Made in Italy (by the Chinese): migration and the rebirth of textiles and apparel

People around the world are on the move and settling in new, unexpected places. In Prato, Italy, Chinese immigrants now run most of the city's textiles-apparel companies and even subcontract for such leading designers as Giorgio Armani and Dolce & Gabbana. Italian products once made by Italian workers are now increasingly made by the Chinese! I argue that this development resulted from dramatic macro-level policy shifts that created an opportunity for an uncanny synchronicity between the Chinese business approach and the demands of Italy's local, family-based, small-batch production environment. Despite fierce competition, outmoded policies and social friction, the Chinese have adapted to their new home and made significant contributions to an increasingly multiethnic and multicultural Italy.     

From the Andes to the Outback: Acclimatising Alpacas in the British Empire

This article examines attempts to naturalise the alpaca in the British Empire. In the nineteenth century Britain made concerted efforts to appropriate useful plants and animals and acclimatise them within its own colonies. The alpaca was a prime target for acclimatisers on account of its silken wool, which was manufactured into a range of luxury textiles. Its export was, however, banned by law in Peru and Bolivia, so the animals had to be smuggled out of the Andean states and shipped illegally to Britain and Australia. The article studies the circuits of exchange that facilitated the transfer of alpacas from one continent to another and considers how British subjects in places as diverse as Bradford, Liverpool, Sydney and Arequipa promoted and benefited from the naturalisation scheme. It situates alpaca acclimatisation within a wider discourse of agricultural ‘improvement’, bio-piracy and imperial adventure.     

Imperial Outposts and the War Beyond: Singapore,Hong Kong and the British Empire’s Land Force Contribution to the Korean War

Histories of the British Empire’s strategic outposts in the Far East have traditionally focused on their traumatic loss to the Japanese adversary during the Second World War. Only in the past decade-and-a-half have historians begun to examine the post-Second World War importance of these outposts to the continued defence and security of Britain’s empire in the Far East. In taking this line of historical enquiry still further, the article examines how Singapore and Hong Kong were used to project British military power, specifically army deployments, across the Far East, and far beyond the imperial frontier, in support of Britain’s involvement in the 1950–53 Korean War and therefore in pursuit of the empire’s foreign and defence policy objectives. It adopts an essentially operational analysis to this end, relying on operational and army ‘ground-level’ sources from the records of the Colonial, Foreign, and War Offices at the British National Archives. It uncovers the hidden workings of the mechanisms of imperial military power projection through strategic outposts, which ranged from training to logistical support to the exercise of command and control, and how these mechanisms and outposts were utilised by the British Far Eastern land forces involved in the Korean War. In so doing, the article sheds much valuable and original light on the historical importance of these strategic outposts to imperial defence.     

When transport becomes a destination: deaf spaces and networks on the Mumbai suburban trains

ABSTRACT

This article considers dense social interactions in commuter trains and their crucial role within city-wide networks. Literature on social interactions in public transport has focused on how commuters have short interactions with each other, or constitute groups of train friends, but without situating them in wider geographies. The article focuses on deaf people in the Mumbai metropolis who travel in compartments reserved for disabled people, chatting and exchanging news and information. These spatial practices are facilitated by the peninsular geography and train infrastructure of Mumbai. In order to produce deaf spaces, where deaf sociality and sign language use are the organizing principles, deaf people strategically board particular trains and particular compartments, and sometimes remain in the train beyond their original destination. Mobile phones are used to coordinate these meetings. The diversity of people meeting in the train is high, such as with regard to gender, age, religion, caste, class and divisions are either perpetuated or abated. Because these compartments provide a diverse range of deaf people a space for daily meetings on the way to and from their (mostly hearing) work places and families; they are very important spaces to maintain and expand networks in the wider Mumbai deaf community.     

The Role of Lesser Aristocratic Women in Twelfth-century Yorkshire Society — The Rumilly,Arches, and St Quentin Charters*

This article argues that lesser aristocratic women were an active part of twelfth-century society and that as landholders and alienators they were able to significantly shape and mould local monastic society, family wealth and relationships, and other secular social networks. The influence women could have on these areas was on the material and physical geography of the land as well as on the social relationships. As landholders, women could and did maintain social networks with the ecclesiastical and secular societies. This was, however, limited by the geographic location of their landholding and thus demonstrates a social world that is defined by localities and regions. The three families of Rumilly, Arches and St Quentin provide cases whereby women’s activities can be evidenced in a range of events and actions. They also demonstrate a level of independence in women’s agency that did not rely on their male kin before land alienations or grants could be made. The available charter evidence for the three families studied is also illustrative of the existing charter material that can be identified for lesser aristocratic women and allows the paper to address twelfth-century women outwith the traditionally studied groups of royal and comital women or religious women.     

Social Networks and Policy Entrepreneurship: How Relationships Shape Municipal Decision Making about High‐Volume Hydraulic Fracturing

Well‐resourced and well‐connected individuals, or “policy entrepreneurs,” often play an important role in advocating and securing the adoption of policies. There is a striking lack of inquiry into the ways that social networks shape the ability of these actors to achieve their aims, including the ways in which network ties may channel policy conflict. To address these gaps, we analyze data from an original survey and an original database of policies to assess the success of policy entrepreneurs (PEs) active in a highly contentious arena: municipal policymaking concerning high‐volume hydraulic fracturing (HVHF) in New York. We use text‐mining to collect social network data from local newspaper archives, then use those data to construct municipal HVHF policy networks. Municipal anti‐HVHF PEs appear more successful when they operate in less cohesive networks, act as bridges to relative newcomers to the governance network, and have a larger number of network connections. Pro‐HVHF PEs appear more successful when they can forge high‐value connections to key decision makers. Policy entrepreneurs on both sides of the issue are more successful when they have a greater number of sympathetic coalition partners.     

