Inland Towns Research Articles

The American Pacific—From the Old China Trade to the Present. By Arthur Power Dudden. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. xx, 314 pp. $27.95.

In 1784, the United States was scarcely more than a strip of seaports, inland towns, and farms along the Atlantic coast--and already the China trade had begun, as the Empress of China sailed into Canton. From this small beginning, an American empire in the Pacific grew until it engulfed Alaska, Hawaii, the Philippines, and hundreds of small islands. With World War II, U.S. power advanced further, into China, Japan, Korea, and Southeast Asia--where it was finally halted. Today American influence continues to ebb, as Japanese economic supremacy mounts and Manila forces the U.S. to dismantle its bases. In The American Pacific, Arthur Dudden provides a sweeping account of how the U.S. built (and lost) a vast empire in the ocean off our west coast. Opening with a fascinating account of the early China trade, Dudden provides a region-by-region history of the Pacific basin. What emerges is the story of how American commercial interests evolved into territorial ambitions, with the aquisitions of Alaska, Hawaii, and the Philippines, and finally into far-reaching efforts to project American power onto the shores of mainland Asia. Dudden's vivid narrative teems with the dynamic individuals who shaped events: William Seward, the Senator and Lincoln's Secretary of State who was driven by a vision of American dominion in the Pacific; Kamehameha I, the Hawaiian conqueror who tried to bring his kingdom into the modern world; William Howard Taft, who as the first governor-general of the Philippines built the institutions of American rule; Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the architect of Japan's attacks on Pearl Harbor and Midway Island; and of course General Douglas MacArthur, whose immensely influential career spanned supreme command of the pre-war Philippine army, the Allied occupation forces in Japan, and the U.N. forces in Korea. Dudden brings the story up to date, reviewing the war in Vietnam, the aftermath of Tiananmen Square, the triumph of the Pacific rim economies, and the tremendous impact of Asian immigration on American society. Since the days when Commodore Perry sailed his black ships to open feudal Japan, the histories of the American republic and the peoples of the Pacific have been closely intertwined. Dudden seamlessly blends developments in domestic politics, military campaigns, commercial trends, and international relations, providing the first comprehensive overview of this critically important region.

Urban bias influences on long-term California air temperature trends

An analysis of 80-year shelter level temperature records at 112 California sites has been carried out. Results show that sea surface temperature (SST) and urban heat island effects influence the magnitude of the observed warming trend in the overall data set. These effects, however, are masked by averaging all temperature records together. While a warming trend existed in the overall data set, areas with such trends generally corresponded to areas containing the state's major population centers. Warming trend magnitude also increased with county population size, and 20 small inland towns and rural areas actually showed cooling trends. SST trends over the last 40 years showed cooling in mid-ocean areas and an anomalous warming at coastal sites. The warming was associated with a decline in the normal frequency of cold water upwelling in the coastal area. SST warming was found to be highly correlated with the warming of shelter level temperatures at coastal land observation sites.

Risk reduction among injecting drug users: Changes in the sharing of injecting equipment and in condom use

In an investigation of risk behaviour among injecting drug users in the North-West of England, information was obtained concerning the sharing of injecting equipment, respondent's sexual partners and the use of condoms. Between six and nine months after the initial contact, 169 respondents (56%) were contacted again. The emphasis in the second phase of the project was on changes, if any, in risk behaviour that had occurred in the intervening period. Significant reductions were found in sharing, mostly in the more indiscriminate use of others' injecting equipment. No reduction was observed in sharing between injecting partners and little in sharing between close friends. The number of sexual partners had decreased and the use of condoms, although it increased among those involved in temporary relationships, remained low. Impediments to further progress in risk reduction are discussed.

Economic decline and the urban elite in eighteenth-century Dutch towns: a review essay

Dutch urban history has finally accorded the eighteenth century the attention it deserves in a number of recent publications. That century was characterized by the economic and political decline of the Dutch Republic generally, and certain towns in particular. The ‘Zuiderzee’ towns witnessed a dramatic fall in population, reflecting their economic decline, and in the southern part of the province of Holland urban life also stagnated. In contrast to the ports, inland towns derived status in the urban hierarchy from their industrial interests, but due to foreign competition in the eighteenth century, they too declined; most notably, the cloth industry of Leiden, the clay pipe industry of Gouda, and the breweries and potteries of Delft each lost the leading position established in the seventeenth century. Leiden was the largest of the towns with more than 70,000 inhabitants in the last quarter of the seventeenth century, and after Amsterdam, was the most populous town of the Republic. Leiden however could not maintain that position, and lost almost 50 per cent of its inhabitants during the first half of the eighteenth century, declining further to under 30,000 residents by 1800. Gouda numbered about 20,000 in 1732, but declined to 12,000 in 1795; Hoorn with 12,000 inhabitants diminished to only 9,500 in 1795 and the population of Delft, too, fell from around 24,000 in 1680 to 14,000 in 1795.

