"Plantations in the political economy of colonial sugar production: Natal and Queensland, 1860-1914"

African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented 27 August, 1979Since 1650 the production of cane sugar for sale in international markets for domestic and industrial consumption has been dominated by the plantation as the unit of production. This form of production has been associated with many tropical agricultural crops in the Caribbean, Central America, Brazil and the Southern United States, but has always had a particularly close association with sugar. Such forms of production, which developed within the economic organization of the mercantalist empires of seventeenth century Europe; have traditionally been almost synonymous with the institution of slavery. (1) However, the freeing of slaves in all the plantation districts of the New World between 1834 and 1836 did not brine about an immediate end to this type of agricultural production. Indeed, the rapid growth of the international economy throughout much of the nineteenth century actually encouraged the maintenance of sugar plantations, and did much to facilitate their emergence in other parts of the world. Cuban sugar plantations, for example, did not reach their pre-eminent position in world markets until the use of slave labour had actually been rejected by the planters themselves. (2) Moreover, Natal and Queensland, areas with no traditional association with commercial sugar' production or slavery, developed a form of wage labour plantation for the production of augar after I860, which drew heavily upon the organizational experience of other sugar colonies

Engaging Schools in Cutting Edge Science: From the Educator’s Perspective

The field of scientific research, by definition, is constantly developing new techniques and adapting current thinking in order to address pertinent issues. With curriculum constraints and exam-based teaching, it is becoming increasingly challenging to engage young people in new ideas and methods, and thus facilitate them in becoming the scientists of the future. A new project developed though collaboration between the Cothill Educational Trust and The Natural History Museum aims to develop a deeper understanding of biodiversity science in pre-GCSE aged children, kindling a real excitement for the science subjects at school

Design-for-test structure to facilitate test vector application with low performance loss in non-test mode.

A switching based circuit is described which allows application of voltage test vectors to internal nodes of a chip without the problem of backdriving. The new circuit has low impact on the performance of an analogue circuit in terms of loss of bandwidth and allows simple application of analogue test voltages into internal nodes. The circuit described facilitates implementation of the forthcoming IEEE 1149.4 DfT philosophy [1]

The Power of Fiction: Reading Stories in Abnormal Psychology

We compared the instructional efficacy of a narrative text (i.e., a story) and an expository text (i.e., a textbook excerpt). Students enrolled in Abnormal Psychology classes read about the disorder, dissociative fugue from a story, a textbook, or both. The story contained literary elements that increased transportation into the story world. We predicted that this would facilitate memory encoding and improve subsequent test performance. Students who read the story achieved higher quiz scores and evidenced greater free recall about the disorder than those who read the textbook. They also reported greater transportation into the discourse. The combined reading conditions were more efficacious than either alone. The advantage of having read the story was evident up to 3 weeks later when students were retested. Our results suggest that, across text genre, the experience of being transported into discourse accounts for greater test performance over time

Working beyond the border? : a new research agenda for the Evaluation of Labour Standards in EU trade agreements

The European Union (EU) has approximately fifty bilateral trade agreements in place with partners across the world, and more than twenty more that are at various stages of the negotiating process. At the same time as they increase in number, these agreements also increase in scope. EU trade agreements now cover a wide range of regulatory measures, including ‘Trade and Sustainable Development’ chapters, which, among other things, contain obligations in relation to labour standards. These labour standards provisions follow a common model (with limited variations) and adopt an approach which has been described as ‘promotional’ rather than ‘conditional’. In the context of the broader debate about the purpose and efficacy of the labour and trade linkage, this article examines the possibilities and limitations of the EU's new provisions on labour standards. It draws attention to the limited research on the impact of existing provisions ‘on the ground’ with respect to different types of agreements, and why this is problematic. It then concludes with proposals for a research agenda that can fill this gap, involving a set of methodologies requiring greater concern for firm and country-level assessment of changes arising from the implementation of this new breed of EU bilateralism and directed to the question of whether EU labour standards can really work ‘beyond the border’

Governing labour standards through free trade agreements: limits of the European Union's trade and sustainable development chapters

The EU has established a new architecture of international labour standards governance within the Trade and Sustainable Development (TSD) chapters of its Free Trade Agreements (FTAs). To examine the operationalization of this framework, we draw upon 121 interviews undertaken with key informants in three FTAs signed with the Caribbean, South Korea and Moldova. We engage with wider debates over external governance and the projection of EU power by showing how operational failings, including a lack of legal and political prioritization of TSD chapters and shortcomings in the implementation of key provisions, have hindered the impact of the FTAs upon labour standards. We also identify significant limitations to the EU's ‘common formulation’ approach when applied to different trading partner contexts, alongside ambiguities about the underlying purpose of the trade–labour linkage. Reflection about the function and purpose of labour standards provisions in EU trade policy is therefore required