Growth of Rural Industries in Post-reform China: Patterns,Determinants and Consequences

The first question addressed by this paper relates to the very high growth rates achieved by China's rural industries during the post-reform period. While growth rates have undoubtedly been extremely high, they can only be put in a proper perspective when growth in different components of the sector (i.e. township- and village-owned and privately owned industries) is examined separately and compared with performance before the reforms. In this regard, an important finding of the paper is that as far as township and village industries are concerned, growth rates in the post-reform period do not represent a sudden break from the rates of the earlier period — particularly the 1970s. It is mainly in the emergence and growth of private enterprises that the growth experience of the 1980s differs substantially from that of the 1970s. The sharp decline in the growth of all rural industries in 1989 does not appear to mark a reversal in their growth environment, but the beginning of a period of consolidation and rationalization; and, contrary to popular notion, private enterprises are not the worst sufferers in this process. Finally, the paper looks at regional imbalance. Historically, rural industries in China have been concentrated more in the eastern provinces along the coast, and this regional concentration has increased during the post-reform period of high growth.     

The Book of Marriage: Histories of Muslim Women in Twentieth‐Century Australia

From 1860 to the 1920s, Muslim merchants and workers from across British India and Afghanistan travelled to Australian shores to work in the extensive camel transportation network that underpinned the growth of capitalism in the Australian interior. Through marriage, South Asian women in addition to white women and Aboriginal women became part of families spanning the Indian Ocean. Yet, the life‐worlds of these women are absent from Australian historiography and the field of Indian Ocean studies alike. When women do appear in Australian histories of Muslim communities, the orientalist accounts work to condemn Muslim men rather than shed light on women's lives. Leading scholars of Indian Ocean mobilities on the other hand, have tended to equate masculinity with motion and femininity with stasis, omitting analyses of women's life‐trajectories across the Indian Ocean arena. In this article, I rethink the definitions of ‘motion’ that underpin Indian Ocean histories by reading marriage records as an archive of women's motion. Using family archives spanning from Australia to South Asia, this article examines five women's marriages to South Asian men in Australia. Challenging the racist accounts of gender relations that currently structure histories of Muslims in Australia, I turn to the intellectual traditions of colonised peoples in search of alternatives to orientalist narratives. Redeploying the Muslim narrative tradition of Kitab al‐Nikah (Book of Marriage) to write feminist history, this article proposes a new framework to house histories of Muslim women.     

‘Certainly the Muslim is the very devil incarnation’: Islamophobia and The Merchant of Venice

In this paper, we examine Shakespeare's sixteenth‐century play, The Merchant of Venice. Anti‐Semitism is a key theme in this play. The well‐known central character, Shylock, is a Jewish man ridiculed and victimised because of his identity. Much literary research has been done on the anti‐Semitism of the play, and many social studies have compared anti‐Semitism and Islamophobia, but scarcely any research brings a Shakespearean play from the sixteenth century into the context of twenty‐first century Islamophobia. There are a number of similarities between the manner in which Shylock is ostracised and the current victimisation that Muslim communities are facing in Europe and more specifically the UK. With this in mind, we explore contextual and thematic elements of this play and argue that it is possible to apply the way Shylock is unfairly victimised on stage because of his identity as a Jew to the treatment of some Muslims today. In particular, the treatment he faces shares stark similarities with the types, impacts and consequences of Islamophobic hate crime today.     

The application of histomorphometry and Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy to the analysis of early Anglo-Saxon burned bone

Macroscopic examination, histomorphometry and Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR) are applied to the analysis of burned bones from the early Anglo-Saxon cemetery at Elsham in Lincolnshire, UK. These methods were undertaken to gain a greater understanding of pyre conditions from an archaeological context and the effects of burning on bone microstructure. Sixteen samples were employed for thin-section analysis while eight samples were used with FTIR. The results suggest that these methods correspond well with macroscopic examination, though anomalies did occur. The techniques employed in this paper have demonstrated that the temperatures reached on the funerary pyres at Elsham ranged from 600 °C to over 900 °C under oxidizing conditions.     

A new statistical approach for determining the crystallinity of heat-altered bone mineral from FTIR spectra

The crystallinity of bone mineral represents an established method of measuring heat-induced change and is of importance to fields including material science, clinical science, anthropology and archaeology. A commonly used technique involves the calculation of the Crystallinity Index (CI) using selected peaks from Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) absorbance spectra. However, the choice of peaks has to date not been statistically justified. In this study a novel application of statistical techniques to the FTIR spectra of bone samples burned in the range 100 °C–1100 °C has been used to identify 5 new spectral indices of heat-induced crystallinity change. The validity of the new indices was tested by using a statistical classification model (LDA) to predict the burning temperature of a set of 108 bone samples burned between 100 °C and 1100 °C. A correct classification rate (CCR) of 97.2% was obtained when a combination of 4 indices including the CI was used. This was significantly better than the CCR of 66.7% which was obtained when the CI was used on its own.     

TESTING FOR SPATIAL EQUILIBRIUM USING HAPPINESS DATA

Happiness data are rarely used in regional and urban analysis, but it is a prime data set for testing the assumption of spatial equilibrium, the key assumption in the field of urban economics. In this paper, we explore the relationship between regional happiness and one‐year lagged change in population growth rates for the nine census regions in the United States using data on reported well‐being from National Opinion Research Center's annual General Social Survey. We observe that, while there is evidence of spatial disequilibrium during recessions and in the long run, happier regions generally experience higher population growth rates indicating a movement (or tendency) toward spatial equilibrium.     

Babri Mosque: A Historic Bone of Contention

Abstract: Since 1855, the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya has been the source of sporadic clashes between Hindus and Muslims. After a thorough scrutiny of the available historical literature on the Mosque, this article argues that to regard it as the birthplace of the Hindu deity Rama is untenable and the notion was actually put into circulation by British colonial officials to serve British interests in the Indian subcontinent. Successive colonial administrations tried to strengthen their grip on South Asia by playing off one group against another in the name of caste, race, and, most importantly, religion. The ongoing Hindu‐Muslim conflict in India is largely the outcome of British policies. With their agenda of ‘divide and rule’ that aimed at consolidating their hold over the subcontinent the British tried to create a huge chasm between Hindus and Muslims. They labelled Muslims as the oppressors and Hindus as the oppressed, working to gain the support of the Hindu masses by provoking their hatred of the Muslims; and they strongly backed their religious and other claims in a vast amount of biased literature. It was with this colonial agenda that they endorsed the Hindu claim to the site of the Babri Mosque.     

Generating Alternative Land‐use Allocation for Mixed Use Areas: Multi‐Objective Optimization Approach

Current research is carried out with an intention to present an optimization approach for the urban land‐use allocation problem by generating Pareto optimum solutions considering two objectives—maximizing compatibility among adjacent space uses of a study area without compromising the area’s total land price and maximizing the price of plot of each individual owner. Considering the non‐linear characteristics of the objective functions, a multi‐objective evolutionary algorithm approach called Non‐Dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm‐II (NSGA‐II) is applied to obtain Pareto optimal land‐use allocation subject to different set of constraints. The objective functions are tested over a case study area of Dhaka, Bangladesh. The resulting NSGA‐II model produces 24 Pareto optimal solutions of land‐use allocation, allowing tradeoff between maximizing compatibility and land price from one solution to other. This research also expresses the potential of the model to aid the policymakers and city planners of development authorities by providing alternative land‐use plans, and thereby predicting the consequences of any plan before practical application.