The container is the universal unit of the global commodity society, facilitating the swift exchange of all kinds of product. Precarity, likewise, connotes a basic form of labour that submissively and flexibly adjusts to any form of employment and system of production.
In an excerpt from his acclaimed book The Slave Ship: A Human History, historian Marcus Rediker describes the deep-sea sailing ship as linchpin of the emergent transatlantic economic order and instrument of terror for slaves brought from Africa to the Americas. In a subsequent interview, he discusses the role played by European harbour cities in the slave trade and their responsibilities in reckoning with its moral legacy.
Too big to fail? Too crisis-hardened to go under? The collapse of the Soviet Union has something to teach Europe’s politicians if another leap from the unthinkable to the inevitable is to be avoided in the case of the EU, argues Ivan Krastev.
Bosnian novelist Alma Lazarevska remembers the siege of Sarajevo obliquely, as the background to a personal loss unconnected to the plight of the city. She thereby implicitly critiques the politicization of the siege, which is commemorated this year.
Legislation allowing the Olympic organisers to control the “association” of the games with approved products – required by the IOC as a condition of a successful bid – disadvantages the community stakeholders of major sporting events, argues Teresa Scassa.
The impact of open access publishing models on the developing world is uncertain, writes Jorge L. Contreras. Until “information philanthropy” is supplanted by self-sufficient, south-focused open-access journals, the potential of developing world scientists will not be fully realised.
At the moment of the Macedonian nation’s greatest victory, independence, “the name issue became the new symbol of our defeat”, regrets Denko Maleski. Predictably enough, those in Macedonia to benefit were the nationalist Right, thus confirming Greek fears.
Gothenburg’s Franska tomten neighbourhood takes its name from a French warehouse established in the eighteenth-century through a colonial trade-off between the French and Swedish crowns. Today, the name’s origins are largely forgotten, writes Klas Rönnbäck.
London’s relationship to water and to the sea remains central to its role in the global economy and vital to a gamble in which the Olympics is a part, argues Anthony Iles. On the connections between shipping, logistics and the hi-speed, only apparently immaterial world of finance.
Walter Benjamin’s description of Naples as a “porous city” absorbent of heterogeneity applies equally to other harbour cities, write Jude Bloomfield and Franco Bianchini. On cultural hybridity, economies of informality and strategies of creativity in four European ports.
Recent historiography emphasizing the egalitarian-democratic character of eighteenth-century piracy undermines Carl Schmitt’s quasi-legal distinction between the partisan and the pirate and reinstates the pirate as political actor within the emergent maritime state order, argues Dominique Weber.
The re-launch of a reconstructed eighteenth-century merchant ship was supposed to promote Sweden’s image as reliable trading partner with an immaculate past. But the failure throughout the project to acknowledge the colonial involvements of the ship’s former owner suggests a less complimentary story, writes Mikela Lundahl.
The Leveson Enquiry into the UK hacking scandal is drawing to a close, yet the future of a new press regulatory body remains controversial. Enda O’Doherty asks what the enquiry’s findings mean for a definition of journalistic standards and the proper relation between politics and media.
Nowhere is the politics of history more vexed than in the conflict over the use of the name “Macedonia”. Valentina Mironska-Hristovska presents the Macedonian position, arguing that the Greek claim to the historical-cultural legacy of Macedonia is, at heart, paradoxical.
Sports journalist and historian Mihir Bose measures the lip service paid to civil rights by sports officials over the last 150 years against actions taken. Of all sporting associations, it is the rhetoric of the IOC that bears the least relation to reality, he writes.
Is FEMEN the precursor of a bold new protest pattern, asks Marian Rubchak, or has it been reduced to an organization of exhibitionists? As long as gender injustices multiply in Ukraine, the strength of FEMEN’s message remains undiminished: for the present, semi-nudity could be the most viable means of generating public dialogue on women’s rights.