Learning to be a ‘Safe’ ex-con: race,symbolic violence and discipline in prisoner re-entry

This article seeks to investigate the ways in which conceptions of race and interact with symbolic violence, discipline and governmentality to produce a responsibilized subject willing to participate in the racialized forms of deference necessary for participation in the secondary labor market. It is based on three years of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a Career Development class in an agency that serves formerly incarcerated individuals who are primarily African American males. In order to meet job placement goals, the agency has focused job development efforts on the secondary labor market. The article focuses on the tensions that develop as program staff attempt to prepare class participants to accept these positions.     

Denied their ‘natural nourishment’: religion,causes of death and infant mortality in the Netherlands, 1875–1899

At the end of the nineteenth century, infant mortality rates started to fall rapidly in the Netherlands. Unfortunately, not all regions benefited from this development. High infant death in the Roman Catholic provinces of North-Brabant and Limburg has often been ascribed to a growing reluctance of Catholic mothers to breastfeed their infants after 1870. This was supposedly caused by the combination of a strict, prudish Roman Catholic norm prohibiting women from baring their breasts and a refusal to accept new medical insights into healthy childcare. The food given to weaned children was generally of such poor quality that many infants succumbed to gastrointestinal diseases. Consequently, infant mortality rates caused by water- and food-borne infectious diseases would have been higher amongst weaned babies. By using recently digitised municipal cause-of-death registration statistics, it is possible to see if there are, indeed, indications of a shift in breastfeeding patterns after 1870. First, the authors look at infant deaths from all causes to see whether Roman Catholic municipalities underwent a rise in the mortality of children under the age of one. Second, the authors do the same for cause-specific infant mortality from typhus, typhoid fever, diarrhoea, dysentery, acute diseases of the digestive system and cholera. Based on the outcomes, there was no homogenous rise in infant mortality in all Roman Catholic municipalities. Furthermore, there is no indication that infant mortality due to digestive diseases increased uniformly in all Roman Catholic communities between 1875 and 1899. Either some communities were able to counteract the negative effects of a shift towards weaning or changes in breastfeeding patterns were not a specific Roman Catholic phenomenon at all.     

Parents and progeny: Inheritance and the transition to adulthood in colonial North Carolina, 1680–1759

There is now an abundance of research on the relative ages of transition to adulthood in colonial America, but, unfortunately, we are still not in a position to offer many generalizations from these myriad historical case studies. There are two reasons for this inconsistency. Some historians have been content to use parental mortality as a proxy for property transfer and we have been reluctant to consider marriage and child-bearing as events that involve, at a minimum, pairs of men and women. Instead, some historians have been content to examine these life course transitions as individual affairs. The article demonstrates the importance of these two points. Direct linkage of intergenerational property transfer has been found to be a powerful predictor of the transition to adulthood and the individual perspective has been found to be an insufficient level of analysis for understanding the social forces underlying the distribution of wealth and, consequently, the transition to adulthood.     

‘Ménages irréguliers’: interracial liaisons in colonial Indochina, 1905–1938

This article explores the history of relationships between Vietnamese women and French men in colonial Indochina as well as the multiplicity of perspectives on these unions. Relationships between Vietnamese women and French men were shaped by a lack of social integration and the skewed sex ratio among the French populations in the region. For French colonizers, these unions complicated the legal and social criteria for ‘being French’ in the colony and were perceived as both a practical necessity and a political threat. Vietnamese discourse on interracial unions demonstrated a preoccupation with changing sexual norms as well as preservation of cultural traditions. By engaging with both Vietnamese and French sources, the article moves away from mainstream colonial Eurocentric parlance that typically cast Vietnamese women as dominated and powerless, and instead highlights the women’s various degrees of agency as well as different motivations and practices in interracial unions.     

European democracy,parliamentary decline and the ‘democratic deficit’ of the European Union

This article examines two different, yet interrelated, phenomena: parliamentary decline in western Europe and the ‘democratic deficit’ of the European Union (EU). It argues that the latter has helped to consolidate, and in certain areas, facilitate, the former. This is illustrated by two sets of empirical studies, covering first the European Community (and in particular the Common Agricultural Policy and Economic and Monetary Union) and then the Common Foreign and Security Policy, and co‐operation in Justice and Home Affairs. The main conclusion to be drawn is that a simple reordering of some policies within and across different pillars will not remedy the current democratic shortfalls of the EU which stem as much from the inadequacy of existing parliamentary structures to hold EU decision makers to account, as from the absence of a European demos. The combined effects of the above are particularly crucial for the democratic viability of the emerging European polity which, as with any other political system in the modern democratic era, needs to strike a balance between efficiency and accountability.     

