Remedial agents: missionary physicians and the depopulation of Hawai'i

This article examines the activities and perspectives of nineteenth-century American missionary physicians in the Hawaiian Islands. The physicians' attitudes toward Hawaiian morbidity and depopulation are viewed in relation to the greater missionary community's role in the political transformation of the island nation. The article argues that missionary physicians monitored and reported on Native Hawaiian depopulation (a result of introduced western diseases) while simultaneously advertising the islands' benefits to American consumptives, imperialists, and others. Mission doctors also failed to respond effectively to the greatest epidemiological crisis Hawai'i had ever faced: a venereal scourge with a resulting blight of Native Hawaiian infertility. As a result of these and other factors, American hegemony in Hawai'i by midcentury was a foregone conclusion.     

The Making of “World‐Class” Delhi: Relations Between Street Hawkers and the New Middle Class

Urban India is undergoing transformation as formal electoral politics increasingly favors the new middle class. Scholarship tends to compartmentalize the politics of the new middle class and the poor, and this article focuses on inter‐class relations. By focusing on relations between street hawkers and the new middle class in Delhi, I show that rather than engaging in zero‐sum conflicts over urban space, conflict is typically over the terms of its use. The analysis shows that these classes are interdependent; the poor depend on the new middle class for their livelihoods, and the lifestyles of new middle class are enabled by services provided by the poor. While the poor enable and participate in Delhi's transformation into a so‐called “world‐class” city, the reconciliation of competing visions of urbanization—one geared toward social reproduction and the other subsistence—is what is at stake in contemporary inter‐class relations.     

Does the Internet Encourage Small Parties? A Case Study of the Minutiae of BC Politics, 1996–2009

Researchers remain divided on what Small describes as ‘a key debate in the cyber-campaigning literature’ – whether or not the emergence of the Internet enhanced the prospects of small parties on the periphery of mainstream politics that speak for those whose voices might otherwise go unheard. Often researchers have approached this question by seeking to establish if small parties are indeed able to maintain an on-line presence that matches that of larger, better resourced parties. The ultimate test of this ‘equalisation thesis’, however, is whether the Internet ushered in a period in which small parties could flourish. With its propensity to produce small parties and its rapid take-up of Internet technology from the mid-1990s onward, the Canadian province of British Columbia (BC) is an ideal case study. The number of small BC parties increased in the decade beginning 1995, but a close scrutiny of the minutiae of BC politics in this period finds no evidence to support a claim that the Internet favoured small parties and enlarged the opportunity for marginalised citizens to participate in politics. ‘Cyber-optimists’ will have to look to unconventional forms of political activity for evidence that the Internet can draw new constituencies into politics.