Contextualizing sugar production in nineteenth‐century Queensland

Cane and Labour: The Political Economy of the Queensland Sugar Industry 1862–1905. ADRIAN GRAVES. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 1993. Pp. xxi + 282. £35. ISBN 0–7486–0117–1.     

British policy towards Indian princes in late nineteenth and early twentieth‐century Britain

This article examines the factors which induced Indian princes to visit Britain, the background and implementation of British initiatives on princely travel and the vocal response they produced. It also explores the impact of residence in Britain and the ambiguity of Indian princes’ status within British society. The last part of the article focuses more closely on official British attempts to restrict foreign travel to England. The study concludes by highlighting the contradictory nature of British attitudes towards Indian princes in Britain. Clearly, official attitudes towards South Asians in Britain were much more complex than is sometimes suggested.     

Reshaping Southern history: Studies in the development of Agrarian capitalism in the nineteenth‐century South∗

The Reshaping of Plantation Society: The Natchez District, 1860–1880. Michael Wayne. Baton Rouge, La: Louisiana State University Press. 1983. xiv, 226 pp. £22.95.

White Land, Black Labor: Caste and Class in Late Nineteenth‐Century Georgia. Charles L. Flynn, Jr. Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press. 1983. xiv, 196 pp. £17.90.     

The aftermath of the jihād in the central sudan∗ as a major factor in the volume of the Trans‐Saharan slave trade in the nineteenth century

During the Haitian Revolution, members of the French government produced official proclamations containing laws that sought to regulate liberty and define citizenship for the ex-slaves. The proclamations were in turn translated from French into Creole to be read aloud. The signatures of Sonthonax and Bonaparte on these Creole documents bear witness to the role of translation as a vehicle for the movement of revolutionary ideals between France and Saint-Domingue. Through rhetorical strategies like omissions, repetition, and call-and-response, the anonymous translators often subverted French power and authority, producing Creole versions of these official proclamations that were often more inclusive and created space for the audience of ex-slaves to participate in debating and defining their liberty, equality and citizenship.     

The failure of the “localisationist project” in mental medicine in nineteenth century France and the emergence of the neurological clinic

During the nineteenth century, neuroanatomical knowledge and the clinical practice of treating mental illnesses develop at the same time. Some practitioners of mental medicine try to combine the clinical practice of treating mental diseases with neuroanatomical knowledge using the idea of cerebral localisations. This point of view is advocated by Gall and the field of phrenology. But there is no obvious success of such a “localisationist project” before Broca and Wernicke’s works on aphasia. This discovery will provoke a revival of the desire to localise the cerebral zones involved in mental diseases. However, the cerebral localisation project progressively decreases during the end of the nineteenth century while neurological clinical practice emerges. Moreover, neurological clinical practice aims to localise anatomical lesions through clinical examination. From a philosophy of science point of view, this segment of history brings into question the relation between a scientific object (the cerebral localisation of zones involved in diseases) and a scientific subject (psychiatry and neurology). It stresses how a scientific project can migrate from one subject to another.     

‘To return to the bosom of their fatherland’: Brazilian immigrants in nineteenth‐century Lagos

This article explores the southern prison system during the expansion of slavery in the nineteenth-century USA, to reveal struggles over landscape and geography. It suggests connections between diverse institutions such as plantation jails, county and city jails, workhouses, state penitentiaries and slave pens that have not been conceptualized as part of a carceral system supporting slavery. Slaveholders' various means of using these institutions are outlined as are their perceptions of these prisons. The article concludes by discussing the perspective of enslaved peoples, arguing that prisons were the site of considerable resistance as slave geographies were unable to be completely confined by the expanding carceral system.     

Lorist,reformist and romanticist: The nineteenth‐century response to Gypsy‐travellers

Gypsy‐travellers have always occupied an uncertain and contradictory position in sedentary‐based societies. Although performing significant economic and social functions this contribution was more usually overshadowed by the points at which they clashed with the structures and ideologies of the dominant and ‘host’ society. In the nineteenth century the Gypsy‐travellers were popularly presented in two distinct ways: as a Romany race and as degenerate itinerants. These varying perspectives originated from different sources and represented contrasting approaches to the Gypsy/nomadic ‘problem’. The validity, purpose and consequences of these apparently conflicting images form the subject of this article.     

Button‐pressers versus picture‐makers: The social reconstruction of amateur photography in the late 19th century U.S.

