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Although situated ~400 km from the east coast of Africa, Madagascar exhibits cultural, linguistic, and genetic traits from both Southeast Asia and Eastern Africa. The settlement history remains contentious; we therefore used a grid-based approach to sample at high resolution the genomic diversity (including maternal lineages, paternal lineages, and genome-wide data) across 257 villages and 2,704 Malagasy individuals. We find a common Bantu and Austronesian descent for all Malagasy individuals with a limited paternal contribution from Europe and the Middle East. Admixture and demographic growth happened recently, suggesting a rapid settlement of Madagascar during the last millennium. However, the distribution of African and Asian ancestry across the island reveals that the admixture was sex biased and happened heterogeneously across Madagascar, suggesting independent colonization of Madagascar from Africa and Asia rather than settlement by an already admixed population. In addition, there are geographic influences on the present genomic diversity, independent of the admixture, showing that a few centuries is sufficient to produce detectable genetic structure in human populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper tackles the issue of national politicization in late Ottoman Thrace through the case study of Stenimahos (İstanimaka, Stanimaka), a large mountainous village in Northern Thrace, whose Greek-speaking inhabitants initiated during the 1860s a long tradition of anti-Ottoman nationalist militancy and a close relation to independent Greece. The rapid national politicization and radicalization of the Stenimahiote Greeks was triggered by a severe reproduction crisis of the local economy in the context of mounting incorporation of the Ottoman empire into the world economy. Ensuing conflicts in local society were successively articulated into the unstable 'post-Crimean war' regional, imperial and international contexts. Last but not least, the analysis of the 'amphibious' emigration movement of the Stenimahiotes to Greece which followed the crisis reveals the agency of the non-elite subjects and challenges idealist and 'topbottom' approaches to the process to nation formation in the late Ottoman Balkans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines and summarizes theoretical approaches in order to select and substantiate the main concepts for identifying the eras of global transformations. As has been pointed out, the main problem of a systematic theoretical-methodological analysis of globalization remains the uncertainty of the direction (diachronic or synchronic) of the economic stage of global development. Based on modern methodological research, the article attempts to define clearly the terms «internationalization», «regionalization», and «globalization».

Tourism, as well as globalization, go a long way with they reach their current developed state. Therefore, it is possible to understand the dialectical relation between globalization and tourism by implementing the historical approach to the long way passed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout history, conquerors and those in power have assumed control not only of the people and the lands they have occupied but also of their food cultures and dietary habits. Encounters related to food have had undeniable influence on the nutrition, the health, and the environment of populations. The traditional diet of the Sámi living in Finnish Lapland – especially in the Utsjoki parish – was heavily dependent on meat and fish, while the diet of officials and settlers coming from the southern parts of the land was based on bread and other sources of carbohydrates. When officials relocated to Lapland, they often brought along bread, flour, and agricultural tools suitable for cultivating grain. The first task of the teacher of a school established in Utsjoki, the northernmost parish of Finnish Lapland, in the 1740s was to travel to the coast of the Arctic Ocean to buy flour for the school and its boarding pupils – despite the fact that the pupils were probably not accustomed to a diet that included bread. Information on matters such as this has been recorded in many sources consulted by historians, and makes it possible to focus on the role of food and dietary habits as an important part of cultural encounters and exchange. The attitudes of the Sámi towards food indicate that the use of power was not always a one-directional, top-down process. Even the rural communities of the northernmost part of Europe could benefit equally from the international trade connections and the increased choice of goods they brought. The inhabitants of the Sámi region also reflected on their own dietary habits and its shortcomings: the potato became popular in Europe starting in the eighteenth century, and some Sámi also expressed their interest in cultivating potato by the 1820s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Hansa formed the principal agent of trade and cultural exchange in northern Europe and the Baltic during the late medieval to early modern periods. Hanseatic urban settlements in northern Europe shared many things in common. Their cultural 'signature' was articulated physically through a shared vocabulary of built heritage and domestic goods, from step-gabled brick architecture to clothing, diet, and domestic utensils. The redevelopment of towns on the Baltic littoral over the past 20+ years offers an archaeological opportunity to investigate key attributes of late medieval society on the micro-scale. Such attributes include the development of mercantile capitalism, colonialism, and proto-globalization. For instance, distributions of artefacts now point to the Hansa as an agent of the Reformation movement in northern and western Europe. Where they were once almost exclusively regarded as material evidence for long-distance commercial activity, domestic artefacts, such as table and heating ceramics, are now subject to scrutiny as media for social, cultural, ethnic, and confessional relationships, and combine to create a distinctive Hanseatic material signature. Ceramic case studies illustrate how the archaeology of the Hansa now intersects with the wider historical debate about Europeanisation and proto-globalization arising from the development of long-distance maritime trade from the thirteenth century onwards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]