The Development of Foreign Trade and Communication in Costa Rica to the Construction of the First Railway

1953 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-209
Author(s):  
Richard J. Houk
Keyword(s):  
Costa Rica ◽  
North America ◽  
Foreign Trade ◽  
Easy Access ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
World Markets ◽  
History Of

The poorest, the most abandoned, the most isolated of the Spanish possessions in North America was the province of Costa Rica. Despite valiant efforts made by the royal governors to build roads and to stimulate the production of items for export, the colonial history of the nation indicates a vegetating and unstimulated economy. The smallest settlements made by the Spaniards were scattered throughout the country, and the greatest concentration of population was in the fertile Meseta Central, which had no easy access to the sea. All of the early settlers were “miserably poor with no prospect of finding mines to bring them quick wealth, no export crop in demand in world markets, and no means of bringing such a crop to the coast had it existed.”

North America from the Top Down

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 109-136
Author(s):  
Catherine Desbarats ◽  
Allan Greer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
North America ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Spatial Dynamics ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
New France ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
History Of

This paper re-examines the spatial foundations of North American historiography concerning the early modern period. By focusing on the history of New France in its broader context, it argues that the hegemony of a United States-centric approach to pre-national America has distorted our understanding of the basic spatial dynamics of the period. More visibly than in other zones of empire formation, but not uniquely, New France displays a variety of spaces. We discuss three of these: imperial space, indigenous space and colonial space. We call into question the entrenched tendency, derived we think, from near-exclusive attention to the history of the Thirteen Colonies, to characterize this as “colonial history” and to assume that “colonies” were the only significant vessel of this history.

scholarly journals Street Name Data as a Reflection of Migration and Settlement History

Urban Science ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 74
Author(s):  
Sarah J. Berkemer ◽  
Peter F. Stadler
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Rural Areas ◽  
Data Sets ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Migration Patterns ◽  
Usable Information ◽  
European Immigrants ◽  
History Of ◽  
Map Data ◽  
Regional Settlement

Street names (odonyms) play an important role not only as descriptors of geographic locations but also due to their sociological and political connotations and commemorative character. Here we analyse street names in Europe and North America extracted from OpenStreetMap, asking in particular to what extent odonyms reflect early European settlements in the New World, i.e., the immigration of German, Austrian and Scandinavian minorities. We observe that old street names of European origin can predominantly be found in rural areas. North American street names indeed recapitulate local and regional settlement histories. The aim of this study is to demonstrate that easily accessible data sets from freely available map data such as street names convey usable information concerning migration patterns and the history of settlements in the case of European immigrants in North America as well as colonial history. We provide a freely available pipeline to analyse this kind of data.

The Historical Turn in Southeastern Archaeology

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
History Of Archaeology ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Historical Trends ◽  
Southeastern Archaeology ◽  
Conceptual Frame ◽  
Historical Turn ◽  
History Of ◽  
Living Organisms

The primary purpose of this edited volume is to formalize as a theory the historical turn in southeastern archaeology (and American archaeology) and provide a number of case studies illustrating the use of the theory in the region. In previous decades, archaeologists and other scholars studying what is commonly termed “prehistoric” America emphasized long-term, evolutionary change and adaptation, and archaeologists conceptualized pre-colonial societies like living organisms adapting to environmental challenges rather than as collections of people responding to historical trends and forces. The history of archaeology and the reasons for this conceptual frame are complex and deeply rooted in misconceptions about indigenous people as unchanging, static “people without history” who disappeared soon after Europeans arrived in North America. Today, however, archaeologists are combining evolutionary processes with a new understanding that so-called prehistory was also historical, contingent, and local, and historians are looking to the ancient past to better understand Indian societies of the historic era. In other words, scholars now understand that the historic and “prehistoric” eras were not categorically different and that people across this divide were subject to similar historical forces. This historicizing of prehistory represents a profound shift in our way of thinking about precolonial and colonial history and begins to erase the false divide between ancient America and colonial and even contemporary America.