Network migration,marriage patterns,and adaptation in rural Portugal and among Portuguese immigrants in Argentina, 1870–1980

This article examines marriage patterns among immigrants and their children as a way to analyze the interplay of primary social networks and local conditions in the social adaptation of two communities of Portuguese immigrants in Argentina. Its main focus is on the factors involved in marriages within the same ethnic group and their evolution over time from a comparative perspective. The analysis considers aspects of marital selection in the main places of origin of the immigrants in the Algarve, southern Portugal, and their influence in the places of settlement; the factors that influenced the selection of spouses in both communities by gender and over time; and the changes from the first to the second generation. Factors, such as gender, the nature and rhythm of immigration, and the occupation of the immigrants and their families, proved very important in marital selection. Environmental factors were also significant. Oil production dominated Comodoro Rivadavia, while intensive family farming in a suburban setting characterized Villa Elisa. Through the comparative analysis of these two contrasting, receiving societies, the article examines the interplay between primary social networks based on national and ethnic origin and socioeconomic local conditions.     

Public health and the development of infant mortality in Germany, 1875–1930

The substantial increase in life expectancy over the past 150 years can largely be attributed to a drastic decline in infant mortality. In the continuing debate about the reasons for this development, recent research has focused attention on the role of public health. Since the 1870s in Germany, municipal and national public health strategies were launched. One major element of this policy was the fight against high infant mortality rates in urban areas. The establishment of municipal milk supplies and the creation of infant welfare centers attacked gastrointestinal disorders, the predominant cause of death among infants. This article investigates these developments in the largest German cities, particularly Düsseldorf, which is located in one of the most industrialized regions.     

The threat of ‘woolly-haired grandchildren’: Race,the colonial family and German nationalism

The German colonial world was marked by an ostensibly self-evident boundary between the white ruler and the black ruled that situated Europeans and indigenous peoples as diametrically opposed and socially discrete. This situation, however, was problematised by the gendered and sexualised interactions between European and indigenous society. The result was often a slippage between the administrative attempts to create recognisably ‘German’ families (perceived in racial terms), and the antinomian realities of human relationships that transgressed racial lines. This in turn gave rise to reproductive anxieties in the face of a new liminal population of ‘half-castes’ (Mischlinge) that refused the white–black, master–slave dialectic of the colonial ideal. Many historians have recently attempted to link the troubled history of race relations in German Southwest Africa to the later history of Nazi anti-Semitism and genocide, by focusing on the apparent continuities between the Holocaust and the Herero–Nama wars. However, an alternative genealogy for the Holocaust that refutes this genocidal continuity thesis is possible through an investigation of the origins and contents of the debates about the nature of the German colonial family and its relationship to German citizenship between 1904 and 1914.     

‘Criminal families’ and the court: co-offending in Amsterdam, 1897–1902

This article focuses on a specific aspect of the history of crime: co-offending (offending with one or more accomplices) in a family setting at the end of the nineteenth century. The aims of this article are to analyze how genders interacted in a criminal setting and to show a possible bias in the court's decision to prosecute ‘criminal families’, either in relation to the people involved or to the environment in which the crime was committed. This article also questions the relevance of the concept of the civilizing mission in a court setting towards ‘criminal families’ and compares it with the reality of the court's work. The study is based on the archives of Amsterdam's Arrondissementsgerecht between 1897 and 1902. This court was in charge of trying criminal offences committed in Amsterdam and its surrounding area (a semi-urban environment within a 25-kilometre radius) according to the 1886 Dutch code of laws. Urban and semi-urban co-offending criminal rates in Amsterdam and its surrounding area are compared, as well as gender patterns and class origins in relation to the crimes committed, in order to highlight a possible prejudice towards working-class offenders. The analysis reveals a high rate of co-offending in female criminality and more gender interactions in the urban environment. However, the results also show that, despite a general anxiety towards working-class families and rising crime rates, magistrates were not more inclined to prosecute them. The family situation was taken into account before trials, and semi-urban families were not treated more leniently than urban families.     

