Contrary to the belief that prisons never predated colonial rule in Africa, this article traces their emergence in the Gold Coast after the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade. During the era of ‘legitimate commerce’, West African merchants required liquidity to conduct long-distance trade. Rather than demand human pawns as interest on loans, merchants imprisoned debtors’ female relatives because women's sexual violation in prison incentivized kin to repay loans. When British colonists entered the Gold Coast, they discovered how important the prisons were to local credit. They thus allowed the institutions to continue, but without documentation. The so-called ‘native prisons’ did not enter indirect rule — and the colonial archive — until the 1940s. Contrary to studies of how Western states used prisons to control black labour after emancipation, this article excavates a ‘debt genealogy’ of the prison. In the Gold Coast, prisons helped manage cash flow after abolition by holding human hostages.

This paper examines the work of lawyers, judges and country experts involved in asylum and migration litigation. I begin by analysing their work in the wider semi-autonomous asylum field within which a number of powerful institutions operate to shape policy, define the roles of key actors and determine access to legal redress/justice by asylum applicants and migrants. To understand the work of these three legal actors, I analyse four very different types of legal cases involving asylum, foreign adoption and migration law. An analysis of these cases helps to identify the constraints on effective litigation on behalf of refugees and migrants against the British Home Office and it illustrates the fact that it is Home Office policy, and the decisions taken by Home Office officials, that created the injustice for the individuals concerned by blurring the ‘bright line’ differentiating between the rights of nationals and those of ‘foreigners’.

The etymologies of English blood and bone are obscure. Although their cognates are well represented in the Germanic family, both lack clear cognates in other Indo-European languages. Various explanations for their origins have been proposed, including that they may be non-Indo-European (e.g. Hawkins 1987). Blood and bone, and their cognates, share an initial /b/ with numerous body-related words (e.g. beard, breast, bosom) throughout Germanic. This initial /b/ constitutes a phonestheme. Phonesthemes – ‘recurring sound-meaning pairings that are not clearly contrastive morphemes’ (Bergen 2004: 290) – are present in many Germanic languages, but their role in lexicogenesis is little understood. I suggest that blood and bone were formed by blending the initial /b/ phonestheme with two pre-existing lexemes: Proto-Germanic *flōda- ‘something that flows’ and *staina- ‘stone’. Phonesthetic blending may be a fruitful avenue for future etymological research.

This article examines the syntax and semantics of please. Using a mainstream generative syntactic framework, I propose that syntactically integrated please is a discourse marker that marks the clause in which it occurs as a request. Please may appear clause-initially or clause-medially as determined by a number of factors, including clause type, modality, negation and the application of ellipsis. There is also a homophonous marker please that occurs in clause-final position; clause-final please does not mark requests per se but ‘bonds’ a speaker and addressee, reinforcing their relationship as requester and requestee. This analysis of please provides support for syntactic approaches to speech act structure, particularly the claim that illocutionary force is part of narrow syntax rather than a solely pragmatic phenomenon. The article provides support for pursuing a model of the syntax–discourse interface in which interactions between discourse markers and clause-internal functional elements, such as mood and modality, form the interface between syntax and discourse.

Ever since 2007/2008, the European Union (EU) and its various institutional actors have been developing a dedicated EU Arctic policy, setting common positions, stressing the EU’s Arctic credentials and prominently expressing its own “Arcticness”. These Arctic steps have been thoroughly scrutinised over the past decade. Yet, research has almost ignored one particular pillar of the EU’s Arctic endeavour: the “Arctic exception” in EU–Russia relations and the related lack of a distinct Russian dimension in the EU’s Arctic policy. Similarly, little is known of how the Russian side views the EU’s Arctic policy steps taken since 2008. The extensive transdisciplinary literature on EU–Russia relations has basically ignored how the EU has been represented in Russia ever since 1991. This article examines EU and Russian Arctic policies and their relations in the European North. In attempting to explore how the EU’s “Arcticness” has been presented, narrated and perceived in Russian media between 2008 and 2018, we draw upon an analysis of articles published on various Russian media platforms during that period. The study identified four core narratives of the EU’s engagement in the Arctic: the EU as player, as seeker, as prohibitor and as partner. These narratives provide evidence of the “Arctic exception” in EU–Russia relations, as well as offering some related explanations.

In much of Europe, the advent of low-input cereal farming regimes between c. ad 800 and 1200 enabled landowners—lords—to amass wealth by greatly expanding the amount of land under cultivation and exploiting the labour of others. Scientific analysis of plant remains and animal bones from archaeological contexts is generating the first direct evidence for the development of such low-input regimes. This article outlines the methods used by the FeedSax project to resolve key questions regarding the ‘cerealization’ of the medieval countryside and presents preliminary results using the town of Stafford as a worked example. These indicate an increase in the scale of cultivation in the Mid-Saxon period, while the Late Saxon period saw a shift to a low-input cultivation regime and probably an expansion onto heavier soils. Crop rotation appears to have been practised from at least the mid-tenth century.

A theory of nationalism should explain the evidence provided by the historical record, but also provide unexpected insight. The modernist theory of nationalism, espoused among others by Benedict Anderson and Eric Hobsbawm, provides a surprising chronology of nationalism’s modernity. The modernization theory of nationalism has attracted extensive criticism from Anthony Smith, who proposed instead a theory he called “ethnosymbolism.” This article considers Smith’s critique of Anderson and then his critique of Hobsbawm, finding that Smith’s objections to modernist theorists rest on mischaracterizations, fallacies, and contradictions. Smith’s approach caters to the primordialism rampant in public opinion, providing scholarly respectability to popular misconceptions. Scholars of nationalism should look instead to Rogers Brubaker for guidance.