Transatlantic Economy Research Articles

Global Origins of Probabilism

In contrast to traditional historiography which, until recently, has generally explained the origin of probabilism based on works written in the European academic context, this article explores pragmatic works written mostly by —and for— experienced actors making practical use of their knowledge in fields such as trade, commerce and sacraments within the new global horizon of the Hispanic Monarchy. I propose a new, more global explanation of the progressive emergence of probabilism as a theological doctrine and method for the resolution of cases. Particular attention is granted to the use of probabilistic arguments in works of American missionary literature and writings of moral theology produced in the changing context of the central decades of the sixteenth century. This analysis allows us to understand their focus on evaluating probable alternatives in unfamiliar contexts and with unforeseen doubts that already existed in Vitoria’s ideas on economy and mission. As I show in this article, this emerging focus is a tendency that later Salamancan disciples such as the novohispano theologians Alonso de la Vera Cruz (1509-1584) and Tomás de Mercado (1523-1575) went on to radicalize by appealing to the need to follow merely probable opinions in a growing range of cases. Both of them adapted European moral and religious norms to a wide range of specifically early modern problems. The evaluation of the family or marriage customs of the indigenous American peoples and of frequent practices in the transatlantic economy such as money exchange and sale on credit were among the most discussed.

Rusty guns and buttery soldiers: unemployment and the domestic origins of defense spending

AbstractScholars and practitioners continue to debate transatlantic burden sharing, which has implications for broader questions of collective action and international organizations. Little research, however, has analyzed domestic and institutional drivers of burden-sharing behavior; even less has disaggregated defense spending to measure burden sharing more precisely. This paper enhances understanding of the relationship between national political economies and burden shifting, operationalizing burden shifting as the extent to which a country limits or decreases defense expenditures, while at the same time favoring personnel over equipment modernization and readiness in the composition of defense budgets. Why do countries choose to allocate defense resources to personnel, rather than equipment modernization? I find that governments slightly decrease top-line defense spending in response to unemployment while shifting much more substantial amounts within defense budgets from equipment expenditures into personnel. This research highlights the intimate connection between Europe’s economic fortunes, transatlantic security, and burden sharing in North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Union – of particular interest as a pandemic buffets the transatlantic economy. It also points policy analysts toward factors more amenable to political decisions than the structural variables generally associated with burden sharing, bridging significant gaps between defense economics, security studies, and comparative political economy.

