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.     

On face transplantation: Ethical slippage and quiet death in experimental biomedicine (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

More and more teams around the globe are gaining ethical clearance to perform face transplant surgery. The operation is a highly experimental medical treatment and patients who are otherwise healthy are dying as a consequence of submitting themselves to the operation. This article is concerned with the quiet deaths and ethical slippages that are emerging in this new medical terrain. It suggests that an examination of the relationship between nationalism and medical advancement is necessary to understand this slippage, because inter alia the surgery has been afforded national significance.     

‘What sort of love will not speak for a friend's good?’: pastoral care and rhetoric in early Anglo-Saxon letters to kings

The late-seventh/eighth-century Anglo-Saxon authors Aldhelm, Bede, Boniface and Alcuin all composed letters to contemporary kings. These authors used three main rhetorical strategies to direct their royal correspondents towards a more virtuous life. The first of these was advice, the (seemingly) straightforward offering of (ostensibly) judgement-free moral guidance. Secondly, there was admonition, where the author overtly and vigorously confronted specific sins. Finally, there were examples, exempla, drawn from both biblical and contemporary history, which the authors employed, with or without editorial comment, either to inspire or to deter. It is argued that these letters were principally motivated by moral or pastoral concern, rather than any desire to establish an abstract kingship ideology.