Visual Anthropology: Photography as a Research Method, New Mexico University Press, 1986, By John, Collier, Jr. and Malcom Collier

Snapshot Versions of Life, Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1987, By Richard Chalfen

Six‐Guns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western, University of California Press, 1975, By Will Wright, St. Lawrence University

Bitter Melon: Stories from the Last Rural Chinese Town in America, University of Washington Press, 1987, By Jeff Gillenkirk and James Motlow

Committing Photography ‐ Yes and No, But Mostly Yes. A Review Essay of Committing Photography, by Su Braden, Pluto Press, 1983

Sociology in a Changing World, by William Kornblum, Holt, Reinehart, and Winston, 1987     

Slave dealers,women, pregnancy,and abortion: The story of a circassian slave‐girl in mid‐nineteenth century Cairo

Revd Richard Price was one of the leading intellectual lights of Rational Dissent in late eighteenth-century Britain and was prominent in campaigns for religious and parliamentary reform. Hailed as an ‘Apostle of Liberty’ by the American and French Revolutionaries, Price was also an early subscriber to the Abolition Society in London. While prominent among British Enlightenment figures he had, however, a low profile as an abolitionist and is seldom mentioned in scholarship on abolition. This study discusses the nature of Price's antislavery and his relationship with Americans such as Thomas Jefferson. It sheds more light on the degree to which the emergence of abolitionism depended upon circumstances and how well it combined with other aims and priorities.     

Stifled at birth: Private emigration from Bombay to British Guiana in the mid‐nineteenth century

The article commences with a general analysis of the labour problems confronting Guianese planters at emancipation and their efforts to tap the seemingly inexhaustible source in India. Its main thrust is to ascertain why, despite repeated clamour by the sugar planters for these invaluable labourers, Indian immigration was confined to the Bengal and Madras Presidencies. It concludes that the attempt to introduce labour from the Bombay Presidency by private enterprise failed not because of a clash of interests between Bombay mill‐owners and colonial planters but purely because the Bombay authorities deplored emigration overseas whatever the economic advantages.     

Identity,community and the lived experience of black Scots from the late eighteenth to the mid‐nineteenth centuries

The existing literature on Black Scots is little developed, has a certain bias towards a limited number of elite figures and, in common with the literature on Black people in Britain in general, tends to treat the question of their identity as unproblematic, even eternalizing it. This article presents a number of case histories of plebeian Black Scots, male and female, alongside, in particular, Benedict Anderson's concept of national identity as ‘imagined community’, in order to attempt a reconstruction of the styles in which these people imagined their own identities. It is argued that this yields a clearer and more fruitful understanding of the varieties of ways in which such people developed strategies of survival and/or resistance. Most of the social data for the case histories are taken from criminal records; any supposition that to do so is to ‘criminalize’ Black History is rejected. Despite the likelihood that there were comparatively few Black people in Scotland in the period under scrutiny, it is argued that the Black Scots have a global as well as a local significance.     

Power and “native” Jews: the Russian imperial bureaucracy and Mountain Jews in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century

The 1880s and 1890s witnessed an intensification of Tsarist policy towards the Jews of the Russian Empire. In 1892, for example, a law directed towards the Jews of Kuban and Cossack areas in the Caucasus was promulgated. In preparing the law, officials failed to notice, either intentionally or accidentally, that alongside European Jews of the Kuban and Terek region resided Mountain Jews. There were, therefore, problems with the implementation of this law especially in relation to Mountain Jews. This led to considerable controversy. This study demonstrates the manner in which officials attempted to solve the Jewish question in the Russian Empire. It focuses on the impact of officialdom at various levels of the Tsarist regime on the lives of Mountain Jews. Its principal sources are drawn from various documents and correspondence between government officials on the matter of the Mountain Jews.1 Research for this paper was generously assisted by a Rothschild Foundation grant.      

The resettlement in Canada of 4,527 Polish ex‐servicemen, 1946–47

After the Second World War, a Canadian immigration policy was negotiated with the United Kingdom whereby Polish ex‐servicemen were resettled in Canada. The policy was developed and presented with great care and resulted in 4,527 Polish ex‐servicemen coming to Canada in 1946 and 1947. Domestic and international functions and dysfunctions of the scheme for Canada and the Polish ex‐servicemen are analysed to determine its success or failure. With regard to the short‐ and long‐term contributions the Poles made to agriculture, the scheme was a failure.     

The history and culture of the Jews as reflected in post‐Communist Polish historiography and related activities

A Jewish European Modern Intellectual. Moses Gaster: Memorii, Corespondenta (Moses Gaster: Memoirs and Correspondence). Edited and annotated by Victor Eskenasy. Bucharest: Hasefer Publishing House 1998. xxxv+467pp. (Romanian with English and German summaries)

A Very Selective Reading. Cecil D. Edy, Hungary at War (Pennsylvania State University Press 1998), xx+318pp., price unknown

’Setting the Record Straight‘. The Story of Two Shtetls, Bransk and Ejszyszki. An Overview of Polish‐Jewish Relations in Northeastern Poland during World War II. A Collective Work, Toronto/Chicago: The Polish Educational Foundation in North America 1998. Part 1 190pp., part 2 240pp.