Codes of Intimacy: Love, Chance, and Masculinity in Henry James's Confidence

Codes of IntimacyLove, Chance, and Masculinity in Henry James's Confidence Karin Hoepker (bio) Setting aside older quarrels over the boundaries of a naturalist canon, this essay argues for a more comprehensive understanding of post-Civil War literary production which traces lines of connection between realism, naturalism, and sentimental fiction. I read Henry James's Confidence (1879), a novel disregarded by critics for more than a century, as a complex text that programmatically investigates codes of intimacy and familiarity against the background of a transatlantic economy of risk, globalization, and uncertainty. As a story of male friendship and romance, jealousy, miscommunication, and a social experiment gone wrong, Confidence explores the late nineteenth-century semantics of love that paradoxically demands both serendipity and inevitable necessity. The novel's often overlooked sharp satirical humor dissects a psychosocial construct of masculine individualism which struggles to maintain a sense of agency within an emerging "age of capital" (Levy 189). Nancy Walker and Donna Campbell have long made convincing arguments for a reevaluation of literary production in the late nineteenth century that revises the lines of distinction drawn between realism, naturalism, and sentimental writing as both heavily gendered and sustaining a prejudice against literature as a marketable commodity. Along similar lines of traditional canonization and bias against the popular and sentimental, Henry James's critics have ignored Confidence as one of his lesser works. Written for profit, tailored to please the tastes of a broader readership, it has, almost by default, been deemed devoid of artistic value. I propose to suspend such categorization and focus on the cultural work of the novel instead. I am interested in what Confidence might tell us about the function of fiction in a late nineteenth-century socioeconomic paradigm of increased social complexity, functional differentiation, and [End Page 1] what kind of impact a pervading logic of market speculation has on contemporaneous codes of familiarity and intimacy. The social system of a capitalist market casts subject relationships in a new light; mutual assessments of value dominate and threaten to overwrite previous narratives of intimacy, familiarity, and ideational values of friendship with a transactional agenda. Speculative capitalism becomes part of the field of invisible forces to which the human subject is exposed and thus also forms one of the "insults" (as Freud had famously called them) to human self-perception and individualist fantasies of control, which naturalism eventually comes to highlight.1 Nineteenth-century literary production centrally engages in an exploration of coping mechanisms, in strategies of complexity reduction, and in efforts of managing the emerging threats of uncertainty and social change. Literary texts address the increasing sense of fragmentation of reality as it is individually and collectively experienced and, more specifically, respond to a crisis of knowledge production and masculinity.2 In this context, Henry James's Confidence engages with issues of masculinity within a broader field of complexity and uncertainty. The novel employs a seemingly conventional sentimental plotline of love and romance to reframe problems of subjectivity, intimacy, and knowledge production. To that end, Niklas Luhmann's discussion of love and trust in modern societies as increasingly differentiating socioeconomic systems provides a conceptual frame for a new reading of Confidence. Luhmann's reflections on the semantics of love help foreground the cultural work of James's text as a forerunner of "naturalist sentimentalism" (Sawaya 56); they highlight how Confidence uses an aesthetics of the sentimental to dismount narratives of individualism and autonomous agency and rejects simplistic ideas of causality and determination. Tapping into the rich resources of sentimental aesthetics and the novel of manners, James employs codes of intimacy at the core of romantic love to question predominant discourses of individualism that are an intricate part of novelistic writing of his time. Confidence targets capitalist fantasies of entrepreneurial individuals as well as realist narratives of individual agency and experience. It humorously exposes the latent sentimental economies of such narratives and the gendered and classist rhetoric that primarily serves the economically privileged figure of the male dilettante. As Confidence pairs romantic narrative and marriage plots with the specters of lost friendship and divorce, it highlights themes of speculation, uncertainty, and confidence as part of a broader engagement with systemic...

Monumental Discord: Savannah's Remembering (and Forgetting) of Its Enslaved

A primary port in the slave trade, the city of Savannah, Georgia, has but one public monument to slavery. As a text, therefore, Savannah's cityscape lacks a chapter on enslavement. The lone slavery monument's placement, content, and poetic inscription are the products of what was a bitter, decade-long fight over what to include and exclude, an editing process that activated competing interpretations about how and even whether to commemorate the city's participation in the trans-Atlantic slave economy. This article presents a case study on the ethics of remembering and how dominant authorities and marginalized groups, including Savannah's black community, negotiate even among themselves, for the social construction of local history, collective memory, and its visual representations.

Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous & Atlantic Slaveries in New France by Brett Rushforth

