Selected Characteristics of Soviet Foreign Trade and Implications for the Foreign Trade of the Commonwealth of Independent States

This paper provides observations on recent patterns of the Soviet Union's foreign trade in the context of factor endowment trade theory and two models drawn from the new trade theory. Empirical analysis indicates that recent Soviet foreign trade was not based on differing factor intensities between Soviet goods and the those of the rest of the world. Instead, the recent geography of Soviet foreign trade suggests that it conformed more to the trade in differentiated products expected under the new trade theory. These results suggest that Soviet foreign trade had developed in such a way that, at least with respect to merchandise trade, the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) has a strong potential for fairly rapid integration within the group of industrial countries.     

The weight of nineteenth century Mexicans in the Western United States

When traditional methods for measuring economic welfare are scarce or unreliable, heights and BMIs are now well-accepted measurements that represent biological conditions during economic development. Weight, after controlling for height, is an additional measure for current net nutrition. Little is known about how weights varied among Mexicans living in the nineteenth century American West. Between 1870 and 1920, average Mexican weight was low and remained constant. Mexican farmers had the heaviest weights, and unskilled worker weights were low. Weight of Mexican-born individuals were higher than Mexicans born in the United States at low weights but lower at high weights. For combined characteristics, weight varied the most with age, an uncontrollable characteristic, indicating that nineteenth century Mexican current net nutrition varied the most with factors over which they had no control.     

Picking up the Pieces: Goa's endangered traditional craft

Three sewn boats surveyed in 1838 are used to evaluate traditional Goan sewn craft. Types additional to those recorded in the 19th century were located during fieldwork. The West Coast provided an abundance of raw materials exported to countries which lacked them; unknown is the extent of the export of local expertise. A consistency of sewing methods, materials, waterproofing, and antifouling are evidence for an indigenous boatbuilding tradition. In Goan pirogues the weight of the crew and nets is carried at the level of the sheer‐strake seam. In prehistory large pirogues of Goan type could have made long‐distance voyages using an outrigger to confer stability. To date archaeological evidence is lacking.     

Rebranding the State: Uganda's Strategic Use of the International Criminal Court

When governments invite the International Criminal Court (ICC) to conduct investigations within their own borders, they seem to indicate acceptance of global norms of accountability for wartime atrocities. The first of these self‐referrals came from Uganda, whose government requested investigation into its conflict with the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), a conflict within which it, too, committed large‐scale human rights violations. This article argues that Uganda used the ICC to help solve a problem faced by many of the world's least powerful states, whose domestic politics are often structured through patron–client networks. Their rulers need to distribute basic state resources, including physical protection, to loyal clients without alienating donors who demand provision of these same resources by right to all citizens. By inviting external scrutiny and manipulating the investigative process, the Ugandan government received an international seal of approval for practices that the ICC would normally punish. This strategy has system‐wide consequences in that repeated mislabelling of rights violations as compliant with international norms causes the meaning of compliance to become incoherent, and norms are less able to constrain the behaviour of all states in the long run.     

Inhabiting Remote Tropical Seashores at 1500–1100 b.c.: Water,Practicalities, and Rituals in the Mariana Islands

When people first inhabited the Remote Oceanic region of the world at 1500 b.c., they generated archaeological sites attesting to their practical coastal adaptations in tandem with their ceremonial traditions, wherein water figured vitally in daily living and ritual performance. Of eight known first-settlement sites in the Mariana Islands, Ritidian in Guam uniquely incorporates one residential habitation plus two caves related to water collection, pictographs, consumption of unusual foods, and use of exceptionally decorative objects. The inter-connected findings clarify what was “special” about the special-use caves, in total articulating a fuller sense of cultural life and landscape than otherwise could be possible.     

The body mass index of blacks and whites in the United States during the nineteenth century

Body mass index (BMI) values reflect the net balance between nutrition, work effort, and calories consumed to fight disease. Nineteenth-century prison records in the United States demonstrate that the BMI values of blacks and whites were distributed symmetrically; neither underweight nor obese individuals were common among the working class. BMI values declined throughout the nineteenth century. By modern standards, however, nineteenth-century BMIs were in healthy weight ranges, though the biological living standards in rural areas exceeded those in urban areas. The increase in BMIs during the twentieth century did not have its origin in the nineteenth century.     

Nuclear energy development in postwar West Germany: Struggles over cooperation in the Federal Republic's first reactor station

In the 1950s, a small group of political, scientific and business leaders in West Germany were determined to build a center for nuclear reactor research and development. They characterized the venture as a three-way partnership, intending to set an example for a scientific-technical age. The project was eventually carried out, but not without much conflict. The attempts at cooperation show parties with divergent sets of criteria that they only inadequately reconciled, and the struggles display their conflicted understandings of both the public-private boundary and the scientific role. New archival material lets us inspect more accurately the workings of the proposed collaboration. It shows how the conflicts developed in practice, despite all parties' expressions of commitment to cooperation.