Saturday, March 13, 2010

The Political Economy of International Oil and the Underdeveloped Countries

Tanzer, Michael, The Political Economy of International Oil and the Underdeveloped Countries, Boston: Beacon Press, 1969.

Review
Review

As a rather interesting footnote, I found a cutout from The San Juan Star which my father had placed in the book. The article, dated May 3, 1969 was by Harold Lidin:

Oil exploration in the Dominican Republic has boomed with the start of off-shore research along the northeast coast, and the beginning of intensive drilling in the republics arid southwest. The operations involve two large US firms and a group of Puerto Rican investors. The offshore effort features the use by the Tenneco Oil Co. of the survey ship "Artic Seal" to test the oil bearing potential of a submarine shelf in the Bay of Samana area.


Regarding the newspaper article, see also this and this.

Class, Race and Political Behaviour in Urban Jamaica

Stone, Carl, Class, Race and Political Behaviour in Urban Jamaica, Mona, Jamaica: Institute of Social and Economic Research, University of the West Indies, 1973.

From Martin Henry (contributor to the June 21, 2009 edition of the Gleaner):
Stone sensibly classified classes in the Jamaican political economy by distinctions of both income and non-material status. In 'Class, State, and Democracy in Jamaica' and an earlier paper on 'Class, Race, and Political Behaviour in Urban Jamaica', he identified four broad socio-economic categories in Jamaican social structure:

1. An upper class of capitalists (large-scale business owners and planters).

2. An upper-middle class, made up of professionals, owners of medium-size businesses, college-level educators, corporate managers, senior bureaucrats in the public sector, and leaders of voluntary associations.

3. A lower-middle class, consisting of small-scale business owners, primary and secondary-school teachers, white-collar workers (in private business, civil administration, and parastatal organisations), skilled workers, and owners of medium-size farms.

4. A lower class of small peasants, agricultural workers, labourers (unskilled and semi-skilled), and the substantial number of rural and urban unemployed (Stone, 1973).

Stone's work delineates a complicated link between class and party loyalty.


Review

See also JSTOR and Retrospective in Commemoration of Carl Stone: Jamaican Pioneer of Political Culture.

Norman Manley: A Biography

Sherlock, Sir Philip Manderson, Norman Manley: A Biography, London: MacMillan London Ltd., 1980. Signed by author to my parents in Christmas 1980.

About the author:
Perhaps his genius for relating to people lay in his deep acceptance of culture and cultural values as being synonymous with creativity, on the one hand, and on the other, as an indispensable factor in assessing the state of development of a nation. It was a natural development for him to become a virtual patron of the arts. Few are aware or will recall that Philip Manderson Sherlock was the promoter of the popular comedy team of the 1930s - Slim and Slam - or that he was a renowned teller of Anancy stories. He was a poet of more than passing repute, a researcher into and a conservator of folk culture. In between all these activities, Philip Sherlock found the time to write several books ranging from readers for young children to historical works for university students; and of course, there was his biography of the great Jamaican leader Norman Washington Manley.

Viaje a la America Meridional

De La Condamine, Carlos Maria, Viaje a la America Meridional, Buenos Aires: Espasa Calpe, 1942. carpeta blanda

CHARLES MARÍA DE LA CONDAMINE
CIENTIFICO Y NATURALISTA.- Nació en París el 28 de Enero de 1701 en el seno de una familia de la nobleza media y desde sus primeros años lo pusieron sus padres a estudiar con los jesuitas la Física y las Matemáticas hasta llegar a ser uno de los más consumados geómetras de Francia, por cuya razón lo eligió la Academia Real de Ciencias por uno de sus individuos de número en 1730.

También sabía Astronomía, Geodesia y Geografía y durante un corto tiempo que sirvió en el ejército viajó por las costas del norte del África, visitando las zonas de berbería y del levante como miembro del escuadrón Duguay-Trouin.

En 1735 la Academia lo designó miembro de la Expedición conformada para medir la longitud exacta de un arco de meridiano en el Ecuador y averiguar la verdadera figura de la tierra.


ENGLISH, Wikipedia:
La Condamine became a member of the expedition that was sent to Peru in 1735 to determine the length of a degree of the meridian in the neighborhood of the equator; this work laid the basis for the determination of the length of the meter. The group was led by Louis Godin and included Pierre Bouguer, Antonio de Ulloa, and Jorge Juan y Santacilia. His associations with his principals were unhappy; the expedition was beset by many difficulties, and finally La Condamine split from the rest and made his way to Quito, Ecuador separately, becoming the first Westerner to encounter rubber in the process.

Saturday, March 6, 2010

The uncertain alliance: the Catholic Church and labor in Latin America

Floridi, Alexis Ulysses, & Stiefbold, Annette E., The uncertain alliance: the Catholic Church and labor in Latin America, Center for Advanced International Studies, University of Miami Coral Gables, Fla., 1973.

Review in EBSCOhost Research Databases

Review in the Journal of Church and State

Review in HAHR

Sugar and Slaves

Dunn, Richard S., Sugar and Slaves; the rise of the planter class in the English West Indies, 1624-1713, Chapel Hill, Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture at Williamsburg, Va.: University of North Carolina Press, 1972.

Richard Slator Dunn BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

From the Foreword of the 2000 edition by Gary B. Nash:
Sugar and Slaves is a brilliant depiction of the outlaw English planters who came to the Caribbean in the early seventeenth century. Because they were the first English colonizers to build an economy on African slave labor, their history provides a comparative perspective on the origins of slavery in England's mainland colonies. Writing at the beginning of the social history tectonic plate shift of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Richard Dunn takes the reader inside the tropical island plantation world where displaced Africans and English colonists built a tobacco and sugar economy that mocked all that the English believed their culture stood for. The book begins in 1624, when the English gained their Caribbean foothold on the tiny island of St. Christopher. From that lonely outpost emerged a "cohesive and potent master class" of tobacco and sugar planters that spread to Barbados, Nevis, Montserrat, Antigua, and Jamaica. The book vividly portrays how the English planters created a living hell in a Caribbean Garden of Eden and how they accommodated themselves to the human wreckage involved in turning the islands into highly successful sugar-producing colonies.

Del Orinoco al Amazonas

Humboldt, Alexander Von, Del Orinoco Al Amazonas: Viaje A Las Regiones Equinocciales Del Nuevo Continente, Editorial: Labor, 1967. [carpeta blanda]

Este libro narra la parte más interesante del viaje que Humboldt realizaó entre 1799 y 1804: el inicio en España y la expedición al Orinoco y al Amazonas, donde se adentró en lugares que hasta entonces no había visitado un europeo. Allí llevó a cabo un trabajo científico que todavía hoy sigue causando asombro.


wikipedia:
Friedrich Heinrich Alexander Barón de Humboldt (Berlín, Alemania, 14 de septiembre de 1769 - 6 de mayo de 1859), conocido en español como Alejandro de Humboldt, fue un geógrafo, naturalista y explorador prusiano, hermano menor del lingüista y ministro Wilhelm von Humboldt. Es considerado el "Padre de la Geografía Moderna Universal". Fue un naturalista de una polivalencia extraordinaria, que no volvió a repetirse tras su desaparición. Los viajes de exploración le llevaron de Europa a América del Sur, parte del actual territorio de México, EE.UU., Canarias y a Asia Central. Se especializó en diversas áreas de la ciencia como la etnografía, antropología, física, zoología, ornitología, climatología, oceanografía, astronomía, geografía, geología, mineralogía, botánica, vulcanología y el humanismo.