The Historian as Diplomat? John Erickson and the ‘Edinburgh Conversations’
By Niall Gray The historian’s relationship with government has always been a contentious subject. Called to inform and encourage debate across all sections of society, historians have repeatedly run into difficulties when engaging with state authorities. This is often due to the potentially sensitive topics that researchers wish to discuss, with the British government subsequently […]
An analysis of extreme weather events over the 1981 – 2018 period: A South African-based study
By Nomvula Mpungose Rainfall in subtropical southern Africa experiences substantial changes in space and time owing to factors such as regional orography, geographic position, impacts of large-scale climate modes (E.g. El Niño Southern Oscillation; hereafter ENSO), and changes in regional sea surface temperatures. The assessment of rainfall patterns and prediction of extreme rainfall events is […]
Rethinking the Spanish Inquisition and Autos de Fe
By Amanda Summers The public may be most familiar with the Inquisition through Monty Python’s famous skit. “No one expects the Spanish Inquisition! Our chief weapon is surprise, fear, ruthless efficiency, an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope, nice red uniforms …”[1] The comedy troupe used humor to poke a little good natured fun at […]
The Women’s War of 1929: Why Is It Still Relevant for Nigeria?
By Emma Davies In November and December 1929, tens of thousands of African women in South-Eastern Nigeria danced, sang, and marched in protest against an enforced and exploitative British colonial policy of taxation, and against patriarchal legal structures. These events have since been referred to as the Women’s War, the Aba Riots, or Ogu Umunwaanyi.[1] […]
Amílcar Cabral, Historical Materialism, and the “Peoples without History”
By Zeyad el Nabolsy The Basic Problem: Are There Peoples Outside History? In a speech delivered to the First Solidarity Conference of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America held in Havana in January 1966, Cabral posed the question: “does history begin only from the moment of the launching of the phenomenon of class, […]
Watch and Feel, Discipline and Punish: Towards an Audio-Visual History of Imprisonment in Argentina
By Oliver Wilson-Nunn The ways in which we understand prisons are filtered through the lens, quite literally, of cinema and television. As criminologists have long remarked, the distance separating many of us, both socially and spatially, from these often-secretive institutions is such that moving images have come to be privileged windows—albeit dirty and cracked—onto this […]
The Radicalization of the Ecuadorian Left: 1959-1983
By Sofia Lanchimba Velastegui During the 60s and 70s, a process of radicalization took place within the left-wing tradition that would reconfigure the militant camp and political identities. Beginning in 1959 with a massacre in Guayaquil, the increase and radicalization of protests in a scenario of economic crisis and the formation of URJE (Revolutionary Union […]
Hit ‘em where it hurts, their wallets – Reconsidering coercion beyond interpersonal violence in Mau Mau Kenya
By Thomas Wright (tw546@york.ac.uk) During the fight for control of Central Kenya in the early years of the Mau Mau Emergency, authorities used collective punishments as the primary method to impose their dominance over the recalcitrant Kenyan countryside. Yet, in recent years, influenced as much by events in the media and court room as elsewhere, […]
Kulangsu and the Birth of the International Settlement
By James Halcrow Kulangsu (Gulangyu) Island was host to Amoy’s (modern day Xiamen, in the Fujian Province, China) foreign resident community during the long nineteenth century. The port city had been forcibly opened to Western trading at the end of the First Opium War in 1842. By 1900, a population of around 280 foreign residents […]
An Analysis of the Intra-American Slave Trade to North America and Spanish America, c.1660-c.1730
By Jennifer Faith Gray In 1714, Captain George Winter of the Mary transhipped a cargo of 111 enslaved persons who had been purchased in Barbados to York River, Virginia, where enslaved labour was used to facilitate extensive tobacco cultivation. In the same year, Captain Robert Benn of the Charles transhipped a cargo of 177 enslaved […]
Is the UN Failing?
By Martin Duffy With modest space one is inclined to the discursive, but at the same time this essay will seek to present robust academic evidence for the opinions expressed. As a point of reference, one notes a recent monumental study of the UN, often-consulted in this essay (Daws and Weiss, 2018). As the writer […]
“Right of Dominion”?: A Comparative Analysis of Legal Doctrine in the Colonial Claim-making of British Settlements in the Spanish Peripheries of Darien, the Mosquito Coast, and the Yucatán Peninsula, c.1630 – c.1790.
By Nicholas Troy In 1787, to prevent conflict with Spain, the British colony of Black River – the central node in a dynamic contraband trade on the Mosquito Coast – was evacuated. At the start of the same century, logger settlements in Yucatán and the Scots colony in Darien paid the price for defying Spanish […]