Gender perspective on the social networks of household heads and community leaders after involuntary resettlement

The study of social network analysis in Indonesia and the Philippines reveals that after a certain period in a new community and living among involuntarily resettled strangers, household heads and community leaders will eventually replace their disrupted previous networks with new network ties. The paper likewise demonstrates how gender moulds social network features at the levels of the Indonesian household heads and Philippine community organization after involuntary resettlement. Existing gendered context in two settings like the Indonesian woman’s role as primary caretaker of the household and the absence of a consolidated patriarchal system in the Philippines is shown to have reinforced gender (dis)advantages. As reflected in the two settings, those who have the biggest networks are also the brokers or the influential actors who can control and have an advantage in accessing social capital. Further, basing on the two cases, we identify the gender norm of the centrality of women’s role as homemaker and caregiver in addition to other roles as a similar explanation for the bigger proportions of friends in the networks of women as compared to men. Unless outside interventions reconfigure the natural trajectory of the social networks, gender equality in terms of leadership, decision-making and access to suitable programs and projects as well as to the relevant authorities, remains problematic.     

The politics of the Shanghai courts: the state,local elites,and social networks in Nationalist China, 1927–1937

This article explores the ways in which the Nationalist Party established dominance over the Shanghai courts in the foreign concession area to use them as weapons against political dissidents, and it analyzes the intricate relations among the Nationalist Party, local elites, and the Shanghai courts during the Nanjing decade (1927–1937). Building on recent studies that pay attention to the limited success of the Nationalist Party’s policy of putting the judiciary under Party control, this study demonstrates that the process of establishing the Nationalist Party’s dominance over the Shanghai courts was highly contested. The interplay between the Nationalist Party’s effort to gain control over the Shanghai courts by building formal and informal institutions and the local elites’ appropriation of their own social networks rendered the Shanghai courts vulnerable not only to the Party’s intervention, but also to the influence of social forces. I argue that due to the weak authority of the Shanghai courts, the Nationalist Party’s use of law against political foes could be a double-edged sword.     

Theories of Governance: Comparative Perspectives on Seattle's Light Rail Project

Governance entails the formulation and implementation of public policies across organizational and sectoral boundaries through coalitions, contracts, and networks. Studies of governance tend to cluster loosely into two theoretic traditions: rational choice and sociological institutionalism. Where the former analyzes actors’ individual interests and information, the latter examines their joint relationships and norms. These different analytic foci can be difficult to reconcile, leaving scholars at a loss as to how to cumulate insights and knowledge across the theoretic traditions. To understand better how the two traditions conflict and support one another in the analysis of governance, this article distinguishes domains of governance and identifies the different theories that the traditions use to study each domain. A case study of a rail transit project compares the insights from these theories, and assesses the quality and the complementarities of the explanations they offer. An analysis of the case generates propositions about the comparative utility of different concepts and theoretic traditions for understanding key governance phenomena.     

Pre-Columbian jadeitite artifacts from the Golden Rock Site,St. Eustatius,Lesser Antilles,with special reference to jadeitite artifacts from Elliot's,Antigua: implications for potential source regions and long-distance exchange networks in the Greater Caribbean

A detailed electron microscopy analysis of jadeitite celts from the Early Ceramic Age Golden Rock settlement on the small volcanic island of St Eustatius, Lesser Antilles, is presented in an effort to identify the source region(s) of these jadeitite axes and evaluate the extent of trade networks in the Caribbean during pre-Columbian times through which those tools (or source rocks) circulated. Habitation at the site occurred between ca. AD 230–890, and the jadeitite tools most likely date between cal. AD 600 and 825/890. We argue that in provenancing jadeitite emphasis should be placed on the identification of the entire mineral assemblage (including the accessory minerals) and textures, given the complex geological histories and processes that form this quasi-monomineralic rock. Indeed, the mineral assemblages and the characteristics of the individual minerals within the studied jadeitite samples are far from homogenous, suggesting either the source has a high degree of internal variation or there are multiple sources. We have identified three jadeitite groups among the analyzed samples on the basis of mineralogical assemblages: Group 1 consists of samples bearing phlogopite (plus phengite and epidote but without lawsonite or quartz); Group 2 contains lawsonite (plus phengite and quartz but without phlogopite and epidote); and Group 3 is defined by containing hematite. Importantly, we have not identified glaucophane in the analyzed materials. The comparison of these artifact data with those of jadeitites from the four potential known source regions of Caribbean jade, i.e., Guatemala (North and South Motagua Fault mélanges), Cuba (Sierra del Convento mélange) and Dominican Republic (Río San Juan complex) allows us to conclude that both the North and South Motagua Valley mélanges are the most likely sources for artifact groups 2 and 3, and perhaps also for group 1. This identification supports earlier hypotheses on the existence of pan-regional exchange networks, tying the northern Antilles with the Isthmo-Colombian region (Colombia, Panama and Costa Rica) during the Ceramic Age of the Caribbean.