Two Worlds Of Cotton

A major new approach to the study of the social and economic history of colonial French West Africa, this book traces French efforts to establish a cotton export economy in the French Soudan from the early nineteenth century through the end of World War II. By showing how a regionally based local economy successfully withstood the pressure from European capitalist markets and colonial aspirations, the book sheds new light on various generally accepted assumptions about the character of colonial economies and their integration into global export markets. It thus challenges the notion that colonial political, military, and elite intellectual hegemony translated directly or easily into regional economic hegemony. In making this argument, the book points to inherent weaknesses in the usual view of the colonial state, notably the failure to recognize sufficiently the enduring power of local processes - or local currents of culture and practice - to withstand empire and ultimately shape the experience of colonialism.

This is a new release of the original 1948 edition.

During the interwar period America and Russia provided German travel writers with opposing visions of Germany's future, as well as blank screens for the projections of their hopes and anxieties. The travel literature genre allowed authors and readers to approach Weimar Germany's social issues from a psychologically safe distance. This is the first book to analyze the American and Russian travels of Kisch, Toller, Holitscher, Goldschmidt, and Rundt from a psychogeographic and imagologic perspective. It is a work of particular interest to researchers and students of travel literature, cultural studies, the construction and perception of the «other, » and literary psychology.

The transatlantic story of how the English settlers of seventeenth century North America became Americans - from the near-calamitous first settlement at Jamestown in 1607 to the drama of the Salem witch trials.

Cotton, crucial to the economy of the American South, has also played a vital role in the making of the Mexican north. The Lower Rio Bravo (Rio Grande) Valley irrigation zone on the border with Texas in northern Tamaulipas, Mexico, was the centerpiece of the Cardenas government's effort to make cotton the basis of the national economy. This irrigation district, built and settled by Mexican Americans repatriated from Texas, was a central feature of Mexico's effort to control and use the waters of the international river for irrigated agriculture. Drawing on previously unexplored archival sources, Casey Walsh discusses the relations among various groups comprising the "social field" of cotton production in the borderlands. By describing the complex relationships among these groups, Walsh contributes to a clearer understanding of capitalism and the state, of transnational economic forces, of agricultural and water issues in the U.S.-Mexican borderlands, and of the environmental impacts of economic development. Building the Borderlands crosses a number of disciplinary, thematic, and regional frontiers, integrating perspectives and literature from the United States and Mexico, from anthropology and history, and from political, economic, and cultural studies. Walsh's important transnational study will enjoy a wide audience among scholars of Latin American and Western U.S. history, the borderlands, and environmental and agricultural history, as well as anthropologists and others interested in the environment and water rights.

Although immigrants enter the United States from virtually every nation, Mexico has long been identified in the public imagination as one of the primary sources of the economic, social, and political problems associated with mass migration. Between Two Worlds explores the controversial issues surrounding the influx of Mexicans to America. The eleven essays in this anthology provide an overview of some of the most important interpretations of the historical and contemporary dimensions of the Mexican diaspora.