The Whip and the Hoe

Spectacular physical punishments such as whipping were at the core of the master-slave relationship but it was the chronic and acute physical demands of forced labor that did the most destructive and lasting damage to enslaved people. Plantation field work caused more extensive damage to enslaved bodies than non-field work. Field work was more debilitating to enslaved women than to their male counterparts. Work on sugar plantations caused more damage to the enslaved than work on cotton plantations. Changes in crops, productivity rates, and work regimes had a compound and cumulative effect on the health of the enslaved.

Stink Bug Population in Cotton Plantations with Different Plant Spacings

The increase in cotton plant population by decreasing the spacing between rows cause some changes in phenotypical characteristics of cotton plants, such as decrease in number of leaves per plant, low-development leaves, and great soil shading. Stink bugs of the Pentatomidae family that migrate from soybean crops seem to benefit from the cotton narrow-row planting system. The objective of the present work was to evaluate adult and nymph stink bug populations in cotton plantations under three plant spacing. The experiment was conducted in the 2010/2011 cotton season at the Experimental Farm of the Federal University of Grande Dourados, in Dourados, MS, Brazil. A randomized block experimental design was used, with three cotton growing systems and eight replications, totaling 24 plots. The cotton growing systems were selected based on spacing between planting rows (0.22, 0.45, and 0.90 m). Five evaluations were conducted to survey the stink bug populations, with two samples per plot. The number of nymphs and adults of Euschistus heros and Edessa meditabunda was counted. The spacing between cotton planting rows affects stink bug populations of the species Euschistus heros and Edessa meditabunda. Increases in cotton plant density decrease the occurrence of stink bug in the plantation. The stink bug population is greater in cotton plantations with spacing of 0.90 m between planting rows.

Specificity and sensibility of primer pair in the detection of Colletotrichum gossypii var. cephalosporioides in cotton seeds by PCR technique

Cotton Ramulosis (Gossypium hirsutum) is an important disease affecting cotton plantations in Brazil, and its causal agent, Colletotrichum gossypiivar.cephalosporioides(Cgc), according to the Brazilian phytosanitary authority, was considered a regulated non quarantine pest. It makes this microorganism subject to standardization in seed certification programs. The current seed health testing for detecting that pathogen in seed samples does not provide reliable results for routine analysis. On this paper, attempts were made to design specific primers for detection of Cgc associated with cotton seed. Two primer sets were selected based on the analysis of a multiple alignment of gene’s sequence encoding the glyceraldehyde 3-phosphate dehydrogenase from Cgc, C. gossypii and reference strains of the C. gloeosporioides species complex. The conserved sites unique to Cgc strains were used to design specific fragment of 140 bp. The primer specificity was confirmed by using other fungi. The primers produced a detectable band of target DNA of Cgc in all inoculum potentials of the pathogen artificially inoculated by the water restriction technique. The developed primer pair represents, therefore, a reliable and rapid mean to diagnose the Ramulosis agent in cotton seed.

Cotton Plantations in India: The Environmental and Social Challenges

Cotton, one of the principal cash crops of India, contributes significantly to the country’s economy and foreign exchange earnings. Approximately 60 million people depend on cotton production and related industries for their livelihoods. Although India has the largest cotton plantation area, in terms of yield, it is far behind. Even though cotton occupies only five percent of India’s total cultivable land, approximately 50 percent of pesticides used in India are consumed by the cotton cultivation, causing environmental pollution and health hazard. The use of nitrogen-based fertilizers further increases the problem. Many social issues such as child labor, women labor, extremely small landholdings and unviable livelihoods are associated with cotton plantations. Recently, due to the norms set up by the textile importing countries, these issues have assumed great importance. This article, after giving a brief introduction to the cotton plantation sector in India, will deal with the environmental and social challenges of the cotton plantations.

The Legacies of the Second Slavery

Chapter 1 by Rafael Marquese compares the impact of the demise of slavery in the US and Brazil and the transformation of the coffee economies and cotton economies. Marquese connects American Reconstruction with larger global processes to explore the reorganization of the national state and American capitalism that took place in the Era of Globalization (1870–1914). He shows how “Second Slavery,” a concept articulated by Dale Tomich, provides a model for understanding both the integrated trajectory of slavery in Brazil and the United States and the ways the coffee plantationa and economies and the cotton plantations and economies of these nations interacted after emancipation.

