Notes on Contributors

The purpose of this paper is twofold. It aims first to provide a critical overview of the literature on the history of technology as it relates to colonialism, decolonization and development in the extra‐European world during the 20th century. Second, it seeks to identify changing perspectives and emerging research issues in the history of technology in the European colonies and ex‐colonies of Asia and Africa, and thus to trace a move away from earlier ‘diffusionist’ arguments and discussion of polarization and conflict between ‘Western’ and ‘indigenous’ technologies, toward a more interactive, culturally‐nuanced, multi‐sited debate about how technology functions within specific parameters of time, place and culture. Body, land and state are identified as major ‘triangulation’ points for the critical investigation and contextualization of these issues.     

Partners for stability? Irish Free State perceptions of the incoming British Labour government 1923–24

This article examines the anxiety and frustration of the Irish Free State government faced with the uncertainty of which party was going to become the next British government in 1923–24. The Free State government had only recently emerged victorious in its own fratricidal civil war and its moral and political legitimacy was still challenged in Ireland itself. The most contentious issue an incoming British government had to deal with on Ireland was the final demarcation of the boundary between the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland which, according to Article 12 of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, would be determined by a boundary commission. The Free State government remained unconvinced that any incoming British Labour government had the competence, understanding or commitment to resolve this issue and contribute to long-term stability in Ireland, given Labour's perceived lack of knowledge and interest in Irish politics and its commitment to social and economic issues taking precedence. This apprehension was articulated in contemporary Irish government papers and personal correspondence and proved well founded, given the legalistic and cautious approach of the Labour government to establishing the Irish Boundary Commission.     

潘柽章、潘耒兄弟之明史学成就考述

明末清初史学家潘柽章、潘耒兄弟二人一生致力于明史的撰述工作。柽章撰《国史考异》、《明史记》,考证精审;《今乐府》为史诗性著作,保存了大量历史资料。潘耒应诏入明史馆,参与《明史》纂修,提出多项修史建议,堪为后世典范。二人毕生致力于明史研究的学术精神成就了中国文化史上的一段佳话。     

Russia's Electoral Geography: A Review

A noted specialist on the electoral geography of Russia reviews the existing body of work on the subject based on national elections, beginning with the RSFSR returns from the March 1989 voting for seats in the the USSR Congress of People's Deputies and extending to the presidential race of 2004. The author identifies major themes and methodologies relevant to a discussion of the political topography of Russia, before assessing the extent to which the country's emergent electoral landscape has been described. He emphasizes the importance of scale in interpreting the spatial patterns of electoral outcomes, as well as the social and economic correlates of voting across the regions. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: H10, O10, R10. 4 figures, 84 references.     

Pufendorf disciple of Hobbes: The nature of man and the state of nature: The doctrine of socialitas

No doctrine of Pufendorf's is better known than that of socialitas. The reason is that Pufendorf himself declared that socialitas was the foundation of natural law. No interpreter of Pufendorf can therefore avoid dealing with it. Moreover, Pufendorf linked the issue of socialitas to the question of the state of nature, thus raising important issues with both theological and philosophical implications.

Given the prominence and importance of this theme in Pufendorf's work, a close analysis of what he meant by it is central to the interpretation of his work, even though this means to pose again a new number of questions already discussed in the scholarly literature. In particular, this article examines the relationship between Pufendorf and Hobbes with regard to this central theme. In fact, a traditional historiographic topos is that Pufendorf and Hobbes fundamentally disagree on the doctrine of socialitas, while the former is closer to Grotius and to the Aristotelian-classic tradition that see man as a social animal.

This article takes, instead, Pufendorf to be a follower of Hobbes, and tries to explain how the more traditional view of Pufendorf as a critic of Hobbes was in some way due to Pufendorf's own attempt to distance himself from the accusations of Hobbesism (and hence of atheism and moral indifference) that the critics made against him when his work first appeared. In order to do this, Pufendorf tried to rethink his own position within the history of ethics, and put himself on the side of the Stoics, of Grotius and of Cumberland, against Epicurus and Hobbes. This retrospective ‘illusion’ has greatly influenced later scholarship, giving us a distorted image of Pufendorf's own view of socialitas. A more precise account of the latter gives a better prospective from which to look at the relationship between Pufendorf and Hobbes.     

