'Aid and Relief': l’assistenza UNRRA in Italia, 1944-1947

The method of the present study is to discuss, improve and apply methods from cartography on the basis of old maps and plans while using approaches of geography and history for the analysis of the selected place in spatial and temporal contexts. Old maps and plans of Liberec are thus a source of information for the characterisation of the state and spatial changes of the defined urban space in time. Result of the work is the implementation of case studies on the geographical concept of place in a particular topographical situation of the chosen urban space in Liberec. Lists of maps were made; historical and archive sources were taken into account, the methodology of using old maps and plans was discussed. These, along with inventory research, are the values which were added to by the work of the greater involvement of geoinformation technologies, especially for spatial, network and other analyses, including the use of remote sensing images. Graphic visualisation of data using GIS tools is also important. Old maps and plans (Liberec city) are integrating bearers of information about the area being studied, which becomes a place or group of places in the analysis conducted. Maps and plans of scales larger than 1:200 000 are classified as topographic maps. Topography is their explicit attribute. Another important attribute is ability to conserve the reality of specific places in time. By adding the study of archive and historical sources, it is possible to outline a concept of interdisciplinary approach to the geography of place in spatial and temporal contexts. The concept of the work can be divided into four thematic areas: - old maps and plans in the interdisciplinary geographic research of urban places described using old maps confronted and supplemented with information from historical materials and historical studies - GIS analysis - comparison and complementarity of three research approaches – reading maps, use of secondary historical source, GIS analyses

Science and Really Existing Socialism in Maoist China

Crude Oil the Forerunner of Internationalisation and ‘Grandparent’ of Diversity Management: The Nigerian Experience

Introduction More than a decade ago, the World Bank argued that “underlying the litany of Africa’s development problems is a crisis of governance.” Poor quality institutions, weak rule of law, an absence of accountability, tight controls over information, and high levels of corruption still characterize many African states today. Aid levels have been reduced in many parts of Africa during the past decade. Yet in many of the countries with poor governance records, aid continues to contribute a very high percentage of government budgets. This article explores the institutional impact of these high levels of aid and the way that large amounts of aid are delivered. There are many reasons why governance is poor in much of sub-Saharan Africa. Colonialism did little to develop strong, indigenously rooted institutions that could tackle the development demands of modern states. Economic crisis and unsustainable debt, civil wars, and political instability have all taken their toll over the past 2 decades and more. It is difficult to separate the impact of these problems from the possible impact of foreign aid, which is often high in countries that suffer from precisely these problems. Theory provides conflicting guidance here. On the one hand, aid can release governments from binding revenue constraints, enabling them to strengthen domestic institutions and pay higher salaries to civil servants. Aid can provide training and technical assistance to build legal systems and accounting offices. In many countries, aid personnel (sometimes expatriate) manage important government programs, and the infusion of resources and technical assistance can give an important boost to the efficiency and effectiveness of governance, if only in a partial sense. Yet despite these likely benefits, it is also possible that, continued over

