A Bit More Detail

• JSTOR Daily links to a paper examining how a speculative sugar boom in early modern Madeira was the first of its kind.


• Simon Worrall interviews author Malachy Tallack about the latter's book of imaginary places, notably islands.


• News that the DNA of a preserved thylacine has been salvaged is fantastic. Besides the scientific interest of this, could this lead to the resurrection of this Tasmanian species?


• Elaina Zachos notes the many problems facing the many cute rabbits product of a recent introduction to the Japanese island of Ōkunoshima.


• A volcanic island that recently emerged from the sea off of Tonga turns out to be much more durable than scientists had expected.

• The Big Picture shares shocking photos of the Portuguese forest fires.


• blogTO notes that, happily, Seaton Village's Fiesta Farms is apparently not at risk of being turned into a condo development site.


• Centauri Dreams notes a new starship discussion group in Delft. Shades of the British Interplanetary Society and the Daedalus?


• D-Brief considers a new theory explaining why different birds' eggs have different shapes.


• The Frailest Thing's Michael Sacasas commits himself to a new regimen of blogging about technology and its imports. (There is a Patreon.)


• Language Hat notes the current Turkish government's interest in purging Turkish of Western loanwords.


• Language Log's Victor Mair sums up the evidence for the diffusion of Indo-European languages, and their speakers, into India.


• The LRB Blog notes the Theresa May government's inability post-Grenfell to communicate with any sense of emotion.


• Marginal Revolution's Tyler Cowen wonders if the alt-right more prominent in the Anglophone world because it is more prone to the appeal of the new.


• Personal Reflections' Jim Belshaw wonders if Brexit will result in a stronger European Union and a weaker United Kingdom.


• Seriously Science reports a study suggesting that shiny new headphones are not better than less flashy brands.


• Torontoist reports on the anti-Muslim hate groups set to march in Toronto Pride.


• Understanding Society considers the subject of critical realism in sociological analyses.


• Window on Eurasia notes how Russia's call to promote Cyrillic across the former Soviet Union has gone badly in Armenia, with its own script.

The port district of Rio de Janeiro is one of the areas most affected by urban interventions connected to the August 2016 Olympics. Until very recently, business groups, politicians, investors and the mainstream media saw the port district as a devalued and degraded space, isolated from the rest of the city. In fact, the entire region had low market value and was of little interest for real estate investments, commercial transactions and services. Even the port itself was of little significance when compared to other Brazilian ports. Therefore, the region was located “outside” the process of capitalist accumulation.

This situation changed completely in November 2009. About a month after Rio de Janeiro was chosen to host the Olympics, the Porto Maravilha project became public. This project catalyzed actions and economic, political and cultural expectations, restructuring the entire port district in order to create value.

Contrary to appearances, this phenomenon is not new. It is a new venue for a history that repeats itself. In its various stages, the port of Rio de Janeiro was marked by different landmarks of capitalist dynamic that both repelled and attracted spaces, processes and market relations, according to the needs of accumulation. This is a history marked by actors, forces and social pressures alternating in a continuous movement of commodification, decommodification and re-commodification – of people, goods and activities.

Since Rosa Luxemburg, in fact, Marxist political economists have realized that the accumulation of capital is not limited to a purely economic process between capitalists and workers in the production of surplus value. Seeing as only a relative portion of the surplus value can be appropriated in this internal transit, the system must make use of a non-capitalist “outside” to completely appropriate it.

Accordingly, the system makes use of explicit non-economic violence, including colonial or imperial policies, dispossessions, bloody legislation etc. There is, in other words, a repeated primitive accumulation throughout the history of capitalism. This repetition is required by capitalist expansion itself, which must commodify not yet commodified spaces in order to develop.

The various historical stages of this phenomenon are evident in the port district of Rio de Janeiro, as this space is incorporated in and uncoupled from a process that transforms socially constructed spaces into merchandise.

