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Poised between the land and the sea, enabling the dynamic flow of people and goods, while also figuratively representing a safe place of rest and refuge, the harbor constitutes a liminal, ambivalent space par excellence that has been central to the American imagination and history since the early colonial days. From the mythical tales of discovery and foundation to the endless flows of migrants, through the dark pages of the slave trade and the imperialistic dream of an ever-expanding nation, harbors, both as a trope and as physical spaces, powerfully signify the American experience. Today, at a time when ideas of border protection and policing gain political prominence in the U.S. and elsew...
Cashews from Africa’s Gold Coast, butterflies from Sierra Leone, jalap root from Veracruz, shells from Jamaica—in the eighteenth century, these specimens from faraway corners of the Atlantic were tucked away onboard inhumane British slaving vessels. Kathleen S. Murphy argues that the era’s explosion of new natural knowledge was deeply connected to the circulation of individuals, objects, and ideas through the networks of the British transatlantic slave trade. Plants, seeds, preserved animals and insects, and other specimens were gathered by British slave ship surgeons, mariners, and traders at slaving factories in West Africa, in ports where captive Africans disembarked, and near the B...
In the wake of a 1952 revolution, leaders of Bolivia's National Revolutionary Movement (MNR) embarked on a program of internal colonization known as the "March to the East." In an impoverished country dependent on highland mining, the MNR sought to convert the nation's vast "undeveloped" Amazonian frontier into farmland, hoping to achieve food security, territorial integrity, and demographic balance. To do so, they encouraged hundreds of thousands of Indigenous Bolivians to relocate from the "overcrowded" Andes to the tropical lowlands, but also welcomed surprising transnational migrant streams, including horse-and-buggy Mennonites from Mexico and displaced Okinawans from across the Pacific....
During the 2008 financial crisis, the possible changes in remittance-sending behavior and potential avenues to alleviate a probable decline in remittance flows became concerns. This book brings together a wide array of studies from around the world focusing on the recent trends in remittance flows. The authors have gathered a select group of researchers from academic, practitioner and policy making bodies. Thus the book can be seen as a conversation between the different stakeholders involved in or affected by remittance flows globally. The book is a first-of-its-kind attempt to analyze the effects of an ongoing crisis on remittance flows globally. Data analyzed by the book reveals three tre...
The age of European high imperialism was characterized by the movement of plants and animals on a historically unprecedented scale. The human migrants who colonized territories around the world brought a variety of other species with them, from the crops and livestock they hoped to propagate, to the parasites, invasive plants, and pests they carried unawares, producing a host of unintended consequences that reshaped landscapes around the world. While the majority of histories about the dynamics of these transfers have concentrated on the British Empire, these nine case studies — focused on the Ottoman, French, Dutch, German, and British empires — seek to advance a historical analysis that is comparative, transnational, and interdisciplinary to understand the causes, consequences, and networks of biological exchange and ecological change resulting from imperialism. Contributors: Brett M. Bennett, Semih Celik, Nicole Chalmer, Jodi Frawley, Ulrike Kirchberger, Carey McCormack, Idir Ouahes, Florian Wagner, Samuel Eleazar Wendt, Alexander van Wickeren, Stephanie Zehnle
Today, the mention of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego conjures images of idyllic landscapes untouched by globalization. Creatures of Fashion upends this, revealing how the exploitation of animals—terrestrial and marine, domesticated and wild, living and dead—was central to the region’s transformation from Indigenous lands into the national territories of Argentina and Chile. Drawing on evidence from archives and digital repositories, John Soluri traces the circulation of furs and fibers to explore how the power of fashion stretched far beyond Europe’s houses of haute couture to entangle the fates of Indigenous hunters, migrant workers, and textile manufacturers with those of fur seals...
In November 2017, the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) celebrated its fiftieth anniversary at its headquarters outside Palmira, Colombia. As an important research center of the so-called Green Revolution in agricultural science and technologies, CIAT emphasizes its contributions to sustainability, food security, gender equity, inclusive markets, and resilient, climate-smart agriculture. Yet these terms hardly describe the Cauca Valley where CIAT is physically located, a place that has been transformed into an industrial monoculture of sugarcane where thirteen Colombian corporations oversee the vast majority of this valley’s famously fertile soil. This exemplifies the pa...