Millions in Niger facing food shortages once again

Jesús Sanjurjo posits that the end of the slave trade to the Spanish empire was largely the result of “international political negotiations that excluded the Spanish authorities and ignored Spanish political actors”—an argument that echoes older, Anglocentric scholarship on the topic and fails to engage with the literature's recent focus on the role that the enslaved themselves played in pushing for abolition (p. 2). (White) Spanish anti–slave trade activists, he sustains, contributed only in terms of turning public sentiment against the slave trade. In so doing, they worked concurrently with the growth of liberalism in the Spanish empire, which Sanjurjo rightly points out looks different in the Spanish context. In Spanish liberalism, liberal political actors privileged preserving what was left of the empire, safeguarding the wealth of Cuba, and generally placating the Cuban elite. This argument about the ties between slavery and Spanish liberalism is intriguing, but it remains unclear whether the book's research, writing, and analysis do it justice.Chapter 1 treats the familiar early Spanish anti–slave trade activists: the statesman Agustín de Argüelles, law student Isidoro de Antillón, and expatriate journalist José Blanco White. With just a few allies, these men singlehandedly initiated public discussion about outlawing the slave trade and slavery itself in Spain—an essential aspect of the author's argument that they “contributed to building the public consensus” against the slave trade (p. 2). But strangely, Sanjurjo barely references—much less analyzes with any thoughtfulness—the body of work that they produced. This is a curious choice because their speeches and publications not only evince deep engagement with the broader abolitionist movements throughout the Atlantic world but also present uniquely Spanish arguments and proposals that merit attention.The next chapter outlines the British diplomatic pressure that resulted in the deeply flawed—and unenforced—Treaty of 1817, by which Madrid agreed to a plan to end the slave trade to the Spanish territories. Here, Sanjurjo references the related 1816 Council of the Indies report that recommended the abolition of the slave trade. He refers to it as “extraordinarily important”—even though it was a dead letter—but does so while attacking other scholars who have written on this topic for downplaying it, misinterpreting it, or failing to mention it altogether (p. 29). Unfortunately, such ruthless attacks against existing scholarship mar much of the book.Chapter 3 has some useful aspects, as it explains the “necessary evil” argument that Spanish elites forged in response to British abolitionist pressure. Sanjurjo shows how instead of attempting to directly counter British arguments about the immorality of the slave trade, proslavery Spanish and Spanish American elites argued that it was a “necessary evil” that would preserve the Cuban economy—and by extension, the economy of the entire empire. Its proponents, Francisco Arango y Parreño among them, framed British abolitionist pressure in terms of nationalistic discourse, suggesting that to be Spanish and Cuban would mean to push back against foreign interlopers who sought to harm Spanish interests under the guise of abolitionism.Chapter 4 examines Cuban historian and politician José Antonio Saco, who is sometimes considered as having contributed to antislavery sentiment. Sanjurjo rightly characterizes Saco as arguing against the slave trade not because he believed it was wrong but because he was convinced that the island's sugar industry and white population would be better off without it. But here again, when given an opportunity to execute original research with new archival sources that could have shed light on such important concepts, the author fails to do so, instead relying on just a few well-known published sources and secondary literature. Throughout the book, in fact, there is a notable lack of substantive engagement with archival sources in England, Spain, and Spanish America. The final chapter—the book is quite short, at only 123 pages of body text—outlines the rise of the Spanish Abolitionist Society in Madrid but strangely fails to engage with Christopher Schmidt-Nowara's groundbreaking work on the topic or the archives he used, instead delivering a basic outline of historical events largely based on secondary sources.The epilogue offers a thesis that frames antislavery and anti–slave trade thinking as “contradictory and complementary . . . Liberal and absolutist, progressive and conservative, egalitarian and racist” (p. 121). While in theory this gesture toward the confounding complexity of Spanish political sentiment regarding the slave trade is suggestive, the book is simply not up to the task of illustrating such historical nuance. It is hampered by an excessively combative approach to the existing literature and an impoverished understanding of the relevant archival documentation. Throughout, its organization is difficult to follow, and the argumentation is both scant and unclear. The book will be of interest to scholars who work on antislavery and abolition in the Spanish empire, but it brings little new to their table.

Perspectives on <i>The Soviet Union and the Horn of Africa during the Cold War</i>

The main purpose of this research was to analyze the impact the Chinese foreign direct investment (FDI), remittances, and foreign aid have had to human capital growth (HCG) and brain drain. The study data were collected from five African countries (Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, South Africa, and Morocco) from 2009 to 2018. Secondary sources were used in data collection, then autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) modeling was used in the analysis. Before modelling was done, co-integration tests and panel unit were applied. The results revealed that Chinese FDI, remittances, and foreign aid had a significant and positive impact on HCG in the long but not the short-run. Besides, remittances, Chinese FDI, and foreign aid demonstrated significant negative impacts on brain drain in the long term, not in the short term. This study makes important practical and theoretical contributions about the roles of Chinese FDI, remittances, and foreign aid in the reduction of brain drain and the growth of human capital.

This article explores the introduction of rice production in Fogera woreda mainly associated with the government initiative of ensuring food security for households at the beginning of the 1970s. The woreda has well-suited agro-ecology for the production of rice. Hence, this study attempts to investigate examine and assess the contribution of rice production to the income and food security of rural households in Fogera Woreda, South Gondar Zone. To achieve the objective, the researcher used a qualitative research method. The data was collected from primary and secondary sources. Primary sources were collected through key informant interviews and archival sources while secondary sources were obtained from relevant literature such as books, journals, articles, study reports, and theses. The study result shows that farmers in Fogera plain have benefited from rice production. The implication of rice production on the socio-economic life of society was seen since its introduction. Hence, rice production in Fogera is one of the most essential achievements of the society which changes the life of peasants incredibly well.

Purpose– This paper examines William Stetson Merrill, the compiler ofA Code for Classifiersand a Newberry Library employee (1889‐1930) in an attempt to glean lessons for modern information studies from an early librarian's career.Design/methodology/approach– Merrill's career at the Newberry Library and three editions of the code are briefly examined using historical, bibliographic, and conceptual methods. Primary and secondary sources in archives and libraries are summarized to provide insight into Merrill's attempts to develop or modify tools to solve the knowledge organization problems he faced. The concept of bricolage, developed by Levi‐Strauss to explain modalities of thinking, is applied to Merrill's career. Excerpts from his works and reminisces are used to explain Merrill as a bricoleur and highlight the characteristics of bricolage.Findings– Findings show that Merrill worked collaboratively to collocate and integrate a variety of ideas from a diverse group of librarians such as Cutter, Pettee, Poole, Kelley, Rudolph, and Fellows. Bliss and Ranganathan were aware of the code but the extent to which they were influenced by it remains to be explored. Although this is an anachronistic evaluation, Merrill serves as an example of the archetypal information scientist who improvises and integrates methods from bibliography, cataloging, classification, and indexing to solve problems of information retrieval and design usable information products and services for human consumption.Originality/value– Bricolage offers great potential to information practitioners and researchers today as we continue to try and find user‐centered solutions to the problems of digital information organization and services.