From its creation until the nineteenth century, the port took part in the classical patterns of primitive accumulation by integrating Brazil into world capitalism through the outflow of sugar, then gold and coffee, in addition to the inflow of manufactured goods and a contingent of about two million Africans that were kidnapped, enslaved and traded. This port received the highest number of enslaved Africans in the entire American continent. The right to provide such service was restricted to a private contractor: the Governor’s brother.

However, since its beginnings, the physical space of the port was itself integrated into various forms of accumulation. The first major traffic increase took place in the early seventeenth century and was connected to the outflow of sugar. In 1618, this traffic led Governor Rui Vaz Pinto to publish a legal decree establishing the use of black slaves to load and unload ships. It was clearly a mechanism meant to take over the space to create value, as only slaveholders were able to load goods in the port. This decree also represented the beginning of regular stevedoring services and established their legal system, namely the privilege or monopoly, since the right to provide such service was restricted to a private contractor: the Governor’s brother.

Some scholars think that the Portuguese followed up these voyages with an attempt to found a colony, a theory which is associated with the name of João Alvares Fagundes. A native of the town of Viana, Portugal, Fagundes probably explored the south coast of Newfoundland in 1520, and may have entered the Gulf of St. Lawrence - though some scholars do not think he went so far west. He received a captaincy to the lands which he had found and then, some think, began to implement plans for a Portuguese colony in the New World.

The story is that, finding Newfoundland too cold, the settlers found another location further to the west. Samuel Eliot Morison (1978) thought that the colony was established at Ingonish, Cape Breton, and other locations have been suggested. Robert McGhee (1991), for instance, has suggested Mira Bay, between Glace Bay and Louisbourg. It is thought that the colony failed because of the hostility of local Natives. Whether this story is true cannot be established, given the evidence currently available.

In 1525, navigator Joao Alvarez Fagundes and some entrepreneurs from the port city of Viana, Portugal, formed an expedition to found a colony on Cape Breton Island -- at the edge of Mi'kmaq country. Commissioned by Portugal's kind, their "large ship and a caravel" sailed to the Azores Islands just west of Portugal (where ten families of settlers came on board) then crossed the Atlantic to the Bahamas, and coasted north until reaching Cape Breton. It seems they established their settlement somewhere on the island's north side, at Glace Bay or St. Anne Bay, "where there are many people and goods of much value and many nuts ... whereby it is clear the soil is rich" (Souza 1570, in Biggar 1911: 195-97)." (45)

The fierce character of the Mi'kmaq was remarked by Europeans through the centuries. Jean Alfonse claimed that the short-lived Portuguese colony established on Cape Breton Island in the 1520s was wiped out by "the natives of the country [who] put an end to the attempt, and killed all of those who came there".12 The Norman merchant, Etienne Bellenger, who undertook a trading voyage to the Maritimes in 1583, noted about the Natives there that "in divers places they are gentle and tractable. But those about Cape Briton and threescore or fowerscore leagues Westward are more cruell and subtill of norture than the rest. And you are not to trust them but to stond upon your gard" (Quinn 1962: 341).

Picture a city with an iconic golden bridge, trams, bronzed surfers and a vibrant technology industry. San Francisco? Definitely. But what about Lisbon?

The Portuguese capital already has the bridge, trams and surfers. Now it's starting to show off its tech strength too, with a raft of startups in Lisbon catching the attention of international investors.

Uniplaces was founded three years ago and finds accommodation for students across 38 countries. It has won backing from renowned angels such as Alex Chesterman, founder of Zoopla, and European venture capital firms including Octopus Investments.

Andre Albuquerque, head of growth at Uniplaces, thinks the Lisbon-San Francisco comparison is a valid one. "It's a booming environment and I see a lot of similarities from the energy of the people who are in both cities."

• blogTO notes that this year, the Canadian National Exhibition will host more high-calorie culinary atrocities.


• Centauri Dreams considers the final pass of Cassini around Saturn's Dione.


• Crooked Timber considers the opportunity costs of war.


• The Dragon's Tales looks at the war in Donbas.


• Personal Reflections' Jim Belshaw notes the Chinese-led revival of the Silk Road as a trans-Eurasian rail route from Poland.