Reviewed by: Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous & Atlantic Slaveries in New France by Brett Rushforth Michael Hughes Brett Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous & Atlantic Slaveries in New France. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. 424pp. $29.95. Rushforth opens his monumental study on Atlantic systems of slavery with two tools that performed the same function. He shows us a set of metal shackles, the instrument used by Europeans to control African slaves, and a leather halter, an object perhaps less familiar. This leather halter, it turns out, was a tool used by indigenous warriors to restrain other Natives taken [End Page 129] during raids. Rushforth asserts that this halter “reminds us that slavery took many forms in the early modern Americas,” arguing that the African slave trade has claimed most scholarly attention (8). In fact, European colonies relied on the labor of indigenous slaves to establish footholds in North America. Rushforth notes that between two to four million indigenous peoples were enslaved in North and South America (9). This book focuses on this phenomenon in one specific context: New France between 1660 and 1760. Following on the work of Richard White, historians have viewed the Midwest in the French era, known as Pays d’en Haut or Upper Country, as a space in which the French and indigenous communities formed relationships based on adaptation and cooperation. Rushforth contends that historians have left slavery out of the equation. He asserts: “The slave trade grew from, and indeed offers a strong example of, these intercultural negotiations in the Pays d’en Haut” that were founded on a “shared commitment to violence” (11). The first two chapters explain the conceptual foundation of slavery for the French and indigenous societies. For Natives, slavery functioned as a “potent symbol” that was “designed to humiliate and control people considered less than fully human by their captors” as well as to exploit labor (8). Indigenous warriors captured slaves from their rivals to balance the taking of life through murder or warfare. Native captors either integrated their slaves into family structures through ritual adoption, in which case the slave replaced dead relatives, or slaves were ritually tortured and executed to exact justice for previous deaths. If allowed to live, indigenous slaves–largely women and children–filled the role and performed the labor of the deceased relatives whom they replaced, but these slaves inhabited a subordinate position in which their new communities could always offer them as gifts in diplomatic rituals. The French forced slaves to perform labor for their growing capitalistic, transatlantic economy. Rushforth argues that, in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, the French made a critical distinction between the act of enslavement and slave owning. The French accepted slavery as a legal institution according to the law of nations in which slaves were captured in “just wars”, opposed to the Aristotelian view that certain peoples were natural slaves. While the French disavowed responsibility for enslavement, they accepted the institution itself, which assumed plural forms that replicated the “baroque patchwork of distinct jurisdictions” that characterized France [End Page 130] (77). With colonies dotting the Atlantic, French slave owners adapted the institution to meet local circumstances. The book then explains tensions that arose as these two overarching systems became entangled with one another. The colonists of New France sought to build a slave society modeled on Caribbean plantations. The French were prevented from doing so, however, as slavery in New France was enmeshed in the alliance structure that connected the French Empire and indigenous nations upon whom the empire depended. Key events in the history of New France reveal this tension. The Great Peace of Montreal in 1701 signaled a critical moment when French administrators recognized that captive exchanges were central to the calumet ceremony that had spread throughout eastern Algonquian communities. Additionally, the Fox Wars in the eighteenth century emerged partly out of Algonquian attempts to control their relation with the French. Diplomacy failed as the Fox’s enemies fed the French a constant stream of Fox slaves, while the French refused to return the Fox slaves to their relations. Similarly, the Sioux killed La Verendrye’s son on an island in the Lake of the Woods...

"On a Wet Rock in the Atlantic": J. M. Synge and Ethnographies of the Irish Revival

"On a Wet Rock in the Atlantic":J. M. Synge and Ethnographies of the Irish Revival John Brannigan (bio) Dec. 1. I have been reading Herbert Spencer and my creed is now very simple. Humanity has evolved from the conditions of the world, and will return to the nothing it has come from. Each separate life is but a ripple on the waves,—a blade of grass on the roadside. For those who fail, there is no hope. They are like the dead leaves in autumn, blown here and there before their final dissolution. In my useless agony I am only hurtful to my fellows. Why should I endure it?1 John Synge's "Étude Morbide," written around 1899, takes the form of "an imaginary portrait," and thus does not pretend to provide autobiographical statements of any authority.2 There are shades here of the Bohemian student who had spent much of the 1890s in Germany, Italy, and France studying European culture, but within a few years Synge had established himself as the most gifted playwright of the Irish literary revival, before his early death from Hodgkin's disease in 1909. The author of Riders to the Sea (1904) and The Playboy of the Western World (1907), Synge's transformation was rooted in his immersion in the language and folklore of the West of Ireland, particularly the Aran Islands. However, in reflecting the impact of evolutionary debates about humanity and degeneration upon the sensibility of the artist, "Étude Morbide" provides some indications of how we might contextualize Synge's encounters with the primitive and the aboriginal on the Aran Islands in relation to his contemporaneous preoccupations with the legacies of Darwinism.3 Synge's choice of [End Page 329] metaphors for the figure of bare humanity are conventional—"a ripple on the waves … a blade of grass on the roadside"—yet distinctly apt given the propensity in his writings for the sea and the roadside as topographical markers of marginal modernity. Similarly, "those who fail" are likened, somewhat predictably, to "dead leaves in autumn, blown here and there before their final dissolution," an image resonant with W. B. Yeats's later reference to "those our civilization must reject," and only ameliorated by Synge's identification of himself with the doomed failures of humanity.4 The work to which Synge refers, Spencer's Principles of Psychology (published in 1855, four years prior to Darwin's The Origin of the Species), argues that "life attains to more and more perfect forms" through an evolutionary process in which the "unfit" fail to survive, and the "fit" progress more and more towards an ideal or archetype.5 It is a "creed" which the artist finds incontestable, but which engenders despondency. At least on a personal level, however, relief from this despondency lies at the margins of modernity: May 5. I am in the country at last—near the end of Finisterre. Since I came here my daily readings of the saints and Stoics have lost their interest, and I live simply and naturally as the peasants do. This ordeal I have passed through has left me without a trace of apprehension. My system saved me, yet when I look back on it now, it seems a childish escapade. I have my fiddle here and I make the peasants dance in the evenings. My skin shivers while I play to see that in spite of the agony of the world there are still men and women joyous enough to leap and skip with exultation. (Synge, "Étude Morbide," 32–33) As James Knapp argues, Synge's The Aran Islands (1907) depicts his encounters with the "primitivism" of the islanders in much the same terms, but without "the tone of weary decadence" notable in his characterization of the artist in Brittany.6 The narrative tone may be refined and clarified, yet the relationship between these cultures "on the edge" of modernity and evolutionary discourses of primitivism, degeneration, and civilization is substantially the same. When Synge turns to Brittany and Aran as sources of cultural renewal it is not as "wild places" beyond the reaches of modernity, but as liminal spaces in an increasingly powerful transatlantic economy, capable...

Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP): The Possible Impact on the European Union and North America

The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is projected high-standard and inclusive free trade agreement which is being conversed between the United States (US) and European Union (EU). Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership is a chain of trade negotiations operating between EU and US. The TTIP is mainly about decreasing the regulatory obstacles to trade to open up a way for bigger businesses such as environmental legislation, food safety, sovereign powers of the individual nations and also banking regulations. The US and EU are two of the most integrated countries when it comes to economy globally. It is as a result of their trade in services, investments and the high commercial presence in each other's financial prudence. These two regions support each other when it comes to the economy, and that's why they are good trading partners in products and services. The EU and U.S trade and investment partnership which is sometimes referred to as transatlantic economy has a significant global relationship and creates a mutually beneficial understanding between the two states (Hoekman and Kostecki, 2009). The TTIP is one of the largest trade and investment partnership in the world and also the most significant because of its absolute size. It has many for example the European Union has 28 member states which include: Bulgaria, Cyprus, Belgium, Austria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Germany, Denmark, Finland. Greece, Ireland, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Slovenia, Lithuania, Romania, Spain, Latvia, Sweden, Portugal and United Kingdom are also part of the partnership. The initial negotiations on TTIP which was to become the first largest bilateral free trade and investment partnership agreement were earlier supported by a paramount and independent study of the Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR). The study by CEPR was called Reduction of the Transatlantic Barriers to Trade and investment. The negotiations were mainly to provide independent advice to the two negotiators based on the additional research. Despite, TTIP being one of the largest trade and investment partnership, it has created both negative and positive impacts on the two states. There are benefits t being enjoyed by the member states such as job creation and home growth. The EU depends on the US exports; they can get investments from the US and also import the goods and services they require (Khanna, Palepu, and Sinha, 2005). Other positive impacts of the TTIP includes; upholding and promoting human rights, governing in a transparent manner that can hold to account individuals in authority and also has markets that can be open to free and reasonable competition and is well-regulated market areas. TTIP also protects the people and the planet through their international rules. For example, the rules look at everyone's health, their condition at workplaces, the endangered species around them and the entire environment. There are also challenges that have come out from TTIP in the field of politics and economics, poor labor standards, workers' rights and security of their workplaces, democracy, and state authority. Foreign shareholder protection, public health and the environment as a whole, health care, consumer safety and food security, climate change and environment protection, banking regulation and privacy and many others. Some competitors challenge the TTIP on slowness in services than in goods leading to difficulty in opening markets in service areas.

