scholarly journals From arsenic to DDT: Pesticides, Fascism and the invisibility of toxic risks in the early years of Francoist Spain (1939-1953)

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. e004
Author(s):  
Silvia Pérez-Criado ◽  
José Ramón Bertomeu Sánchez

This paper reviews the way in which Spanish agriculture climbed onto the pesticide treadmill. We claim that Fascist policies and expert advice assembled in the early 1940s accelerated the introduction of pesticides into Spanish agriculture and promoted the emergence of the Spanish pesticide industry in the times of autarky. Agricultural engineers were the key protagonists in this process, but other human and non-human actors also played a pivotal role: a new pest (the Colorado beetle), Francoist politicians, farmers, landowners and industry managers. Our focus is on the use of pesticides against the Colorado beetle (the main threat to the potato crop), and the transition from arsenical pesticides to DDT during the 1940s. We discuss how the politics of autarky offered new opportunities for developing agronomic programmes and the chemical industry and led to the creation of the Register of Pesticides in 1942. We also discuss the role of these regulations in concealing the risks of pesticides from farmers and food consumers. Arsenic pesticides became sources of slow poisoning and tools for social control while reinforcing the alliance of agricultural engineers and Fascist politicians in their autarkic and authoritarian projects. When DDT arrived in Spain, the agricultural engineers praised the low toxicity it had demonstrated (compared to lead arsenate) in its first uses in public health and in military campaigns in Italy. Indeed, the data concerning its potential dangers disappeared from view thanks in part to a large multimedia campaign launched to promote the introduction of the new organic pesticides in Spanish agriculture, which is described at the end of the paper.

1943 ◽  
Vol 23 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 122-147 ◽  
Author(s):  
Percy Morris

The early years of the fourteenth century were memorable ones in the history of Exeter Cathedral, for work on the new presbytery, or novum opus as it is called in the Fabric Rolls, was in progress. When Bishop Bytton died, in 1307, building operations had reached an advanced stage, and the task of completing the work devolved upon his successor, Walter de Stapledon, a Devon man and at the time of his election precentor of the cathedral. At that date the presbytery vaulting was finished, with the exception of its colouring, and the windows were glazed. The transformed chancel of the Norman church was nearly ready to receive the stalls, but the Norman apse still separated the old and new parts of the building. In 1309–10 ‘John of Glastonbury’ was engaged in removing the stalls to the new quire, but we find no record of the date when the linking-up of the Norman building with the new work took place. The Fabric Roll of the following year records a visit of ‘Master William de Schoverwille’, master mason of Salisbury, to inspect the new work: from this we may infer that a stage had been reached when important decisions were pending—the furnishing of the chancel, the building of the altar-screen, and the addition of a triforium arcade and clerestory gallery to the newly built presbytery—and it may have been these undertakings which prompted the chapter to seek expert advice.


2013 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 826-843
Author(s):  
JAMES LEES

AbstractThe histories of Asian peoples penned by British East India Company officials during the early years of colonial rule—rightly—have long been considered to be doubtful source material within the historiography of South Asia. Their credibility was suspect well before the middle of the twentieth century, when Bernard Cohn's work began to present the British colonial state as one that relentlessly sought to categorize Indian society, and to use the distorted information thus gained to impose its government.However, the histories of these administrator-scholars still retain value—not as accurate studies of their subjects, perhaps, but as barometers of the times in which they were written and also in the unexpected ways in which some continue to resonate in the present. To illustrate that point, this paper will review three recent monographs which deal with the writings and historical legacies of some of the Company's most prominent early nineteenth-century administrator-scholars. These are: Jason Freitag's Serving Empire, Serving Nation: James Tod and the Rajputs of Rajasthan; Jack Harrington's Sir John Malcolm and the Creation of British India; and Rama Mantena's work centred around the antiquarian pursuits of Colin Mackenzie, The Origins of Modern Historiography in India: Antiquarianism and Philology, 1780–1880.1


ILR Review ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 126-132 ◽  
Author(s):  
Debra L. Casey ◽  
G. Steven McMillan

Since its inaugural issue in 1947, the Industrial and Labor Relations Review (ILRR) has been considered among the foremost industrial relations journals. Prominent among subjects treated by ILRRs articles in the journal's early years were collective bargaining and industrial strife, but the subject mix has changed greatly with the times. This paper employs bibliometric techniques to compare ILRR's intellectual bases across three recent periods: 1974–1984, 1985–1995, and 1996–2006. Using co-citation and network analyses, the authors identify the “invisible colleges”—research networks that refer to each other in their publications—of ILRR Economics-oriented journals were heavily cited by ILRR authors across the entire 33-year observation period, but there is evidence that another field, human resource management, was of growing importance in the most recent years.