Vico's science of imagination

I argue that despite the various ways in which Fichte separates right from morality in his 1796/97 Foundations of Natural Right, he nevertheless suggests in the writings from the period of his professorship at the University of Jena that there is a reciprocal relation between them. This requires, however, reading the Foundations of Natural Right in the light of The System of Ethics, which was published in 1798, especially the account of the ethical duties deriving from a person's membership of a profession that Fichte gives in this work. Although this approach allows us to attribute to Fichte a different conception of the state to the amoral one found in the Foundations of Natural Right, I argue that the separation of right from morality developed in this work remains valid and amounts to one of Fichte's main achievements, namely, his identification of the different dispositions that may characterize an individual's relation to the society in which he or she lives. This point is developed by comparing Fichte's amoral conception of the state to Hegel's account of civil society as the ‘state of necessity’. This does not involve an attempt to turn Fichte into Hegel but to show how the insights contained in Fichte's distinction between right and morality can be illuminated with reference to Hegel's theory of civil society and can be retained in the face of a powerful criticism that Hegel makes of the kind of contract theory of the state offered by Fichte.     

The challenges facing forest interpretation

Abstract

The article examines the development of forestry interpretation programmes in Cumberland State Park, near Sydney, Australia. The programme seeks to conserve the environmental resources by raising community awareness of the issues. The aim is to empower the greater community to take responsibility for its own actions and its effect on the environment.     

The first record of Galea Meyen, 1832 (Rodentia,Hystricognathi, Caviidae) in the late Pleistocene of southern Brazil and its palaeobiogeographic implications

The first caviine rodent referable to Galea Meyen, 1832 is described from the late Pleistocene of southern Brazil based on a left dentary with the p4–m3 series. The specimen derives from the Ponte Velha I locality in the Touro Passo Creek (Touro Passo Formation, upper Pleistocene), western Rio Grande do Sul State. The main characters used to assign this specimen to Galea are: anterior area of horizontal crest at the level of prism I of p4; deep anterior area of masseteric fossa; incisor alveolus on the medial face of the dentary extended up to the level of prism II of m2; and presence of cement in the hypoflexid. Currently, the genus has a disjunct distribution, with a group in Argentina, Bolivia and Peru, and another in northern and northeastern Brazil. The presence of this taxon in Pleistocene deposits of Rio Grande do Sul State, Uruguay and the Argentine Mesopotamian, where there are no extant representatives of the genus, indicates its wider distribution during the late Pleistocene.     

Seeking the State: Appropriating Bureaucratic Symbolism and Wealth in the Margins of Southeast Asia

Anthropological research on Southeast Asian states has contributed to understanding how local communities engage with states in their everyday lives. Two approaches drawing out the complexities of state‐society entanglement stand out. First is Foucault's idea that states possess the art‐of‐government. Through techniques such as mapping, census data, biometrics and so on, states are believed to achieve new levels of control over people, who are thus rendered as individual citizens. Second is Scott's idea that societies possess the art‐of‐not‐being‐governed. People, particularly in peripheral areas, seek to escape state control, for instance by sheltering in the hills and forests of Asia. In this article, we seek to identify and expand upon a literature which we see as emerging from the space opened between Foucault and Scott's work, to demonstrate the many creative and diverse ways that peripheral societies seek out states. In doing this we present a synthesis of diverse forms of entanglement to provide new insights into understanding relations between societies and states.     

Accurate identification of the pastry contained in a ceramic pot excavated from Jurou Li's grave from the Jin dynasty (1115–1234 ce) in Xi'an,Shaanxi, China

In order to identify accurately the circular object contained in the ceramic pot excavated from Jurou Li's grave of the Jin dynasty (1115–1234 ce ) in Xi'an, Shaanxi, China, mass spectrometry was applied to determine the amino acid sequences of the residual proteins extracted from the sample, after preliminary starch grain analysis. The sequences were searched against a standard protein sequence database. The proteins extracted were identified as originating from domesticated barley (Hordeum vulgare), soybean (Glycine max), and fermentative microorganisms (Kluyveromyces lactis, Lipomyces starkeyi, Wickerhamomyces ciferrii, Nadsonia fulvescens and Zygosaccharomyces rouxii). These findings indicate that the extremely degraded object in the ceramic pot was made from barley by fermentation with the addition of soy sauce, providing direct evidence of culinary culture in the Jin dynasty.