HISTORY TEACHERS have long had their students work with documents and taught them the difference between primary and secondary sources as well as other skills needed to interpret these correctly. At first there were problems books and printed collections of documents, nonwritten sources were added, and now there is a plethora of sources both verbal and non-verbal available on the internet. This paper will argue, however, that there is a special value to having students do handson work with original primary sources of all kinds in an archival collection. The use of archival material takes them into an environment differ-

This study aimed at identifying the most important factors that affect the production of manufacturing industry in Palestine by conducting a test on the impact of industrial exports, inflation, foreign direct investment, grants and foreign aid, as well as the production of manufacturing industry in Palestine. The descriptive-analytical methodology was used by relying on standard methods to study the factors affecting the production of the manufacturing industry in Palestine. Secondary sources were relied on to collect data by relying on a desk survey of literature related to the research topic as those sources included books, periodicals, published studies and reports that were issued by official authorities to collect data on the study variables. The study community has represented the establishments operating in the manufacturing industries sector in the Palestinian territories. The factors affecting the production of manufacturing industry in Palestine were studied by using the time series during for the period (1996-2018). It relied on modern methods in studying the factors affecting the production of manufacturing industry in Palestine and identifying their statistical characteristics through the use of time series analysis method and the joint integration of Johansson. The model of this study was also estimated through the ordinary Least Squares method (OLS). It concluded a set of important results that were represented in the presence of a positive moral effect of statistical significance for industrial exports on the Production of Manufacturing Industry in Palestine, which is related to the role these exports play in providing foreign currencies to the country and enabling investors in the manufacturing sector to achieve a steady capital expansion as a result to maximize the profitability rates associated with exporting. In addition to the presence of a negative impact with a significance for the rate of inflation in the Production of Manufacturing Industry in Palestine. finally, the results also showed that there was no statistically significant effect for both grants, foreign aid and investment Direct foreign production in the manufacturing industry in Palestine. The study recommended the necessity for the Palestinian National Authority to provide the necessary infrastructure to facilitate the work of the manufacturing sector to enhance its ability to expand production. This is can be done by focusing on establishing well-prepared border industrial zones. Besides, the establishment of industrial zones within the municipalities borders to gather the scattered factories within Residential neighborhoods in Palestine.

The aim of this article is to present the early history of Hyundai Heavy Industries, currently the world’s largest shipbuilder. The company was established by the prolific South Korean entrepreneur Chung Ju-Yung in the early 1970s. Due to limited experience in shipbuilding, the establishment relied heavily on foreign assistance. This article sheds new light on the crucial relationship between Chung and two British companies: the Newcastle-upon-Tyne-based consulting firm A&amp;P Appledore International Limited, and the Lower Clyde shipbuilders Scott Lithgow Limited, during the beginnings of large-scale South Korean shipbuilding. The article is based on a combination of British and South Korean archival sources, as well as secondary literature and the oral and written testimony of consultants and workers involved in the project.

The purpose of the article is to analyse the impact of COVID-19 on the agricultural supply chains and markets in Zimbabwe and subsequent effect on livelihoods. The research methodology that was applied is a systematic literature survey anchored on inductive research approach. This article is based on the systematic review of secondary data sources, such as journals, policy reports, as well as reports from national and international organizations. The review involved a predetermined and comprehensive approach of searching, analyzing and synthesizing extant literature on agricultural supply chains. In general, the pandemic has affected the whole supply chain from the food production systems and input supply, the storage and distribution, processing and packaging as well as the retail and marketing aspect. The research showed that the COVID-19 pandemic severely threatens an already critical food security situation arising mainly from the prevailing poor macroeconomic conditions and consecutive years of drought in Zimbabwe. This has led to a higher than previously anticipated food insecure population, especially in urban centers. Over 70% of the workers are self-employed and a vast majority operate in the informal sector. The informally employed represent a significant breadwinner constituency, whose dependents comprise vulnerable sections of the populace. The restrictions on mobility and the closure of borders meant immediate loss of employment and income. The study revisited the previous viruses such as Ebola to extrapolate though marginally, the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using secondary sources and the general agriculture supply chain to guide understanding, the findings show that unless measures are put in place to safeguard farmers especially smallholder activities in Zimbabwe, COVID-19 has the potential to reproduce the same catastrophic implications created by Ebola in West Africa countries where peasant food systems where shattered and livelihoods strategies maimed.

<i>The Sino-Soviet Alliance: An International History</i> by Austin Jersild