2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 8-16
Author(s):  
Murtazali S. Gadzhiev ◽  
Nizami A. Abdulgamidov

Abstract. The article is dedicated to the localization of the fortress Bilistan that was besieged by Arabian forces lead by Marwan ibn Muhammad, deputy of Arminiya and Azerbaijan, in spring 783 A.D. during his military campaigns in the Eastern Caucasus and in which King of Lakz Arbis ibn Basbas took refuge. According to Abu Muhammad Ahmad ibn A’sam al-Kufi’s Kitab al-Futuh (The Book of Conquests), this fortified settlement was located in the «Land of Lakz» at the middle of the river Samur. The authors suggest localizing the Bilistan fortress (from the Persian/Tati – «place, settlement in lowland») in the area of the Lezgin village Quysun that has a second name Quyustan. The village has strategic value in the Samur valley bordering with plains and foothills. The name Quyustan is of Turkic origin and is a Turkic calque of a Persian word for «place, a settlement near the river valley» (Old Turkic quj / qoj – «bottom of the valley», i.e. «lowland»). The other name of this village (Quysun) is of Turkic-Mongolian origin and means «place on the verge of the river valley». The names of these three semantically and geographically interrelated toponyms belong to three different chronological levels and reflect certain political dominants and cultural and linguistic influences during these periods: Persian Bilistan, which is, clearly, relates to the times of Khosrow Anushirwan’s reign (mid. of VI cent.); Turkic-Persian Quyustan, which, supposedly, dates back to the Seljuq Empire (XI-XII cent.); Turkic-Mongolian Quysun, which seemingly appeared in the Mongolian/Golden Horde period (XIII-XIV cent.).


2019 ◽  
pp. 123-143
Author(s):  
Mary Augusta Brazelton

This chapter focuses on vaccination in the early years of the People's Republic of China. The 1949 establishment of the PRC formally ended the conflicts that had engulfed China for almost twenty years. However, the new nation was still in crisis. The People's Liberation Army continued to wage military campaigns in Tibet and Xinjiang, war loomed in Korea, and infectious diseases still threatened the country's population. In 1949, bubonic plague struck Tianjin and Beijing, and in the following year smallpox broke out in Shanghai. The establishment of national vaccination campaigns, first against smallpox in 1950 and then against tuberculosis, diphtheria, and other diseases in 1952, signaled a national commitment of the new regime to epidemic prevention. Such an achievement was possible, this chapter argues, because new systems of recordkeeping, surveillance, and accountability accompanied the implementation of public health policies. These programs built power over life by self-consciously protecting it from epidemic catastrophe.


2007 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 751-782 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sumathi Ramaswamy

The increasing preoccupation of the scholarly community in recent years with globalization appears to have left its impact on postmodern geographers and historians of cartography as well, several of whom have turned their attention recently to the history and politics of the image that is at the center of this new problematic, namely, the terrestrial globe. As Denis Cosgrove notes in his provocative analysis of cartographic representations of Earth in the Western imagination, “Whether pictured as a networked sphere of accelerating circulation or as an abused and overexploited body, it is from images of the spherical earth that ideas of globalization draw their expressive and political force” (2001: ix). Its very ubiquity as a symbol of the times in which we live underscores the preoccupation with the image of the globe in the late modern imagination. However, as Jerry Brotton observes, its pervasiveness may also point to an increasing redundancy of its appearance in our times, and the image of the globe has suffered what might be called “a waning of affect” (1999: 73). This argument leads him to a study of the early modern period in Europe when the terrestrial globe first emerged in his assessment as “a socially affective object” (ibid.: 72). In his Trading Territories (1997), Brotton considers how the terrestrial globe came to not just reflect an increasingly “global” world but also to constitute it over the course of the sixteenth century. Its power lay “in the ideological representation of the world it purported to describe. Its lack of cognitive specificity was not its weakness but ultimately its greatest strength, because the very perceptions of distance and space upon which the terrestrial globe rested stressed speculation and conjecture over the extent and possession of distant territories” (1999: 87–88). From the early years of the sixteenth century, even as the Copernican revolution was slowly undoing medieval Christian cosmological conceptions of the universe, terrestrial globes became increasingly crucial to the exercise of state power in Europe, as well as to the surging search for new markets and tradable goods. As importantly, as prestige objects, globes and maps became part of a new gift economy of circulation and exchange, and were sought after like “the spices, pepper, silk and precious metals to which [they] appeared to give directional access” (Brotton 1997: 25; see also Jardine 1996: 295–309, 425–36). In the process, they helped fashion new bourgeois modalities of the self, mostly but not exclusively male. Not surprisingly, as Brotton notes, “It is upon the figure of the globe, as both a visual image and a material object, that many of the social and cultural hopes and anxieties of the period came to be focused” (1997: 21).


