Search

William Petty's work has usually been regarded as an epistemic break in the history of statistical and politico-economic thought. In this paper, I argue that Petty's statistical notions stemmed from the natural-historical techniques he originally implemented to manage the Down Survey. Following Bacon, who viewed the description of trades as a paramount branch of natural history, Petty approached the art of surveying itself as an object of natural-historical analysis. He partitioned the surveying work into individual tasks and implemented a meticulous division of labour, employing hundreds of disbanded soldiers as surveyors and using questionnaires to calibrate the responses of his 'instruments', as he called his specialized workers. By borrowing these methods from natural history to organize surveying work, Petty was able to conceptualize Ireland as a political body defined by tables of aggregate data. I then compare the Down Survey with John Graunt's observations on the bills of mortality to show that both are representative of a particular style of natural history, aimed at describing the natural and political state of a circumscribed territory. I close by considering other manifestations of 'territorial natural history', indicating a continuity between this research tradition and the appearance of statistics in the British Isles.

This essay coins a term 'Judeopessimism,' engaging questions of some of the contemporary writing on antisemitism and its claim to be historical in nature through the lens of critical race theory, specifically Afropessimism and its offshoots, which make claims of anti-Blackness as political ontology. Is some of this writing on antisemitism really making theological or political ontological claims of 'eternal antisemitism' refracted in a less volatile historical narrative? How can critical race theory and its understanding of anti-Blackness help refine, clarify, and push the discussion on antisemitism to be more forthright about its underlying claims? I explore some examples of ontological antisemitism in the writings of Meir Kahane and Naftali Zvi Berlin who each in different ways offer ahistorical and even ontological views on antisemitism that are mostly shunned by contemporary writing on the subject and suggest that Afropessimism offers a helpful way to see beyond the historical veil of how antisemitism is understood today. Keywords Afropessimism, antisemitism, Jews, political ontology, critical race theory, Semite, history, We must tell the truth 'till we can no longer bear it. --James Baldwin (1) Introduction When did Jews begin to think of antisemitism as a problem? While that may [...]

Resistance to and avoidance of stress slow aging and confer increased longevity in numerous organisms. Honey bees and other superorganismal social insects have two main advantages over solitary species to avoid or resist stress: individuals can directly help each other by resource or information transfer, and they can cooperatively control their environment. These benefits have been recognised in the context of pathogen and parasite stress as the concept of social immunity, which has been extensively studied. However, we argue that social immunity is only a special case of a general concept that we define here as social stress protection to include group-level defences against all biotic and abiotic stressors. We reason that social stress protection may have allowed the evolution of reduced individual-level defences and individual life-history optimization, including the exceptional aging plasticity of many social insects. We describe major categories of stress and how a colonial lifestyle may protect social insects, particularly against temporary peaks of extreme stress. We use the honey bee (Apis mellifera L.) to illustrate how patterns of life expectancy may be explained by social stress protection and how modern beekeeping practices can disrupt social stress protection. We conclude that the broad concept of social stress protection requires rigorous empirical testing because it may have implications for our general understanding of social evolution and specifically for improving honey bee health., (© 2024 The Authors. Biological Reviews published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Cambridge Philosophical Society.)

Around half of the population of Suriname, who are mainly of African and South Asian descent, migrated to the Netherlands at the end of the previous century, where they face higher perinatal and maternal mortality and up to 5 years lower life expectancy than European-Dutch. Analyses by ancestry are needed to address these inequalities, but the law prohibits registration by ancestry. Therefore, a list of Surinamese surnames was compiled and validated to identify the largest groups, African-Surinamese or South Asian-Surinamese ancestry in health research. A complete database of Surinamese surnames was provided by the National Population Registry of Suriname. Surname recognition by researchers of Surinamese ancestry was used. Disagreement was resolved using historical registers and through discussion. The list was further validated against contemporary lists of Surinamese surnames with self-defined ancestry, obtained during population and clinical studies in Suriname and the Netherlands. All 71,529 Surinamese surnames were encoded, as African-Surinamese (34%), South Asian-Surinamese (18%), Brazilian or other Iberian (17%), Indonesian-Surinamese (13%), Chinese-Surinamese (5%), First Nation (2%), and other (10%). Compared to self-defined ancestry, South Asian-Surinamese surname coding had 100% sensitivity, 99.8% specificity, and 99.9% accuracy. For African-Surinamese, who may have Dutch surnames, these values depended on geocoding. With a known Surinamese origin, sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy were, respectively, 97.3%, 100%, and 98.6%, but without this information, there was interference of African-Surinamese with European-Dutch surnames in the Dutch validation sample. In conclusion, the Surinamese Surname List has a high accuracy in identifying persons of Surinamese ancestry. This quick, inexpensive, and nonintrusive method, which is unaffected by response bias, might be a valuable tool in public health research to help address the profound health disparities by ancestry.