Differences in intergenerational fertility associations by sex and race in Saba,Dutch Caribbean, 1876–2004

This study examines the intergenerational transmission of fertility behavior in Saba, Dutch Caribbean from 1876 to 2004 using reconstituted genealogies. Pearson product-moment correlation coefficients of several fertility measures and event-history models of age at first birth are used to explore relationships between the fertility of mothers and their children. The strength of intergenerational fertility ties varies by race and gender. Individuals that are better positioned to realize their fertility preferences have the strongest intergenerational associations, while individuals with the most limited reproductive options have the weakest intergenerational associations. This evidence supports hypotheses that posit the intergenerational transmission of attitudes, goals, and behaviors and the ability to act on those preferences as drivers of the presence or magnitude of links between the fertility of parents and their children.     

Becoming ‘European’ through police reform: a successful strategy in Bosnia and Herzegovina?

Police reform plays a key role in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s internationally-supervised statebuilding process. It is one of the four key conditions to move the country closer to its European future. Against this background the article analyses the role that the European Union Police Mission (EUPM) plays in preparing Bosnian police agencies for this challenge. Using as guiding tools some of the key elements of the Mission’s leitmotif—local ownership, European police standards—the article comes to the conclusion that EUPM has introduced much needed reforms but these have been overshadowed, among other things, by the police restructuring process and its unnecessary politicisation of “European police standards/practices” to fit a model of statehood not shared by all local stakeholders.

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The ‘good’, the ‘bad’ and the ‘Charlie’: the business of cocaine smuggling in Greece

This article examines the social organisation of cocaine smuggling in Greece. Emphasis is placed on the involvement of professionals from the shipping industry and actors from the ‘upper society echelons’ who play a pivotal role in the transportation and importation of cocaine to Western Europe and Greece. After considering empirical evidence from a variety of sources, our findings indicate that the cocaine market in Greece is ‘organised’ by a system of collaborative relationships between state, business and civil society actors. It is suggested that to better understand the nature of this illegal market, further research is required to take a closer look into the economic, socio-cultural and political incentives of these actors.     

Territory,Jurisdiction, and Colonial Governance: ‘A Bill to Repeal the British Constitution’, 1856–60

Britain claimed full territorial sovereignty over New Zealand, even though substantive enforcement of its authority against Maori often faced significant challenges. Alarmed at the weakness of British governance in relation to Maori, Governor Thomas Gore Browne proposed a Native Offenders Bill. The Bill proposed giving the New Zealand Governor sweeping powers to ban ‘any communication’ or trade with any Maori within a specified district, or with a particular tribe. Such a ban would, it was claimed, ensure compliance with colonial law. However, the bill was twice rejected by the settler legislature (1856 and 1860), on both constitutional and practical grounds. The paper places the bill in its political and legal contexts, and examines some of the ways colonial administrators and politicians responded to the difference between the government's claim to extensive legal authority and its more limited substantive power.     

‘From weird to wired’: MPs,the internet and representative politics in the UK

On 14 May 2002, the House of Commons voted on proposals put forward by the Modernisation Select Committee for reform of the departmental select committee system. This article examines the origins of those proposals, and the outcome of the vote, focusing on one particular proposal to create a Committee of Nomination to place MPs onto select committees. This raises questions regarding two competing academic approaches to explaining parliamentary reform, the ‘attitudinal’ approach and the ‘contextual’ approach, and concludes that, of the two, the ‘contextual’ approach is better placed to explain the failure to create a Committee of Nomination.     

Consensus,Difference and Sexuality: Que(e)rying the European Court of Human Rights’ Concept of‘ European Consensus’

Law and Critique - This paper provides a queer critique of the European Court of Human Rights’ use of ‘European consensus’ as a method of interpretation in cases concerning...     

Smallpox vaccination and the limits of governing through contagion in the Straits Settlements, 1868–1926

Vaccination involves the encounter of nonhuman biological matter and human bodies, recalibrating our susceptibility to illness and death. This boundary-crossing act has been caught in conflicting webs of moral significance, including the normalizing frameworks of public health governance and its corresponding forms of resistance. Such tensions and dynamics were a feature of smallpox vaccination - the first modern, systematic state-driven project to build population immunity. Focusing on smallpox vaccination in the British-ruled Straits Settlements (Singapore, Penang, and Malacca) between 1868 and 1926, we examine the recurrent features of contentions over vaccination from the tentative beginnings of the 1868 Vaccination Ordinance to the systematic extension of vaccination in the 20th century. Engaging science and technology studies of nonhuman agency and social theories on security, we argue that such contentions demonstrate the limits of a power formation we call governing through contagion (GTC). GTC centralizes law and other technologies to normalize public health measures that combat contagious diseases, while dysconnecting populations by its strategies of control. Our history of smallpox vaccination reveals: (i) GTC relies on the interconnectedness of human and nonhuman actors in protecting populations against viral threats; law is essential but does not necessarily drive vaccination or other strategies of control and (ii) resistance to GTC, in which law plays an integral role, reinforces inequalities and differentiated treatment, what we term endemic inter/dysconnectedness.     