Articles and Publications

Articles and Publications Christopher Densmore and Barbara Addison Mysticism and Reform, 1400–1750, edited by Sara S. Poor and Nigel Smith (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015) includes a chapter by Genelle C. Gertz, “Quaker Mysticism as the Return of the Medieval Repressed: English Women Prophets Before and After the Reformation.” Kristianna Polder, Matrimony in the True Church: the Seventeenth-Century Quaker Marriage Approbation Discipline (Burlington: Ashgate, 2015) examines marriage among English Friends, with particular attention to the marriage of George Fox and Margaret Fell. Elizabeth Bouldin, Women Prophets and Radical Protestantism in the British Atlantic World, 1640–1730 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015) includes a chapter, “Female Prophecy, Election, and the Transatlantic Quaker Community” and other references to Quakers. Other studies of Quaker religious thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries include: Jonathan Warren, “‘Out of Whose Hive the Quakers Swarm’d’: Polemics and the Justification of Infant Baptism in the Early Restoration,” Perichoresis, 13:1 (June 2015) 97–113; Carol Dale Spencer, “James Nayler and Jacob Boehme’s The Way to Christ,” Quaker Religious Thought, No. 125 (Oct. 2015), 43–56; Jon R. Kershner, “Mysticism and Revelation in John Woolman’s Theology,” Quaker Religious Thought, No. 125 (Oct. 2015), 34–42; and Judith Roads, The Distinctiveness of Quaker Prose, 1650–1699: a Corpus-Based Enquiry (Thesis (Ph.D.), University of Birmingham, 2015). Works on early Quakerism with an American context include: Natalie Spar, “The Politics of the Pure Language in Seventeenth-Century Quakerism: Speech, Silence, and the Founding of Pennsylvania,” Early American Studies 13.3 (Summer 2015), 692–713; Andrew R. Murphy, “The Emergence of William Penn, 1668–1671,” Journal of Church & State, 57:2 (Spring 2015), 333–359; and Heather E. Barry, “Naked Quakers Who Were Not So Naked: Seventeenth-Century Quaker Women in the Massachusetts Bay Colony,” Historical Journal of Massachusetts, 43.2 (Summer 2015) 116–135. Two recent studies examine the meaning of travel among seventeenth and eighteenth century Friends. Hillary Hinds, “Going Nowhere: the Stranger and the Pilgrim in the Journal of George Fox,” Quaker Studies 20:1 (Sept. 2015), 84–102, looks at the place of the journey, the rhetoric of movement and the figure of the stranger in the writings and behavior of early Friends. Jon R. Kershner, “‘A More Lively Feeling’: the Correspondence and Integration of Mystical and [End Page 70] Spatial Dynamics in John Woolman’s Travels,” Quaker Studies 20:1 (Sept. 2015), 103–116, examines the impact of his travels on his social and religious convictions. Tony Seaton, “Travel and Touring in England by Elite Quaker, Industrial Families in The Long Nineteenth Century: the Journeys of Mary-Anne Schimmelpenninck (née Galton) of Birmingham (1778–1856),” Quaker Studies 20:1 (Sept. 2015), 117–144, considers the role of tourism in promoting connections among British Quakers in the nineteenth century. A related work is by Jordan Landes, London Quakers in the Trans-Atlantic World: the Creation of an Early Modern Community (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire [UK]: New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Two studies examine material culture among American Quakers: Michael Lawrence Young, The Style of Quaker Consumption in British Colonial New Jersey: the Link Between Religious Beliefs and Values and the Archaeological Record of the Society of Friends (Thesis (Ph.D.), School of Archaeology and Ancient History, 2015); and Neil Larson, “The Architecture of Quaker Meeting Houses in Dutchess County,” Hudson River Valley Review 31.2 (Spring 2015), 62–87. Quakers and Their Allies in the Abolitionist Cause, 1754–1808, edited with an introduction by Maurice Jackson and Susan Kozel (Abingdon, Oxon. [UK]; New York: Routledge, 2015) contains a wealth of chapters by leading scholars: Gary B. Nash, “Warner Mifflin (1745–98): The Remarkable Life of an Unflinching Abolitionist”; Geoffrey Plank, “Sarah Woolman and the Anti-Slavery Family”; Julie Winch, “Friends, Family and Freedom in Colonial Philadelphia: A Black Slave-Owner Settles Her Accounts”; Maurice Jackson, ‘What Shall Be Done with the Negroes?’: Anthony Benezet’s Legacy: Then and Now”; Richard C. Allen, “Samuel Meredith (1741–1817): American Patriot and Welsh Philanthropist”; Jon R. Kershner, “‘Come Out of Babylon, My People’: John Wool-man’s (1720–72) Anti-Slavery Theology and the Transatlantic Economy”; Julie L...

