Gold and Greater Britain: Jevons, Trollope, and Settler Colonialism

The Australian gold rushes of the 1850s provide an exemplary test case for exploring the impact of Greater Britain—the settler colonial empire—on the Victorian novel and political economy. British gold diggers’ nomadism operated in seeming antithesis to the colonies’ explosive growth, which posed a conceptual challenge both to political economy’s stadial model of societal development and to liberal narratives of labor and land—narratives that underpinned concepts of individual character and civil society. Informed by colonial writing and the experience of gold fields, W. S. Jevons’s Theory of Political Economy (1871) and Anthony Trollope’s John Caldigate (1879) reimagine metropolitan space and subjectivity in settler-colonial terms, helping lay the ground for a deterritorialized, global British identity

Figures from the Past: Sargeson's Wandering Men and the Limits of Nationalism

Frank Sargeson's repositioning of Henry Lawson as a 'colonial' writer, away from the more familiar categories of nationalism and realism, offers a provocation for re-considering his own short fiction. In taking up that challenge, this essay diverges from recent attempts to trouble the periodization of writing from the 1930s and 40s: rather than arguing that the concerns of cultural nationalism were anticipated in the nineteenth-century, it will make the case that colonial literary forms and cultural formations persist in some of the most familiar works of that later period

The Victorian Colonial Romance with the Antipodes

Does New Zealand matter to the rest of the world? For various reasons the question has always seemed important here, a kind of hollow echo bouncing around national politics, economics and culture, and reflecting back most strongly from concrete measures of overseas recognition: a seat on the United Nations Security Council; an Oscar or a Booker Prize; a World Cup; a global milk auction. For scholars working on New Zealand studies, a version of this question is prompted by the rise of institutional incentives such as the Marsden Fund and the PBRF, which frame “research excellence” in large part in terms of global visibility. It’s a challenge, perhaps, of speaking to two audiences at the same time: a local readership familiar with a narrow but deep national archive, and an international readership who must be persuaded of its relevance to their more “mainstream” concerns. Yet the question can also be asked another way: Does the study of New Zealand have to be framed solely in national terms? Shaped for so long by the ethos and aesthetics of mid-twentieth century cultural nationalism, humanistic inquiry in New Zealand still tends to use the nation as its unquestioned unit of measurement

Morganeering, Or, The Triumph of the Trust: A Satirical Burlesque on the Worship of Wealth

I’ll begin with a confession: before taking on this review, I’d never even heard of Alexander Bickerton, let alone his only novel, Morganeering. In my defence, he doesn’t rate a mention in the Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature (he lies in the gap between “bibliography” and “Biggs, Bruce”), or even in Lawrence Jones’ encyclopaedic survey of the novel in the Oxford History of New Zealand Literature in English. As Lyman Tower Sargent explains in his thorough introduction, Bickerton was well known during his lifetime, albeit for other reasons than his fiction. As the inaugural professor of physics at Canterbury College, where he taught from 1874 to 1902, he numbered Ernest Rutherford and Ettie Rout among his pupils

The Victorian Colonial Romance with the Antipodes

Does New Zealand matter to the rest of the world? For various reasons the question has always seemed important here, a kind of hollow echo bouncing around national politics, economics and culture, and reflecting back most strongly from concrete measures of overseas recognition: a seat on the United Nations Security Council; an Oscar or a Booker Prize; a World Cup; a global milk auction. For scholars working on New Zealand studies, a version of this question is prompted by the rise of institutional incentives such as the Marsden Fund and the PBRF, which frame “research excellence” in large part in terms of global visibility. It’s a challenge, perhaps, of speaking to two audiences at the same time: a local readership familiar with a narrow but deep national archive, and an international readership who must be persuaded of its relevance to their more “mainstream” concerns. Yet the question can also be asked another way: Does the study of New Zealand have to be framed solely in national terms? Shaped for so long by the ethos and aesthetics of mid-twentieth century cultural nationalism, humanistic inquiry in New Zealand still tends to use the nation as its unquestioned unit of measurement

Figures from the Past: Sargeson's Wandering Men and the Limits of Nationalism

Frank Sargeson's repositioning of Henry Lawson as a 'colonial' writer, away from the more familiar categories of nationalism and realism, offers a provocation for re-considering his own short fiction. In taking up that challenge, this essay diverges from recent attempts to trouble the periodization of writing from the 1930s and 40s: rather than arguing that the concerns of cultural nationalism were anticipated in the nineteenth-century, it will make the case that colonial literary forms and cultural formations persist in some of the most familiar works of that later period

Racial variation in the number of spontaneous abortions before a first successful pregnancy, and effects on subsequent pregnancies.

OBJECTIVE: To assess the relationship between race and spontaneous abortion, whether the relationship varies by risk factors, and the effect of spontaneous abortions on subsequent pregnancies. METHODS: A retrospective study was undertaken using data collected in London, UK, between 1988 and 2000. Logistic regression evaluated histories of spontaneous abortion and associations with small-for-gestational-age and preterm births in black African, black Caribbean, and South Asian women relative to white European women. Interactions with risk factors were assessed. RESULTS: Overall, 196 040 women were included. Compared with white Europeans, the odds of a previous spontaneous abortion were increased in black African (adjusted odds ratio [aOR] 1.20; 95% confidence interval [CI] 1.12-1.29) and black Caribbean women (aOR 1.31; 95% CI 1.21-1.41). The strength of the association with black African race increased with age (P=0.002), and the association with South Asian race increased with age and body mass index (P<0.001 for both). Spontaneous abortion was associated with preterm birth in all races, but was strongest in black African women (aOR 1.47; 95% CI 1.29-1.67). CONCLUSION: The greater incidence of spontaneous abortion in black African and black Caribbean women should prompt further study of risk factors in relation to race. The interaction with age in black African and South Asian women could be important for counseling in relation to timing of pregnancy.This work was supported by a Medical Research Council PhD Studentship.This is the final published version. It first appeared at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002072921500123X