Despite the fact that Burmese courts had sizeable harems and that eunuchs are typically associated with harems, little attention has been paid to the presence of eunuchs in Burmese courts. This essay provides an overview of the existing English-language literature on eunuchs in Burmese courts, focusing on the three Burmese courts for which mention of eunuchs has survived in the historical record, namely the court at Pegu of the Taungoo dynasty (1486-1599), the court of Mrauk U of the Arakan kingdom (1429-1785), and the so-called 'Court of Ava' of the Konbaung dynasty (1765-1885). Noting the descriptions of eunuchs as Muslim, the essay considers the evidence regarding their numbers, their functions, and their possible origins., Eunuchs played major roles in the courts of the Chinese, Mughal, Ottoman and Persian empires. Because they were castrated and could not impregnate women, their main role has stereotypically been [...]

Familial twinning and fertility traits were investigated in Nigerian mothers of dizygotic (DZ) twins (MoDZT; N = 972) and controls (N = 525) who responded to our person-to-person interview, which included questions on pregnancy history and family history of DZ twinning. Controls were defined as women who are not twins themselves and do not have twins in their first-degree relatives. Over 95% of the participants were Yoruba. We found that Nigerian MoDZT had an average of 4.0 (±2.6) pairs of twins among their relatives, and of these, the prevalence of DZ twins was significantly higher than that of monozygotic (MZ) twins (45.9% vs. 25.8%). Controls had an average of 0.5 (±0.4) pairs, and over 95% of the controls had no twins in their relatives. These results suggest genetic influences on DZ twinning in Nigerians. MoDZT were significantly younger in their mean age at first child, and had higher parity than controls, suggesting increased fertility in MoDZT. As compared to mothers with a single set of twins, mothers (N = 130) with multiple sets had significantly more twins among their relatives (5.4 pairs vs. 3.7 pairs) and had their first twins at a younger age (28.4 vs. 30.7 years), indicating that mothers with multiple sets of twins might have higher genetic propensity for twinning associated with earlier age at twin pregnancy. Our findings argue for genomewide association studies for DZ twinning in Nigerians, and may help to develop intervention strategies to overcome infertility/subfertility problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sudeshna Guha. 2022. A history of India through 75 objects. Gurugram: Hachette India; 978-93-5009-902-5 hardback 40.03 [pounds sterling]. With her experience as archaeologist and historian, curator and professor in both [...]

Until the early twentieth century, populations on many Pacific Islands had never experienced measles. As travel to the Pacific Islands by Europeans became more common, the arrival of measles and other pathogens had devastating consequences. In 1911, Rotuma in Fiji was hit by a measles epidemic, which killed 13% of the island population. Detailed records show two mortality peaks, with individuals reported as dying solely from measles in the first and from measles and diarrhoea in the second. Measles is known to disrupt immune system function. Here, we investigate whether the pattern of mortality on Rotuma in 1911 was a consequence of the immunosuppressive effects of measles. We use a compartmental model to simulate measles infection and immunosuppression. Whilst immunosuppressed, we assume that individuals are vulnerable to dysfunctional reactions triggered by either (i) a newly introduced infectious agent arriving at the same time as measles or (ii) microbes already present in the population in a pre-existing equilibrium state. We show that both forms of the immunosuppression model provide a plausible fit to the data and that the inclusion of immunosuppression in the model leads to more realistic estimates of measles epidemiological parameters than when immunosuppression is not included.