Non-tariff barriers, integration and the transatlantic economy

We examine the potential impact of TTIP through trade-cost reductions, applying a mix of econometric and computational methods to develop estimates of the benefits (and costs) for the EU, United States, and third countries. Econometric results point to an approximate 80% growth in bilateral trade with an ambitious trade agreement. However, at the same time, computable general equilibrium (CGE) estimates highlight distributional impacts across countries and factors not evident from econometrics alone. Translated through our CGE framework, while bilateral trade increases roughly 80%, there is a fall of about 2.5% in trade with the rest of the world in our central case. The estimated gains in annual consumption range between 1% and 2.25% for the United States and EU, respectively. A purely discriminatory agreement would harm most countries outside the agreement, while the direction of third-country effects hinges critically on whether NTB reductions end up being discriminatory or not. Within the United States and EU, while labour gains across skill categories, the impact on farmers is mixed.

Refracting African and Black diaspora through the Nordic region

This introductory essay places the contributions to this special number in a larger context of Nordic debates and research on African and Black diaspora. In particular this essay presents a critical discussion of the Nordic region as a specific kind of geopolitical categorization and branding which allows certain kinds of stories to be told as well as erased and silenced. Rather than ‘case studies’, the articles in this special number should be seen as interventions which complicate and challenge the hegemonic branding of the Nordic region that have posited colonialism, and engagement in the trans-Atlantic slave economy and racist categorizations in particular, as an external, continental European problem and legacy.

Leveling the International Playing Field with the Marketplace Fairness Act

Quill v. North Dakota unbalanced the American retail market with its preference for out-of-state over in-state sellers. The preference under Quill is that sellers without physical presence in a state cannot be compelled to collect the sales tax. If the buyer does not voluntarily remit the complementary use tax, the purchase is effectively tax-free. As a result, Quill is seen as facilitating tax avoidance and driving business to sellers who have no in-state nexus, notably e-businesses. Revenue losses are estimated in excess of $10 billion per year. The reach of the Quill decision is international. Preferred sellers can reside just as easily in another country as they can in another State. The international dimension of the Quill decision means that legislative efforts to correct Quill’s preference for out-of-state sellers, like the Marketplace Fairness Act (MFA), also have international implications. This paper provides a rough analytical and quantitative measure of the impact of the MFA on the largest block of foreign businesses selling into the US, businesses selling from the EU.* Analytically, the MFA offers a compliance regime similar to that advanced by the EU Commission for collecting VAT on difficult cross-border transactions. This administrative replication allows outcomes to be compared. Quantitative measures can be extrapolated from trade statistics, and will allow some rough estimate of where the MFA will have its greatest international impact. The EU and the US Sates are looking at much the same problem when they endeavor to have remote sellers collect and remit destination-based consumption taxes. Both systems recognize that simply having a law in place requiring collection is not sufficient. Both systems have adopted one-stop-shops (OSS) and compliance simplifications to induce or persuade remote sellers to comply. The EU’s preference for a government-centric OSS and the US preference for OSSs that involve third-parties and certified software may have very different success profiles. This is an important assessment that is yet to come, but it suggests that the US may want to borrow a solution from the EU, or the EU may want to borrow a solution from the US States. Both sides need to be open to the possibility.* The transatlantic economy is the largest and wealthiest market in the world, accounting for over 54% of world GDP in terms of value and 40% in terms of purchasing power. See: Daniel S. Hamilton & Joseph P. Quinlan, The Transatlantic Economy 2011 – Annual Survey of Jobs, Trade and Investment between the United States and Europe, Center for Transatlantic Relations, Johns Hopkins University, Paul H. Nitz School of Advanced International Studies.