Environmental considerations for ocean outfalls and land-based treatment plants

When planning for the treatment and disposal of domestic wastes, coastal communities have a number of options. Like inland towns, they may utilize full treatment allied with traditional methods of disposing of the treated liquid and solid end products. At the other extreme, it would be possible to consider discharge of untreated wastes directly to the ocean through a submerged outfall. As a compromise, some combination might be used with the final design incorporating a degree of on-land treatment together with a submerged outfall.In this paper, the environmental problems and benefits of discharging domestic wastes through a submerged ocean outfall after minimal on-land treatment are compared with those of a totally land-based treatment plant. Water-quality standards attainable by both systems are enumerated, and other environmental problems are taken into account. Consideration is also given to biological, chemical, and bacterial effects; and aspects of aesthetics and health are discussed. Financial and economic viewpoints merit considerable discussion but are generally outside the scope of this paper and are mentioned only briefly. Regulations governing discharges in Canada, the United States, and Europe are discussed and considered in light of the evidence presented. Key words: outfall, dilution, pollution, treatment, sewage.

The States General and the strategic regulation of the Dutch river trade, 1621-1636

Few aspects of the Dutch economic miracle of the seventeenth century were more fundamental to Dutch prosperity or more distinctive to the country than the Republic's flourishing river trade both internally and with the neighbouring Spanish Netherlands and north-west Germany. The Dutch Republic, Europe's leading entrepot for foodstuffs, notably Baltic grain, fish and herring, salt, wines, sugar, spices and dairy products, possessed a major market for these and other provisions in the densely populated, relatively highly urbanised and industrial belt of territory girdling the United Provinces to the south and southeast. So substantial indeed was this transfer of foodstuffs along the inland waterways of the Low Countries and Westphalia, that from an early stage in the Dutch revolt against Spain, the binnenstromen came to be seen as a formidable strategic instrument. During the years 1621-1636, the States General repeatedly closed the waterways for limited periods, in most cases, but not all, only to the passage of foodstuffs and certain materials beyond Dutch territory. The purpose of engaging in such action was in the main strategic, particularly that of inconveniencing as far as possible one or more Spanish or Imperial armies in the field. Due to the complex, decentralised character of the Dutch political system, however, it often proved difficult to implement these temporary blockades in a consistent manner. Especially revealing about Dutch political life at the time is the way conflicting economic interests within the Republic were able at different times to influence both the form and duration of these blockades. Undoubtedly, the major tension in this respect was between the interests of the inland towns on the one hand and those of the maritime towns of Holland and Zeeland on the other. The history of Dutch regulation of the river traffic bef ore 1609, admirably described by J. H. Kernkamp, shows that the practice then took several forms, that its effects varied greatly in different parts of the Republic and that on

The Smacksmen of the North Sea

The modern history of British deep-sea fishing begins with the railway expansion of the mid-nineteenth century. Rapid transport and the increasing use of ice as a preservative made it possible for fresh sea fish to enter the diets of the inhabitants of inland towns. Fresh sea fish was regarded as almost a luxury food before the railway age, yet by the third quarter of the nineteenth century, it had become a major protein source for the working classes of the industrial towns, and the fried-fish shop had become a working-class institution. The sea-fishing industry underwent a vast market-induced expansion. The census of 1841 enumerated only 24,000 males as being employed in fishing. By 1881 there were 58,000. If the inland consumer ever gave thought to the fishermen who supplied his table, he probably conjured up a picture of a weather-beaten village fisherman going daily to the fishing grounds to return in the evening to his waiting wife and children, bringing the silver harvest of the sea. While he had been at sea his family had busied themselves baiting lines, making and mending nets, and, in the case of the fish wives, performing their traditional function of selling the catch. Such a picture may have been broadly true of the fishing villages of Scotland, Cornwall, Northumberland or the South coast, but a feature of the second half of the nineteenth century was the creation of a new kind of fisherman who crewed the sailing trawlers of the North Sea. The expansion of the market has coincided with the discovery of the rich beds of the North Sea, and to such an extent did the North Sea trawling ports come to dominate the fishing industry that, by the beginning of the twentieth century, Hull and Grimsby were together receiving as much fish as all the remaining ports of England and Wales put together. Those who toiled on the grey North Sea were known as the “smacksmen”, and it is the extreme nature of their occupation which is the subject of this study.