1995 ◽  
Vol 63 ◽  
pp. 1-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fausto Zevi

THREE CHARACTERS FROM SULLAN POMPEIIOne of the most traumatic events of Italian social history in the times of Sulla was the establishment of colonies of veterans in towns which had taken Marius's side. A particularly well studied case, given the wealth of documentation available, is Pompeii. Amongst other things, Cicero's Pro Sulla throws some light upon the issues which, in the early years after the colonial deductio, separated the two communities in Pompeii—that is the old inhabitants and the Sullan veterans. Within this framework, this article examines, as a form of example, the cases of three people of Pompeii of the colonial period. Two of these, Norbanus Sorex and, in some senses, L. Eumachius, both of whom arrived in Pompeii as a result of the Sullan colonization, have a particular role to play in the establishment of the phenomenon of cultural uniformity which followed the general externsion of Roman citizenship. In contrast, the third case, that of the decurion M. Herennius, is an example of a member of the ancient Samnite aristocracy being restored to the height of his social privileges at a very early stage. He became a supporter of P. Sulla at the time of the Catilinarian conspiracy: the event in which he was a protagonist contributes to the clarification of some statements in the Pro Sulla.


PMLA ◽  
1935 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 444-468 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Elizabeth Storer

The documentary value of the Mercure galant, the review founded in 1672, which La Bruyère considered to be “directement au-dessous de rien,” has not ceased to increase with the passage of time. Interspersed among frivolous poems, conundrums, descriptions of festivals and of styles, one finds announcements of new books, of military campaigns, and (what interests us here particularly) accounts, often filled with picturesque detail, of the foundation and the sessions of literary bodies organized in the provinces in the seventeenth century, in imitation of the French Academy. Some of these still have vigorous existence. In most instances, the Mercure is the chief source of information on these early years, and, strangely enough, has been neglected by the historians of the provincial academies.


Author(s):  
Felicia MUREŞANU ◽  
Maria FENEŞAN ◽  
Elena NAGY ◽  
Dana MALSCHI ◽  
Adina IVAŞ

Colorado potato beetle (Leptinotarsa decemlineata) is and will remain the main pest of potato crops. It seeks to combat it, more so as enable transmission of the virus X (PVC) and could reach total causing damage, in an attack early harvest losses are possible in 50 to 80% while a later attack, they can reach up to 30%. This pest developed resistance to a wide range of insecticides, which has enhance management studies determined based on a better and more thorough understanding of the ecology pest. In currently there are different methods based on biological products, various chemicals (pheromones) that causes certain behaviors (in this case aggregation) with efficiency superior, clean, reducing the quantities of toxic chemicals in the cultivation of potatoes, there is not resistance (as happens with insecticides), and thus do not affect consumer health tubers of potatoes. The paper presents results under the program Agral-CEEX from S.C.D.A. Turda during 2006-2008, regarding the use of unconventional biotechnics control or limitation under ETD (Economic Thresholds for Pest ) of the Colorado beetle (Leptinotarsa decemlineata Say.) from the potato crop. This method was tested based on the use of compositions biotechnics pest attraction that obtained at the Institute of Chemistry Cluj-Napoca, which were used as traps for beetle aggregation pheromone in Colorado; two variants were synthesized pheromone of aggregation, V1-PEG and V2 -ExFr. Adults to follow this pest abundance and attack rate (%) in each variant. Pitfalls of both V1-PEG, and in those of V2-ExFr were found near the Colorado beetle, many insects in the same order as proof that these aggregation pheromones are efficiency and can be placed in management integrated control, using this method to potato crop. Also using this method biotechnics -aggregation pheromone- to reduced chemical treatments needed to pest control and protect wildlife be helpful existing default


The Handbook provides a comprehensive exploration of a great renewal movement in Christian history, which has profoundly influenced not only the world Anglican Communion, but other Church traditions as well. Commencing with the Movement’s roots within both High Church and evangelical Anglicanism, and its genesis within the University of Oxford and notably Oriel College, the Handbook considers the relatively short period when the Movement could properly be called the Oxford Movement—including its publication outlets such as the Tracts for the Times, its vibrant personalities, its early years of expansion, its opposition and the backlash it inspired, culminating in the crisis of 1845–50, a crisis which for many marked its end, but which in truth brought renewed growth and diversification. The Handbook then examines the development of the Oxford Movement up to the present day, including the gradual adoption of the name Anglo-Catholicism, its adaptation to different national and cultural contexts, its growing commitment to liturgical and devotional reforms, its pastoral, missionary, and global outreach, its diverse influence on literature and the arts, and its wider ecumenical concerns.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document