‘Female Husbands’, Community and Courts in the Eighteenth Century

While there was no specific law prohibiting sex between women in the eighteenth century, some women were prosecuted as a consequence of same-sex relationships. These ‘female husbands’, women who married other women under male identities, often lived highly individual lifestyles; but their path through prosecution and punishment involved a much more intricate web of relations. Thus an exploration of their cases highlights important features of the contemporary criminal justice system as well as popular and elite attitudes to the specific offences. In particular, understandings of the role of the community in the discovery, prosecution, and punishment of criminal offences are complicated by an examination of the female husband cases. In a crucial period of change for the legal system, the complexities of its processes as well as the impact of class, gender, and culture are exposed. Light is shed upon the shifting roles and interests of the individual, the local community, and the courts at a point when criminal cases were in the early stages of a shift from private prosecution and public punishment to greater formality and state control. These unusual cases bring into focus the complex role of community relationships in an evolving legal system.     

Reproductive behavior and contraceptive practices in comparative perspective,Switzerland (1955–1970)

This paper focuses on marital birth control practices c. 1955–1970, i.e. before the era of widespread uniform adoption of modern contraceptives, in two nearby Swiss cities characterized by different religious cultures. It asks how responsibility for contraceptive practices was shared within the marital couple, whether it was the object of discussion between spouses, how the choice of a method of contraception was made and how religious culture affected these elements. This paper uses written sources reflecting medical authorities' views about birth control and 48 semi-structured interviews with elderly persons from the lower middle and working classes. The results point to three key conclusions. Firstly, the findings show a joint responsibility of both spouses for contraceptive practices. Secondly, the paper shows that religious culture plays a key role in the access to means of birth control. Specifically, Fribourg gynecologists were reluctant to prescribe modern methods. Thirdly, the results underline that a combination of methods are used throughout reproductive life, depending on the spouses' desire to have additional children and on men and women's individual attitudes toward birth control methods.     

‘Done to death by father or relatives’: Irish families and infanticide cases, 1922–1950

In February 1929 the Bishop of Ossory commented on the fact that in Ireland illegitimate infants were often ‘done to death by father or relatives’ (Irish Catholic, 16 February 1929). There were many instances where family members of unmarried women who gave birth were the sole defendants or co-defendants in infanticide cases in post-independent Ireland. Although illegitimate infants were ‘done to death’ by their fathers in a number of cases that were tried at the Central Criminal Court in Dublin between 1922 and 1950, this article will focus on cases where infants were murdered or suspected of having been murdered by relatives of the birth mother both in the Twenty-Six Counties and in Northern Ireland (Irish Catholic, 16 February 1929). For the purposes of this article I have referred to the murder of illegitimate infants as ‘infanticide’ even though there was no separate charge of infanticide in the Irish Free State until 1949. The English infanticide acts of 1922 and 1938 also applied to Northern Ireland. This article discusses the motives of the relatives of single mothers who played a part in the deaths of illegitimate infants. Unmarried motherhood was severely frowned upon in Ireland and the relatives of single pregnant women assisted their female kin in destroying the evidence of extra-marital conception in order to protect the family's honour and moral reputation in the wider community. The records of infanticide trials provide a great deal of insight into the ways in which mainly working-class families dealt with the strain of pregnancy outside wedlock in Ireland between 1922 and 1950.     

Electoral balancing,divided government and ‘midterm’ loss in German elections

This paper takes a fresh look at the midterm loss in German elections and argues that government type is a crucial determinant of midterm loss. Using panel regressions on a newly compiled data set covering all state elections during the period 1949–2004, we find that systematic midterm losses occur only when both chambers of the federal legislature (Bundestag and Bundesrat) are controlled by one party or a party coalition. Prior research has failed to discover this important regularity. These findings lend strong support to electoral balancing models while calling into doubt more traditional explanations of midterm loss.