A Symbol of the ‘Story‘. Michael Moshe Checinski, My Father's Watch, New York and Jerusalem: Gefen Publishing House 1994, 248pp. Glossary. Hard/softcover, US$30; $14.95

A Curious Experiment. Robert Weinberg, Stalin's Forgotten Zion: Birobidzhan and the Making of a Soviet Jewish Homeland. An Illustrated History, 1928–1996. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998 ix + 105pp. Biblio. Illus. Notes. Index     

Internal ethnic friction: Orange and green in nineteenth‐century New York, 1868–1872

The presence of large numbers of Protestants within the nineteenth century Irish exodus to the USA ensured that the integrity of the Orange/Green dispute continued in the adopted homeland. The Catholic majority amongst Irish immigrants was nevertheless a minority within Protestant American society. The struggle between Orange and Green in New York thus gave each faction both a majority and a minority status. Fear of Catholicism within America meant that the commonality between Irish Orangemen and native born Protestants was a classic example of an internal ethnic dispute having a relevance to the whole society. This common Protestantism was able to straddle, to an extent, the ethnic barrier. The clash between Fenians and Orangemen in New York thus gained an inflated significance for both state and national politics.     

Slavery in eighteenth‐century Rhode Island: Evidence from the census of 1774

Slave Cultures and the Cultures of Slavery. Stephan Palmié (ed.). Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press. 1995. xlvii, 283pp. $35.00. ISBN 087049–903–3.

Carnival. Canboulay and Calypso Traditions in the Making. John Cowley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1996. xv, 293pp. £35.00. ISBN 0–521–48138–4.

West Indies Accounts: Essays on the History of the British Caribbean and the Atlantic Economy in Honour of Richard Sheridan. Roderick a. McDonald (ed.). Kingston, Jamaica: The Press, University of the West Indies. 1996. xvi, 388pp. £14.00 (paperback). ISBN 976–640–022–9.

L'Engrenage de la Liberté: Caraïbes ‐ XIXe siècle, Nelly Schmidt. Aix‐en‐Provence: Publications de l'Université de Provence. 1995. 360pp. 250FF. ISBN 2–85399–359–0.

Slave Captain: The Career of James Irving in the Liverpool Slave Trade. Suzanne Schwarz (ed.). Wrexham: Bridge Books. 1995. 164pp. £8.95. ISBN 1–872424–42–2. The Slave Trade and the Economic Development of Eighteenth‐Century Lancaster. Melinda Elder. Halifax: Ryburn Publishing. 1992. 232pp. £25. ISBN 1–85331–030–1.

Them Dark Days: Slavery in the American Rice Swamps. William Dusinberre. New York: Oxford University Press. 1996. xiv, 556pp. £40.00.

The Kidnapped and the Ransomed: The narrative of Peter and Vina Still after forty years of slavery, Kate E.R. Pickard. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. 1995. xv, 103, 409 pp. £14.00. ISBN 0–8032–9233–3.

The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women's Political Culture in Antebellum America. Jean Fagan Yellin and John C. van Horne (eds.). Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, in co‐operation with the Library Company of Philadelphia. 1994. xviii, 363pp.

’what nature suffers to groe’: Life, labor and landscape on the Georgia coast, 1680–1920. Mart A. Stewart. Athens &; London: University of Georgia Press, 1996. xix, 370pp. $45. ISBN 0–8203–1808–6.

Abolitionism in the United States and Brazil: A Comparative Perspective, Celia M. Azevedo. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc.1995. xxvi, 200pp. ISBN 0–8153–2332–8.     

The Black Sheep of the Land: Bandits in the Polish Borderlands, 1918–1925

This article examines banditry in the northeastern provinces of the Second Polish Republic after the First World War and into the mid-1920s. It considers the devastating effects of the war, which ravaged the territory, together with policies of the Polish state that contributed to an increase in bandit activity in the eastern borderland region. This work argues that banditry here worked as a multi-level system and thrived due to the involvement of multiple social actors—the bandits themselves, locals, state authorities, and foreign aid. Furthermore, this article pushes for an examination of bandits—not merely as social outcasts or misfits—but as an integral part of the communities they emerged from. More broadly, the focus on banditry contributes to scholarship dedicated to better understanding the aftermath of the First World War and continued conflict from the perspective of everyday people.