Spatial Structure and Climatic Adaptation in African Maize Revealed by Surveying SNP Diversity in Relation to Global Breeding and Landrace Panels

BackgroundClimate change threatens maize productivity in sub-Saharan Africa. To ensure food security, access to locally adapted genetic resources and varieties is an important adaptation measure. Most of the maize grown in Africa is a genetic mix of varieties introduced at different historic times following the birth of the trans-Atlantic economy, and knowledge about geographic structure and local adaptations is limited.MethodologyA panel of 48 accessions of maize representing various introduction routes and sources of historic and recent germplasm introductions in Africa was genotyped with the MaizeSNP50 array. Spatial genetic structure and genetic relationships in the African panel were analysed separately and in the context of a panel of 265 inbred lines representing global breeding material (based on 26,900 SNPs) and a panel of 1127 landraces from the Americas (270 SNPs). Environmental association analysis was used to detect SNPs associated with three climatic variables based on the full 43,963 SNP dataset.ConclusionsThe genetic structure is consistent between subsets of the data and the markers are well suited for resolving relationships and admixture among the accessions. The African accessions are structured in three clusters reflecting historical and current patterns of gene flow from the New World and within Africa. The Sahelian cluster reflects original introductions of Meso-American landraces via Europe and a modern introduction of temperate breeding material. The Western cluster reflects introduction of Coastal Brazilian landraces, as well as a Northeast-West spread of maize through Arabic trade routes across the continent. The Eastern cluster most strongly reflects gene flow from modern introduced tropical varieties. Controlling for population history in a linear model, we identify 79 SNPs associated with maximum temperature during the growing season. The associations located in genes of known importance for abiotic stress tolerance are interesting candidates for local adaptations.

Crying Wolf Again? The Decline of Western Economic Influence after the Great Recession

Since the turn of the millennium, scholars and pundits have been musing over the decline of the West. The disappointing US military invasions in Afghanistan and Iraq, together with the subprime mortgage crisis, seem to be evidence of an abrupt end to America's ‘unipolar’ moment. In Europe, the sovereign debt crisis has amplified Europe's long-term structural economic problems and laid bare the fragile institutional foundation on which the Economic and Monetary Union was built. At the same time, the BRICs and other emerging economies have been growing at unprecedented rates. Those same analysts see a ‘decoupling’ in the world economy: the developing economies pulling the world out of recession, while the advanced industrial economies are unable to solve their domestic difficulties. So to them, the events of the past five years signify the beginning of the end of Western influence, eventually leading to a more complete rebalancing of the world economy's current ‘Western’ system of governance. This article argues instead that the West still has a significant edge when it comes to most critical factors that determine long-term economic growth potential, including technology, innovative capacity, research and development, investment climate and education. Furthermore, the transatlantic economy is less vulnerable than the rest of the world to outside economic shocks and might eventually prove more capable of reform than many expect. The current malaise in the transatlantic community might therefore prove once again to be more cyclical than structural. Relying on linear projections, many are ‘crying wolf’ again, too loud and too soon.

‘Even the Conservatives would be socialists’: British Labour, American Democrats and the postwar transatlantic political economy

This article analyses the impact of the pivotal British Labour victory of 1945 within the larger continuum of reform over market and property relations in the postwar transatlantic political economy of the United States and Great Britain. Despite the seeming divergence of the American and British political economies after 1945 – one under the rubric of the regulatory reforms of the liberal Democratic party (1933–53), the other under the nationalizing reforms of the socialist Labour party (1945–51), respectively – the two nations, I argue, progressed in the long term along complementary stages of development conditioned by their own historical circumstances. These included not only the impact of the Depression and World War II on each society, but also the distinctive legacy and timing of British and American social reforms throughout the twentieth century.