Hadramaut, Oman, Dhufar: the experience of revolution

When the ill-fated Federation of South Arabia came into being on January 1, 1963, it did not include among its member states the Hadramaut and the Mahra country to the east. It was not difficult to see the reasons for their exclusion. The Mahra territory, nominally under the rule of the sultan of Qishn and Socotra, was the wildest and most inaccessible corner of the eastern Aden Protectorate. Any effective display of authority there by the sultan or the protecting power was confined to the few villages along the coast. Inland a kind of formalized anarchy reigned among the tribal nomads and cultivators. The Hadramaut was a rather different case. Although the land was itself forbidding its very name means 'death is present' the energies and enterprise of its inhabitants had made it relatively prosperous, at least by the standards of southern Arabia. The coastal towns, the chief of which were Mukalla and Shihr, had been the centres of a wideranging maritime commerce, while in the interior, beyond thejol, the broken and desolate plateau which rose abruptly behind the coastal plain and stretched inland for a hundred miles, the fertile regions of the Wadi Hadramaut supported a thriving agriculture and a number of imposing towns, of which Shibam, Saiyun and Tarim were the best known. The comparative prosperity of the Hadramaut, however, did not derive primarily from its native economy but from the wealth accumulated overseas by the large colonies of emigre Hadramis, especially in India, the Philippines, Malaya and the East Indies. The constant intercourse they kept up with their homeland, no less than the steady flow of remittances they sent to it, was in large measure responsible for the country's progress before the Second World War; for this intercourse was the means by which innovations and improvements in agriculture, commerce and transport were introduced into the Hadramaut. What the Hadramis, resident and emigre alike, could not do, however, was to put an end to the constant feuding among the tribes, which all too often impeded or stultified the country's development. Sovereignty over the Hadramaut was exercised by the Qu'aiti sultan of Shihr and Mukalla, whose territory extended for some 200 miles along the coast and another 150 miles inland, to Shibam and its related towns and settlements in the Wadi Hadramaut; and by the Kathiri sultan of Saiyun and Tarim, whose lands formed an enclave athwart the Wadi Hadramaut with no access to the sea. Neither sultan's writ, however, ran much beyond the environs of the coastal and inland towns. Elsewhere the tribesmen, and especially those across whose diyar (ranges) the routes to the coast ran, acknowledged no authority but that of their own shaikhs and the more influential saiyids (or sada), the putative descendants of the Prophet, who were the wealthiest and most prominent class in Hadrami society. It was the great achievement of Harold Ingrams, who first visited the Hadramaut as a political officer in 1934 and three years later was appointed resident adviser at Mukalla, to bring the contentious tribes to conclude a truce among themselves in 1937, and by so doing to reinforce the authority of the Qu'aiti and Kathiri sultans. Ingrams's own account of his time in the Hadramaut is contained in his well-known Arabia and the Isles, one of the finest books on Arabia ever written. His widow, Doreen Ingrams, added her account of their

The Purpose and Organisation of the Alimenta

The opening of Trajan's reign saw the propagation in Italy of a system of government alimenta or subsistence payments, which had perhaps been begun by his predecessor, Nerva. Their immediate purpose was clearly the support of children in the small inland towns of Italy at which units of the scheme were mainly concentrated. Male recipients of the alimentary dole were given a cash payment of HS16 per month; girls received HS12 per month, the amounts given to illegitimate children being somewhat lower for both sexes. Hadrian laid down that boys who benefited were to be given support until the age of 18, and girls until 14; under Trajan, the ages at which support ceased had presumably been lower. The scheme was financed by grants from the fiscus which were placed with landowners in the districts in which children were to be supported. In general, each landowner who took part in the loans received a sum amounting to about 8% of the stated value of his land, and had to pay to the city interest of 5% per year, which formed the income from which the children were supported.

Nairobi, Master Plan for a Colonial Capital

NAIROBI started in 1896 as a transport depot on a site that was none too favourable except for the railway which reached it three years later from the coast. Since then it has grown rapidly but largely without a plan, and now, with more than 100,000 inhabitants, is one of the largest inland towns of tropical Africa. The population is mixed, with Bantu Negroes in the majority ; next in number Indians, and fewest, but in a dominating capacity, Europeans. At an altitude of 3,600 feet it has a climate suitable for Europeans and its centrality marks it out as the eventual capital of all European-held East Africa. At its present rate of growth it should reach nearly 300,000, which the authors think will be a desirable size about 1975, that is to say, if the serious problem of an adequate water supply can be solved. The rapid rise called for the planning and regulating of the town growth, and the present volume is the outcome of a careful study of the site and the functions of the town both at present and in the years to come. It was prepared at the instigation of the Municipal Council of Nairobi by an architect, a civil engineer and a sociologist. The inclusion of the last in the team was a recognition that problems of race, caste and religion as well as purely material considerations had to be faced. The report not merely plans Nairobi for many years to come ; it is also a discussion of the problems involved by Europe‘s introduction of the town and all it involves to the agricultural and pastoral peoples of tropical Africa.