Re-imagining Reproduction: Unsettling Metaphors in the History of Imperial Science and Commercial Surrogacy in India

Somatechnics ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-103 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kalindi Vora
Keyword(s):  
Assisted Reproductive Technologies ◽  
Reproductive Technologies ◽  
The Body ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Commercial Surrogacy ◽  
Art Practices ◽  
History Of ◽  
Travel Industry

This paper provides an analysis of how cultural notions of the body and kinship conveyed through Western medical technologies and practices in Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART) bring together India's colonial history and its economic development through outsourcing, globalisation and instrumentalised notions of the reproductive body in transnational commercial surrogacy. Essential to this industry is the concept of the disembodied uterus that has arisen in scientific and medical practice, which allows for the logic of the ‘gestational carrier’ as a functional role in ART practices, and therefore in transnational medical fertility travel to India. Highlighting the instrumentalisation of the uterus as an alienable component of a body and subject – and therefore of women's bodies in surrogacy – helps elucidate some of the material and political stakes that accompany the growth of the fertility travel industry in India, where histories of privilege and difference converge. I conclude that the metaphors we use to structure our understanding of bodies and body parts impact how we imagine appropriate roles for people and their bodies in ways that are still deeply entangled with imperial histories of science, and these histories shape the contemporary disparities found in access to medical and legal protections among participants in transnational surrogacy arrangements.

How Finance Colonised Aotearoa: A Concise Counter-History

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 41
Author(s):  
Catherine Cumming
Keyword(s):  
Financial Institutions ◽  
The State ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Financial Instruments ◽  
Financial History ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
History Of

This paper intervenes in orthodox under-standings of Aotearoa New Zealand’s colonial history to elucidate another history that is not widely recognised. This is a financial history of colonisation which, while implicit in existing accounts, is peripheral and often incidental to the central narrative. Undertaking to reread Aotearoa New Zealand’s early colonial history from 1839 to 1850, this paper seeks to render finance, financial instruments, and financial institutions explicit in their capacity as central agents of colonisation. In doing so, it offers a response to the relative inattention paid to finance as compared with the state in material practices of colonisation. The counter-history that this paper begins to elicit contains important lessons for counter-futures. For, beyond its implications for knowledge, the persistent and violent role of finance in the colonisation of Aotearoa has concrete implications for decolonial and anti-capitalist politics today.  

Specters of Colonialism - Sven Augustijnen's Haunted Cinema

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrzej Marzec
Keyword(s):  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Prime Minister ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Philosophical Perspective ◽  
History Of ◽  
Contemporary Cinema ◽  
Presence And Absence

The author analyzes Sven Agustijnen's Specters from the philosophical perspective. He tries to prove that the cinema of the Belgian director is haunted because it presents the reality as made out of traces, which disturb the traditional division into presence and absence. The author analyzes Augustijnen's film techniques and uses Jacques Derrida hauntology to show, how contemporary cinema tries to face the difficult and unfinished colonial history of Belgium (the genocide in Congo during the reign of the Belgian king Leopold II and the murder of the first prime minister of the independent Congo, Patrice Lumumba).

Multicultural and Transnational Novels

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Meffan
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
The Other ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Return Home ◽  
Access Rights ◽  
The One

This chapter discusses the history of multicultural and transnational novels in New Zealand. A novel set in New Zealand will have to deal with questions about cultural access rights on the one hand and cultural coverage on the other. The term ‘transnational novel’ gains its relevance from questions about cultural and national identity, questions that have particularly exercised nations formed from colonial history. The chapter considers novels that demonstrate and respond to perceived deficiencies in wider discourses of cultural and national identity by way of comparison between New Zealand and somewhere else. These include Amelia Batistich's Another Mountain, Another Song (1981), Albert Wendt's Sons for the Return Home (1973) and Black Rainbow (1992), James McNeish's Penelope's Island (1990), Stephanie Johnson's The Heart's Wild Surf (2003), and Lloyd Jones's Mister Pip (2006).

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