History

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This essay examines a growing literature on postcolonial Black Britain that seeks to suture the ties between prewar and postwar histories of Black political activity in Britain. By examining how people of African descent articulated the political conditions of being Black in metropolitan Britain during the 20th century, recent studies have shown how non-state actors shaped ideas about the relationship between race and citizenship. In unearthing the myriad of ways that people of African descent navigated the politics of being both Black and British, this body of work has begun to offer critical perspectives on postcolonial Black Britain's place within the political history of the African Diaspora. Moreover, this essay argues that new work on Black Britain and the politics of race yields fruitful ground for dismantling some of the artificial historiographical partitions that have oftentimes separated metropolitan race politics in the postwar era from the broader history of empire, decolonization, and transnational anti-racist movements organized around the pursuit of Black freedom.

Women, who lived on sailing ships with their family during the 19th century, wrote in their journals about several large items built or brought on board specifically for their comfort. Five captain’s wives voyaged on the whaleship Charles W. Morgan. Clara Tinkham survived seasickness in a small deckhouse, Lydia Landers slept well in a gimballed bed, and Honor Earle refused to use the gamming chair that often dunked the occupant in the sea. Their stories provide evidence of the material culture, which could be used in shipwreck archaeology as diagnostic of seagoing women.

The two ships, Bato (1806) and Brunswick (1805) wrecked in Simons Bay, South Africa, provide an opportunity to compare British and Dutch maritime technologies during the Napoleonic Era (1792–1815). The former was a Dutch 74-gun ship of the line and the latter a British East Indiaman. Their remains reveal pertinent information about the maritime technologies available to each European power. Industrial capacity and advanced metal working played a significant role in ship construction initiatives of that period, while the dwindling timber supplies forced invention of new technologies. Imperial efforts during the Napoleonic Era relied on naval power. Maritime technologies dictated imperial strategy as ships were deployed to expand or maintain colonial empires. Naval theorists place the strategy into a wider spectrum and the analysis of the material culture complements further understanding of sea power. The study also recommends management options to preserve the archaeological sites for future study and to showcase for heritage tourism.

We consider the problem of lossless compression of individual sequences using finite-state (FS) machines, from the perspective of the best achievable empirical cumulant generating function (CGF) of the code length, i.e., the normalized logarithm of the empirical average of the exponentiated code length. Since the probabilistic CGF is minimized in terms of the Rényi entropy of the source, one of the motivations of this study is to derive an individual-sequence analogue of the Rényi entropy, in the same way that the FS compressibility is the individual-sequence counterpart of the Shannon entropy. We consider the CGF of the code-length both from the perspective of fixed-to-variable (F-V) length coding and the perspective of variable-to-variable (V-V) length coding, where the latter turns out to yield a better result, that coincides with the FS compressibility. We also extend our results to compression with side information, available at both the encoder and decoder. In this case, the V-V version no longer coincides with the FS compressibility, but results in a different complexity measure.

The two ships, Bato (1806) and Brunswick (1805) wrecked in Simon’s Bay, South Africa, provide an opportunity to compare British and Dutch maritime technologies during the Napoleonic Era (1792–1815). The former was a Dutch 74-gun ship of the line and the latter a British East Indiaman. Their remains reveal pertinent information about the maritime technologies available to each European power. Industrial capacity and advanced metal working played a significant role in ship construction initiatives of that period, while the dwindling timber supplies forced invention of new technologies. Imperial efforts during the Napoleonic Era relied on naval power. Maritime technologies dictated imperial strategy as ships were deployed to expand or maintain colonial empires. Naval theorists place the strategy into a wider spectrum and the analysis of the material culture complements further understanding of sea power.