Bryn Mawr College
Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College | Bryn Mawr College ResearchNot a member yet
4802 research outputs found
Sort by
China’s Race to the Top: Regional and Global Implications of China’s Industrial Policy
No full textThe paper examines the global and regional implications of China’s revitalized state capitalism model through the sectoral lens of the Chinese automotive industry, which stands at the intersection of both traditional and green industrial policy. At the multinational level, China skillfully facilitates local policy implementation that creates excess capacity by propping up local and national champions through con- venient compliance with the WTO. At the bilateral level, China closely links purchasing and coercive dip- lomacy with protections for Chinese players both at home and abroad. Key endeavors like the Belt and Road Initiative open up overseas markets to develop global champions and secure foreign footholds for Chinese champions. Additionally, China’s increasing reliance on exclusionary diplomacy provides polit- ical justifications to discriminate against foreign competitors within the Chinese market while moving for- ward with industrial upgrading of domestic players. When linked together, these factors – all byproducts of China’s approach to state-led capitalism – combine to explain China’s efforts to create a race to the top
The “World\u27s Greatest Mineral Locality:” Haiǁom, Ndonga, Herero, and the early colonial histories of Tsumeb, Namibia
Get PDFThe Tsumeb copper mine in the Otavi Mountains of Namibia is famous both for its spectacular mineral specimens and for its unparalleled diversity of mineral species. The site was mined for nearly 100 years, first by Anglo-German and then by multinational companies; however, prior to that, the site was central to the economies of the Ndonga, Haiǁom, and Herero, who mined, smelted, crafted, and traded the copper. This paper attempts to fill a major gap in the early history of Tsumeb: how did control of Tsumeb’s copper transfer from local communities to Germany? By synthesizing a wide variety of sources, this paper tells pre-colonial and early colonial histories of copper in the Tsumeb area, focusing on the Haiǁom who mined the copper, the Ndonga who smelted and crafted it, and the Herero who had historical relationships with the land. Throughout, the paper attempts to connect Tsumeb’s local history with the larger regional context of South West Africa (now Namibia), and to provide a more in-depth account of the communities whose roles, in previous mineralogic histories of Tsumeb, have been reduced to: ‘trouble with the natives.
Imperial/Non-Imperial Encounters in the Gulf during the Late Pre-Islamic Period: The Glazed Pottery from Southeastern Arabia and Tepe Yahya, Iran
Get PDFThis dissertation proposes a method of combining formal, contextual, and geochemical ceramic analyses to investigate an encounter between imperial and non-imperial societies evidenced in the archaeological record. Glazed pottery from Mesopotamia appeared in southeastern Arabia and southeastern Iran during the late pre-Islamic period (c. 300 BCE – 7th century CE) and neither the mechanisms through which it arrived nor its use in local contexts is fully understood. It is found alongside a set of objects that signal an increased connectivity with the wider worlds of the Indian Ocean, MENA region, and the Mediterranean. Previous scholarship has focused on the extent to which the imperial powers of the Seleucids, Parthians, and Sasanians controlled trade routes in the region. Such approaches overlook local agency and simplify encounters to a center-periphery model. This study seeks to invert this model and return agency to local groups through an analysis of the trade in glazed pottery. The consumption of glazed pottery at Mleiha, Ed-Dur, and Dibba on the one hand, and Tepe Yahya on the other, demonstrates how non-local pottery was used in local contexts to suit the needs of local actors. The results of the investigation suggest that glazed pottery was transported into the regions via both maritime and overland trade, that its value in southeastern Arabia and southeastern Iran was not static over the long centuries of the late pre-Islamic period, and that it played a key role in negotiations of local identity outside the purview of imperial interest
Environment–host–microbial interactions shape the Sarraceniapurpurea microbiome at the continental scale
Get PDFThe importance of climate, habitat structure, and higher trophic levels on microbial diversity is only beginning to be understood. Here, we examined the influence of climate variables, plant morphology, and the abundance of aquatic invertebrates on the microbial biodiversity of the northern pitcher plant Sarracenia purpurea. The plant\u27s cup‐shaped leaves fill with rainwater and support a miniature, yet full‐fledged, ecosystem with a diverse microbiome that decomposes captured prey and a small network of shredding and filter‐feeding aquatic invertebrates that feed on microbes. We characterized pitcher microbiomes of 108 plants sampled at 36 sites from Florida to Quebec. Structural equation models revealed that annual precipitation and temperature, plant size, and midge abundance had direct effects on microbiome taxonomic and phylogenetic diversity. Climate variables also exerted indirect effects through plant size and midge abundance. Further, spatial structure and climate influenced taxonomic composition, but not phylogenetic composition. Our results suggest that direct effects of midge abundance and climate and indirect effects of climate through its effect on plant‐associated factors lead to greater richness of microbial phylotypes in warmer, wetter sites
Ambient Prime Geodesic Theorems on Hyperbolic 3-Manifolds
Get PDFWe prove prime geodesic theorems counting primitive closed geodesics on a compact hyperbolic 3-manifold with length and holonomy in prescribed intervals, which are allowed to shrink. Our results imply effective equidistribution of holonomy and have both the rate of shrinking and the strength of the error term fully symmetric in length and holonomy