The Distribution of Cimex lectularius in Towns in England and Wales

A brief historical account of Cimex lectularius in England is followed by an analysis of numerical data regarding infestation in twenty-three towns in England and Wales. The data indicate that in the majority of cases the degree of infestation increases along with the order of magnitude of the town ; one or two exceptional cases are discussed. Comparison of the figures for inland towns and seaports suggests, though more data are desirable, that a low degree of infestation is common in the former whereas the majority of the latter show a moderate or heavy infestation.

The Ontario Hydro-Electric Power Commission

The development of a form of collective management of hydro power in Ontario must be viewed as a part of the National Policy; Ontario's own positive part; her peculiar sector of the line wherein she attempts through collective action to further the use of her major and almost sole source of power in order to ensure a stable industrialism and a healthy urban life. This development was begun by the municipalities and the government of Ontario in the first quarter of the present century when the federal government was pursuing the main lines of the National Policy—constructing railways, subsidizing the rails of private corporations, providing tariff protection or bonuses to manufacturers.At the outset the drive for collective action in providing power came from the same class which supported the National Policy of the federal government; viz., the small manufacturers and traders in Toronto and those congregated in the Boards of Trade or represented in the Municipal Councils of Western Ontario. The inland towns were specially interested in power because they paid higher prices for coal than those on the lakes. But all the major municipalities soon became concerned in the collective action, and their initial activity determined in part certain salient features of the Ontario hydro as an administrative system. At first it was assumed, as is reflected in the Ross Act of 1903, that the enterprise might be entirely municipal; an organization whereby any group of municipalities through a Commission, without the financial aid of the government, might generate, transmit, and distribute electrical energy, meeting the cost through the issue of bonds secured by a mortgage on the works. But serious difficulties arose, and the overwhelming advantages of obtaining the financial support of the provincial government led to the scrapping of the scheme. A collective experiment designed to affect greatly the whole economy of Ontario obviously required the backing of provincial credit and provincial supervision. Hence the statute of 1906 which laid the legal foundation for the Ontario Hydro-Electric System.

A Delta in Miniature—Twenty-Seven Years’ Work

Introductory .—The rate of sedimentary accumulation has in all cases that I know of been calculated from the amount of sediment held in suspension in river-water and the mean annual discharge of the river. It is true, history has furnished examples of towns that have once been sea-ports becoming inland towns through the extension of river-deltas; but the information has not been sufficient or accurate enough to found an estimate of the rate denudation has proceeded at in the river-basins in question. The Rake-Brook Delta .—In June 1883 Mr. Joseph Parry, C.E., who has charge of the Rivington Waterworks supplying Liverpool, called my attention to the great amount of deposit that had taken place in the Rake reservoir since 1856, the year it was filled. On visiting the locality in his company, I found that where the two forks of the Rake Brook joined the reservoir, a corner of the reservoir was cut off by the public road from Bolton to Withnell, the communication being by a culvert, stated to be 8 feet high under the road, but then nearly silted up with deposit. The following plan will explain my meaning more fully. The whole corner of the reservoir on the south side of the road, at A on plan (fig. 1), was filled to considerably above the level of the crown of the arch of the culvert (fig. 2) with a beautifully stratified deposit of peaty matter, gritty sand, gravel shingle and boulders, as shown in the

I. The Bakerian Lecture. —On the proofs of a gradual rising of the land certain parts of Sweden

It is now more than one hundred years since the Swedish naturalist Celsius expressed his opinion that the waters, not only of the Baltic, but of the whole Northern Ocean, were gradually sinking; and he represented their level as lowering at the rate of forty Swedish inches in a century. He observed that several rocks which not long ago were sunken reefs and dangerous to navigators, had become in his time above water; that the sea was constantly leaving dry new tracts of land along its borders; that ancient ports had become inland towns; and that old fishermen and seafaring people could testify that at a variety of places, both on the shores of the Baltic and the ocean, considerable changes had taken place within the time of their memory, in the form of the coast and depth of the sea. Lastly he appealed to marks which had been cut in the rocks before his time expressly to indicate the former level, and the waters were observed to have fallen below these marks. This notion of a change continually in progress in the relative level of land and sea was at first warmly controverted, and many facts were adduced to prove that there had not been a general fall of the waters even in the Baltic. It was supposed by many that there might have been some error in the observations, as the Baltic, though free from tides, is often raised for several days continuously two or three feet above its standard level by the melting of the snow, or by the prevalence of particular winds; and it was remarked that the altered form of the coast and the shallowing of the sea might be ascribed partly to new accessions of land at points where rivers entered, depositing sand and mud, and partly to the drifting of large blocks by ice, which are sometimes stranded and driven up on rocks and low islands so as to raise their height.