Illuminating Nineteenth-Century English Urban Midwifery: the register of a Coventry midwife

The three-volume register of a sworn midwife provides unique insights into midwifery practice in an English city in the second half of the nineteenth century. The register is a rare primary source, and contains 5029 entries, from July 1847 to October 1875. Considered alongside the limited sources discovered to date, this analysis casts light on our understandings of non-elite midwifery, and the wider context of women's work in the nineteenth century. The midwife's patterns of work, her relationships with clients and lying-in charities, and the impact of local economic circumstances on her practice are discussed. Despite her extensive practice, the official record of her occupation is meagre.     

Communing with Disaster: What We Can Learn from the Jusen and the Savings and Loan Crises

Now that the Japanese economic miracle has soured into the Japanese economic meltdown, scholars are confronted with a new challenge: instead of trying to penetrate the secret of Japan's successes, they must try to unravel the enigma of its misfortunes. Professors Curtis Milhaupt and Geoffrey Miller (1997) have performed a great service in documenting one of the most dramatic of those misfortunes – the collapse of the jusen companies. Professor Shinsaku Iwahara (1997) has also performed an equally valuable service by placing this event in the larger context of Japanese politics and society. But despite its record setting scale, the jusen problem was not unprecedented; Japan merely followed in the footsteps of its economic mentor, the United States, which experienced a very similar financial meltdown about a decade earlier. This commentary briefly describes that event – the U.S. savings and loan crisis – and then draws some tentative conclusions on the basis of a comparison of the two events.     

America,Britain, and Swaraj: Anglo-American Relations and Indian Independence, 1939–1945

In the years before and during the Second World War, the Roosevelt Administration played an important and often overlooked role in encouraging Britain's disengagement from the Indian subcontinent. Roosevelt's motivations in pressing for Indian independence were varied. They included a mix of principled opposition to colonialism, practical concern for the outcome of the war and pragmatic jockeying for influence with post-colonial nations when the war was won. Churchill's government was wary of being pushed by Washington to move more quickly to “quit India” than it thought prudent. U.S. policy and actions clearly influenced the direction of events toward independence, but U.S. caution as the war ground on led to disillusionment among nationalist leaders. This reaction would have consequences once swaraj was won and India came into its own, at a time when the Cold War was becoming the dominant factor in America's view of the world.     

National and local vulnerability to climate-related disasters in Latin America: the role of social asset-based adaptation

The Latin American region is particularly prone to climate-related natural hazards. However, this article argues that natural hazards are only partly to blame for the region's vulnerability to natural disasters with quantitative evidence suggesting instead that income per capita and inequality are main determinants of natural disaster mortality in Latin America. Locally, the region's poor are particularly susceptible to climate-related natural hazards. As a result of their limited access to capital, adaptation based on social assets constitutes an effective coping strategy. Evidence from Bolivia and Belize illustrates the importance of social assets in protecting the most vulnerable against natural disasters.     

A just soldier's dilemma: facing a war that does not meet jus ad bellum criteria

In our challenging times individuals in military services may find themselves in the position of being called to contribute to a war whose overall justice they personally find morally suspect, or about which they have moral qualms. The right course of action in this situation can be a serious dilemma. Applying the principle of double effect to this dilemma recognizes essential state responsibility for war, but does not discount the soldier's personal moral responsibilities or individual will. This novel application of the principle of double effect treats damage produced by participating in a questionable war as a side-effect of pursuing other—clearly justifiable—intentions. The just war tradition already uses the principle of double effect when weighing the permissibility of individuals' acts in war, such as choosing bombing targets. The proposal here is to evaluate the decision to contribute to the war effort at all. This adaptation of the classic just war principle of double effect can be used to justify some—but not all—individual participation when a war's state-level justification is suspect.     

Public choice and tort reform

The common law originally was thought to be immune to rent seeking. More recently, scholars have recognized that attorneys are engaged in exactly that activity. Rent seeking by the legal profession has greatly expanded the scope of US tort law, and generated efforts to reverse its expansion. Organized groups (attorneys, businesses and doctors) are active on both sides of the issue and the partisans have numerous tools available for advancing their agendas, such as litigating, lobbying for favorable rules and attempting to elect sympathetic legislators and judges. All of this creates an ideal setting for public choice analysis.     

Integrating Gender into Government Budgets: A New Perspective

A government's budget represents a statement of its priorities. During the past 25 years, the international community has recognized that gender equality is essential for sustainable economic growth and full social development, and it has called upon nations to use their budgets to promote genderequitable resource allocation and revenue generation. More than 60 countries have answered this call by implementing gender-responsive budgets at the national and subnational levels. However, gender-responsive budgeting is virtually unheard of among public finance scholars and U.S. public administration scholars and practitioners. Here we define gender-responsive budgeting, discuss the need for it, describe the lessons learned, and discuss its potential as a budget reform. We hope our commentary will bring gender-responsive budgeting into the mainstream of research in the U.S. public administration community and into the practice of government budgeting.