Butter, Milk, and a “Spare Ribb”: Women's Work and the Transatlantic Economic Transition in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts

Exploring the generally unappreciated connection between local economic behavior and the emergence of larger commercial endeavors in seventeenth-century Massachusetts, the article demonstrates, through a close analysis of contemporary account books, that “women's work” was a vital element in the colony's pivotal transition to a transatlantic economy.

Quaker aesthetics: reflections on a Quaker ethic in American design and consumption

The notion of a uniquely Quaker style in architecture, dress, and domestic interiors is a subject with which scholars have long grappled, since Quakers have traditionally held both an appreciation for high-quality workmanship and a distrust of ostentation. Early Quakers, or members of the Society of Friends, who held plainness or as a virtue, were also active consumers of fine material goods. Through an examination of some of the material possessions of Quaker families in America during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, the contributors to Quaker Aesthetics draw on the methods of art, social, religious, and public historians as well as folklorists to explore how Friends during this period reconciled their material lives with their belief in the value of simplicity. In early America, Quakers dominated the political and social landscape of the Delaware Valley, and, because this region held a position of political and economic strength, the Quakers were tightly connected to the transatlantic economy. Given this vantage, they had easy access to the latest trends in fashion and business. Detailing how Quakers have manufactured, bought, and used such goods as clothing, furniture, and buildings, the essays in Quaker Aesthetics reveal a much more complicated picture than that of a simple people with simple tastes. Instead, the authors show how, despite the high quality of their material lives, the Quakers in the past worked toward the spiritual simplicity they still cherish.

Government–Business Strategies in EU–US Economic Relations:

The increasingly complex character of the US–EU economic relationship is well understood. Within this relationship, trade politics is an important setting for the interaction of firms, states and civil society. Focusing on a highly significant transatlantic trade dispute relating to a US tax policy (called foreign sales corporations), the article explores the business–government interactions generated. We conclude that such cases illustrate how the integrated character of the transatlantic economy limits the tactical options for all policy players and produces patterns of interaction between public and private actors in which both can come to assume significant roles.

THE TRANS-PACIFIC ECONOMY: A NETWORK APPROACH TO SPATIAL STRUCTURE

Abstract The Asia-Pacific region is analysed as a trans-oceanic economy. Like the Trans-Atlantic economy it constitutes a sub-system of the world economy. Drawing on world systems theory its spatial structure could be defined in terms of core states and peripheral states. The use of nation states in the real world situation leads to categorization problems. An alternative approach is to revive network analysis. Rather than making value judgments about core and periphery an analysis of transport and communications networks is used to determine the proximity and intensity of real economic activity. This approach is illustrated in this paper using the frequency of inter-port container services.

Migration in a World Economy

Large scale migration to the U.S. emerges as a consequence of a significant presence of the U.S. in a limited number of countries, economic and/or politico-military. This would explain why in the past, emigration to the U.S. occured always from a limited number of countries in a very specific context, for example, the transatlantic economy of the 1980s. Secondly, the types of bridge-building we see in the case of those countries has contributed to a growing incorporation of women into the migration stream. A major policy implication is that U.S. immigration policy needs to recognize that certain U.S. activities abroad establish bridges to the U.S. and that U.S. immigration is one consequence. This would shift the « responsability » for immigration somewhat away from the individual migrant and onto the U.S. government and multinational corporations.

"And Don't Forget the Guinea Voyage": The Slave Trade of Aaron Lopez of Newport

R ECENT studies of the transatlantic economy in the third quarter of the eighteenth century have indicated that New England merchants played only a minor role in the slave trade to the English colonies. It has even been contended that the so-called triangular trade, of which the commerce in slaves was an important part, is in fact a myth invented by such nineteenth-century historians as George H. Moore and William B. Weeden.' While it is surely true that the notion of the triangular trade was exaggerated by these scholars, the current tendency to regard the trade as mythical overlooks the activities of a prominent Newport, Rhode Island, merchant, Aaron Lopez, who sent fourteen vessels to the slave coast between I76i and I774. These voyages are documented in detail in the Lopez commercial papers. They enable us to begin a more accurate appraisal of the extent and significance of New England's participation in the slave trade.2 Lopez, a Sephardic Jew, emigrated in I752 from Lisbon to Newport,