State Security Policy and Changing the Nature of the Conflict after the End of the Cold War Rivalry

The aim of the paper is to try to determine the essence of the new face of armed conflict. Liberia is the main point of reference in the analysis for two reasons. Firstly, Liberia is the oldest independent republic on the African continent and its establishing is linked to paradoxical events begun in 1821, when black people settling in the vicinity of Monrovia, former slaves liberated from South American cotton plantations, reconstructed a slave-like type of society, taking local, poorly organised tribes as their subjects. Secondly, Liberia proves that the intensity of changes in armed conflict does not have to be strictly dependent on the size of the land: a country of small geographical size can equal or even exceed countries with several times larger surface in terms of features of “new wars”. In 1989 in Liberia, the nine-year presidency of Samuel Doe, characterised by exceptional ineptitude and bloody terror, led to the outbreak of clashes between government forces and the opposition from National Patriotic Front of Liberia, led by Charles Taylor. Thus, the first civil war in Liberia was begun, that lasted until 1997 and became an arena of mass violations of human rights, leaving behind 150,000 dead victims and about 850,000 refugees to neighbouring countries.

Peter Fairbairn: Highland Factor and Caribbean Plantation Manager, 1792–1822

This chapter is a case study in the transnational transfer of land agent skills. Peter Fairbairn was first chief factor on the Seaforth estate in Ross-shire, in which position his ability, energy and honesty were much admired by his employer. From 1801 he was attorney of the Seaforth cotton plantations in Berbice, the results of which were so disappointing that by 1811 Lord Seaforth for a time considered dismissing him. The chapter compares his performance in Ross-shire and Berbice, examine how far his skills as a land agent were transferable between the two locations and consider how far the problems in Berbice were due to issues beyond his control.

The Southern Origins of Bohemian New York

The first Americans to identify as artistic bohemians gathered at a Manhattan beer cellar in the 1850s. They counted Walt Whitman as one of their number, and considered Edgar Allan Poe a bohemian avant la letter. But New York’s first bohemians were not displaced Parisians living in a section of the Latin Quarter magically transplanted to the United States. Rather, bohemianism in the United States has roots in Charleston, South Carolina, the hometown of both Ada Clare (the “Queen of Bohemia” and host of a weekly literary salon) and Edward Howland (the financial backer for the bohemians’ literary weekly, The New York Saturday Press), as well as in the setting of Poe’s “The Gold-Bug” (1843), which influenced the first literary representation of American bohemianism in Fitz-James O’Brien’s short story “The Bohemian” (1855). Charleston’s cotton plantations provided Howland and Clare with the money to fund the institutions that were essential for bohemianism to flourish: the periodical and the salon. With Poe at the imaginative center of American bohemia and Clare and Howland at its financial center, U.S. bohemianism emerges as a complex network of people, money, and ideas circulating between the North and the South as well as New York and Paris.

Scipio Vaughan’s South Carolina

In 1840, Church Vaughan’s dying father Scipio advised his family to return to Africa, the continent of their ancestors. Although Scipio had spent most of his life as a slave, his ten children and their mother were life-long free people of color in Kershaw County, South Carolina. Through hard work and the careful cultivation of white patrons, they made an independent living and owned their own land. As this chapter shows through the experiences of this family and their neighbors, however, inland South Carolina became increasingly restrictive and dangerous for free people of color in the first half of the nineteenth century. By the time Church Vaughan’s free Anglo-Catawba mother and African American father married in the 1810s, so many slaves worked on Kershaw County cotton plantations that planters had good reason to fear rebellion, such as one that was brutally suppressed in 1816. Over the following decades, plantation slavery expanded over land previously controlled by Native Americans. Though Scipio Vaughan was gradually manumitted, even free people of color faced increasing legal restrictions, social exclusion, and violence. This chapter illustrates their limited pathways to freedom as well as the mounting pressures on free people of color that made emigration attractive.