Handaxes have a uniquely prominent role in the history of Palaeolithic archaeology, and their early study provides crucial information concerning the epistemology of the field. We have little conclusive evidence, however, of their investigation or societal value prior to the mid seventeenth century. Here we investigate the shape, colour and potential flake scarring on a handaxe-like stone object seen in the Melun Diptych, painted by the French fifteenth-century artist Jean Fouquet, and compare its features with artefacts from diverse (including French) Acheulean handaxe assemblages. Commissioned by a high-status individual, Étienne Chevalier, Fouquet's work (Étienne Chevalier with Saint Stephen) depicts an important religious context, while the handaxe-like object points to the stoning to death of an important Christian saint. Our results strongly support the interpretation that the painted stone object represents a flint Acheulean handaxe, likely sourced from northern France, where Fouquet lived. Identifying a fifteenth-century painting of a handaxe does not change what we know about Acheulean individuals, but it does push back the evidence for when handaxes became a prominent part of the 'modern' social and cultural world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I commence this review with six important works on mobility, diasporas, ethnicities, and intercultural relations in antiquity; after a decade of relative dearth of significant contributions, it is truly wonderful that the field is moving again. Jonathan Hall and James Osborne have edited an excellent volume on the interregional networks in the eastern Mediterranean between 900–600 bce. The volume aims to link the novel approaches to Mediterranean history espoused in the major syntheses by Nicholas Purcell – Peregrine Horden and Cyprian Broodbank respectively, with new approaches to the study of cross-cultural interaction and material culture. The editors explicitly and convincingly argue in favour of employing multiple models for explaining the Early Iron Age Mediterranean; the ten chapters exemplify both multiplicity and important common themes. Certain contributions accept the concept of globalization as a useful way of explaining the changes evident across the Mediterranean. While some contributions problematize the concept of style as a means of drawing clear ethnic lines among artists and artistic traditions, other scholars argue for the need to maintain traditional ethnic labels like that of the Phoenicians, which is facing a current deconstructive trend; equally interesting is the stress on the agency of specific groups, like mercenaries, as agents of connectivity. Particularly significant, finally, is the focus on areas that have usually remained at the margins of discussion of Iron Age interconnectivity, like the North Aegean and the Troad, the Black Sea, Anatolia and Egypt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If Derrida once praised English for the richness of the expression “to enforce the law,” in this article I return the favor and embrace the ambiguity of the French word endroit. While it means nothing more than place, I suggest one could draw from Benjamin’s work on dwelling to ponder on the meaning of being within the spaces of 19th century (counter) revolutionary internationalism. In this vein, I read Benjamin’s unfinished Arcades Project—and, in particular, its analysis of the rise of iron & glass architecture that accompanied the conquering bourgeois and the persistent aristocracy—to analyze the new built environments of the fin de siècle North Atlantic diplomacy. Despite the growing interest in the history of global governance, for historians and critical legal scholars alike, the spatial dimension of “the international” have been a largely unexplored affair. Conversely, I suggest Benjamin’s insistence on the materiality of architecture reminds us that international law’s castles were not built solely in the air. In this vein, I suggest one can trace a material history of the spaces in which revolutionary and counterrevolutionary internationalisms struggled to fashion a shell for themselves during Europe’s turbulent 19th century.

Economists ignore caring labor since most is provided unpaid. Disregard is unjust, theoretically indefensible, and probably misleading. Valuation requires estimates of time spent and the replacement or opportunity costs of that time. I use the maintenance costs of British workers, costs which cover both the material inputs into upkeep and the domestic services needed to turn commodities into livings, to isolate the costs of paid domestic labor. I then impute the value of unpaid domestic labor from these market equivalents, and aggregate across households without domestic servants. Historically, unpaid domestic labor represented c. 20 percent of total income, a contribution that suggests the need to revise some standard narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can historians of "small spaces" and cities focus on local events and issues and at the same time carry on conversations with peers in a disciplinary mode marked by the spatial expansiveness of global history, on one hand, and a focus on objects and individuals of microhistory on the other? At stake here are key questions connected with the intellectual value of place-based knowledge and detailed single-site historical case studies. I argue that as long as we are caught between the positivist idea that causal regularity and time-place independence of explanatory mechanisms are the hallmark of theory, and the postmodernist resistance to generalizations, histories of cities and other small spaces will suffer from "defanged empiricism." This problem is particularly debilitating for non-global histories of small spaces and cities of the global South, which often "do not travel well." Is there a way out? I argue that a critical engagement with the stratified ontologies of critical realism— in particular, a version that I call "soft critical realism"—and Charles Tilly's "deep order" can enable historians of small spaces and cities to re-situate their research at the heart and center of social theory, and simultaneously strike a better balance between attention to local details, the narrative form, and engagement with larger processes, concepts, and theories. Finally, I concretize the discussion by offering the example of how my own research on late colonial and early postcolonial Calcutta has benefitted from this approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article historicizes a single stage in how the contemporary obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) category was built. Starting from the position that the two central components which make up OCD are 'obsessions' and 'compulsions', it illustrates how these concepts were taken apart by a small group of clinical psychologists working at the Institute of Psychiatry and the Maudsley psychiatric hospital in south London in the early 1970s, and why compulsions were investigated whilst obsessions were ignored. The decision to distinguish the previously undifferentiated symptoms is attributed to the commitment amongst psychologists at the Maudsley, most notably Stanley Rachman, to an empirical conception of science which emphasized observability. Two aspects of this are discussed. First, compulsions were deemed 'visible' through their correspondence with animal behaviour. Second, the symptom was seen as open to an experimental modification procedure which privileged visible outcomes. Ultimately, the article concludes that the historical division between 'obsessions' and 'compulsions', and the extensive investigation of the latter, has had substantial implications for the development of OCD as a category centred on visible behaviours and treated through behavioural means.