Famine and land in Ireland and India 1845-1880: James Caird and the political economy of hunger

The perception of Ireland and India as ‘zones of famine’ led many nineteenth-century observers to draw analogies between these two troublesome parts of the British empire. This article investigates this parallel through the career of James Caird (1816–92), and specifically his interventions in the latter stages of both the Great Irish Famine of 1845–50, and the Indian famines of 1876–9. Caird is best remembered as the joint author of the controversial dissenting minute in the Indian famine commission report of 1880; this article locates the roots of his stance in his previous engagements with Irish policy. Caird's interventions are used to track the trajectory of an evolving ‘Peelite’ position on famine relief, agricultural reconstruction, and land reform between the 1840s and 1880s. Despite some divergences, strong continuities exist between the two interventions – not least concern for the promotion of agricultural entrepreneurship, for actively assisting economic development in ‘backward’ economies, and an acknowledgement of state responsibility for preserving life as an end in itself. Above all in both cases it involved a critique of a laissez-faire dogmatism – whether manifest in the ‘Trevelyanism’ of 1846–50 or the Lytton–Temple system of 1876–9.

Short reflections on the history of African communication

This article aims to propose a chronological subdivision in the history of African communication. African communication today is one of the most important axes for implementing development strategies, sustaining education, health, and schooling programmes, and so on. However, many of these programmes fail due to a lack of or ineffective communication between international organisations, local elite and lay people. The reasons for this situation must be found in Africa’s history of communication, which has undergone radical transformations in its different phases. Using the functionalist analysis drawn up by Jakobson, this article proposes a new chronological subdivision of Africa’s history of communication, reflecting on the current contradictions in contemporary communication in Africa.

Dogs in the paradise: The influence of the cynical philosophy in the construction of the myth of the good savage

This paper studies the influence of cynic philosophy in the construction of the myth of the good savage. In the first part it studies the importance of cynicism in the XVI century and how the cynic influence of Erasmus, More and Montaigne was fundamental to the way that Europe approached the American indigenous. In the second part it studies the cynic motives that could have influenced in the construction of the myth of the good savage.

‘‘An old quarrel between us that will never be at an end": Middleton’s Women Beware Women and Late Jacobean Religious Politics

In this article, I examine Thomas Middleton's Women Beware Women as a response to the particular religio-political context in the years surrounding 1621. The onset of the Thirty Years War in 1618 and the subsequent humiliation of James' son-in-law Frederick, Elector of Palatine, the vexed question of a possible Catholic marriage for Charles, Prince of Wales, the ever present difficulty of Anglo-Catholic relations, particularly with Spain, as well as growing religious factionalism within the Church of England between Calvinists and Arminians: all contributed towards a culturally febrile atmosphere, one to which, as I will argue, Middleton was well placed to respond. Given Middleton's Calvinistic beliefs, I suggest that Women Beware Women offers an acerbic examination of contemporary debates concerning human will, especially women's will, as well as promoting a sceptically apocalyptic anti-Catholic agenda throughout. I also examine the religious language and imagery used to construct Bianca as the whore of Babylon, and argue that her emergence and fall offer a political commentary on the precarious position of the English Church around 1621.

James Anderson's Political Economy--His Influence on Smith and Malthus

James Anderson's powerful critique of Adam Smith's position on the corn export bounty was published in 1777. It focuse d on Smith's proposition that the bounty could not lead to increased corn production because it could not increase corn's real price. Smit h's response to the critique is traced in later editions of Wealth of Nations. While Anderson's critique of Smith influenced Thomas Malthu s's writings from 1803 onwards, his theory of differential rent did n ot influence Malthus at this stage. An examination of the evolution o f Malthus's ideas on rent between 1803 and 1815, however, indicates t hat Malthus knew and used Anderson's work on rent.