that our current preoccupation with the drama of the apocalyptic belies a deeper paralysis of the imagination, and with this the concomitant loss of actions conducive to a new politics. Jameson's comments here foreground a contradiction in our experience of late capitalism, representations of dramatic rupture which obscure fundamental political stasis. This paper takes Jameson's reflections and the contradiction of action which is also non-action as the point of departure to query the current state of Liberation Theology, particularly the work of Ivan Petrella, to defend the work of Gustavo Gutiérrez, and ask how our contemporary predicament might be illuminated by Danny Boyle's zombie film, 28 Days Later.