Search

This article presents new research on the impact and consequences of the incorporation of Puerto Rico into the American economic sphere of influence and how much change truly took place during the first decades of the twentieth century. As reconstructed here, Puerto Rico's social and economic structure did change after the American invasion. However, a closer look at the data reveals that, contrary to the generally accepted conclusions, land tenure did not become concentrated in fewer hands. Puerto Rico did experience profound changes with the rapid growth of US agribusiness and the penetration of American capital. In the process of arriving on the island, these two interests found a land tenure system in the firm control of local farmers (small, medium, and large). The American invasion and subsequent incorporation of the island into the American economic/political system as a non-incorporated territory provided the conditions for the numerical increase of farms and farmers in the island during the first three decades of the twentieth century.

This article focuses on the 1905 crisis of French and Algerian viticulture that came to be known as the "Leakey Affair." It explains why metropolitan French observers reacted so strongly to Leakey's contract and subsequent advertising of Algerian wine on the British market, first from a socio-economic perspective, and second by reference to the importance of wine in French culture and identity. The final section of the article explains the response of Algeria's colonists to their metropolitan critics. Throughout, wine is used as a prism through which to explore the nature of identity in modern France and the complex colonial relationship in which the wine industry played such a major role. The Leakey Affair revealed the fragility of colonial cultural formations and the importance of wine as a conduit of ideas, and a symbol for fierce wrangling over identity, belonging, and the nature of empire. What was at stake was no less than the intellectual ownership of a mainstay of France's cultural mythology -- wine -- and the relationship between an imperial power and its colonial world.

South Africa was the third largest exporter of asbestos in the world for more than a century. As a consequence of particularly exploitative social conditions, former workers and residents of mining regions suffered--and continue to suffer--from a serious yet still largely undocumented burden of asbestos-related disease. This epidemic has been invisible both internationally and inside South Africa. We examined the work environment, labor policies, and occupational-health framework of the asbestos industry in South Africa during the 20th century. In a changing local context where the majority of workers were increasingly disenfranchised, unorganized, excluded from skilled work, and predominantly rural, mining operations of the asbestos industry not only exposed workers to high levels of asbestos but also contaminated the environment extensively.

Much information on traditional indigenous society in Australian historiography and anthropology stems from the vast store of eyewitness accounts left by missionaries, settlers and government officials. How cautious does one need to be in using such material? After all that it reveals about the moral and legal universe of its writers, can it speak reliably about traditional society? This article traces the production of knowledge about indigenous gender relations at Cape York Peninsula through a lineage of sources from the 1890s to the 1990s and concludes that unless the assumptions embedded in the primary sources are clearly identified, the discourse on Aboriginal womanhood continues to be a colonising project.