• Spacing describes the funiculars of Portugal.


• Torontoist celebrates Summerworks.


• Towleroad reports on Zachary Quinto's arguments about safer sex techniques.


• The Volokh Conspiracy advances an argument against immigration restrictions.


• Why I Love Toronto shares more local Toronto craftsmakers.

Before a recent religious procession here, a wooden statue of the Holy Christ of Miracles was draped in a new cape, but with a distinctly non-Portuguese twist: images of Canadian maple leaves were woven into its silk and velvet embroidery.

The leaves were more than just a token offering for one of Portugal’s most important feast days, but a reminder of how this archipelago in the middle of the Atlantic has spawned a far-flung and influential diaspora, concentrated in the United States and Canada, whose ties home remain vital even generations later.

About a million North Americans were born in or descend from the Azores — four times the current population of these islands. Each year, thousands of former residents return to the Azores for the feast day in May to give thanks to the Christ of Miracles for helping them on their travels.

“This is the feast that symbolizes the hardship of the islands that they left and their opportunity to give thanks for having managed the difficult journey,” said Mario Silva, the cape’s donor, a former politician who was the first Portuguese-born member of the Canadian Parliament.

[. . .]

“I don’t think there’s another place in Europe with a diaspora that has kept such an intense relationship with the U.S.,” said Gonçalo Matias, director of the Migration Observatory, a Lisbon-based institute that monitors Portuguese migration.

In its most common definition, Macaronesia consists of four island groups, belonging to three different countries: the Azores, the Madeira Islands [5] (both Portuguese possessions), the Canary Islands (Spain), and the independent archipelago of Cape Verde.

The name refers to the Fortunate Islands, a.k.a. the Islands of the Blessed (makaron nesoi), situated by ancient Greek legend beyond the Pillars of Hercules, in the Atlantic Ocean. As is the case with Atlantis, the precise mix of fact and fiction is hard to untangle in the case of the Fortunate Islands.

Perhaps those Greek legends were based on actual knowledge of the Canaries or other nearby islands. But their location beyond the horizon of the Greek world provided them with mythical qualities: island paradises rich in fowl and flowers, last resting place of heroes. According to Pliny the Elder, the only drawbacks were the “putrefying bodies of monsters, which are constantly thrown up by the sea.”

In later centuries, the Greek legends of happy faraway lands beyond the sea were conflated with similar Celtic legends (Avalon, Tir na nOg), with Viking explorations of Vinland and even with the Antilles.

At that very beginning of decolonisation in Asia, the Portuguese dictator Salazar found a lot to like in what was happening in the British-ruled port city — its new Legislative Council included only six (later nine) elected seats out of twenty-five, and only British subjects were eligible to vote. Meanwhile the colonial system remained dominant. Salazar figured this an excellent model for the four-centuries-old Estado da India Portuguesa.

Even after the Council yielded to a fully-elected Assembly, and the UK Parliament passed the 1958 State of Singapore Act accepting the establishment of an independent state, Salazar still looked for a Singapore-type solution to the increasingly thorny Goa crisis, as Nehru and Krishna Menon grew progressively restive about the last colonial "pimple disfiguring the face of India". The Portuguese dangled promise of a NATO port at Mormugao to his allies, and it took a Russian veto to stymie the US/UK-led United Nations resolution demanding withdrawal of Indian troops after their mercifully bloodless takeover in 1961.

In the immediate aftermath of Indian annexation, the Goan freedom fighter (he famously got into a fistfight with the colonial Governor General) António Anastásio Bruto da Costa led a group demanding "Goan Goa" with "full sovereignty" to be achieved via "natural right to a plebiscite." This "third force" also looked to Singapore as a model of what might be possible in Goa.

With those political questions resolved, visions of Singapore continue dancing in the minds of a very wide range of contemporary observers of India's smallest state. As India Today — the national media outlet that gets Goa most consistently wrong — ludicrously put it in 2013, "the steady march of urbanisation, experts predict, will turn tiny Goa into a Singapore-like city state miraculously untouched by the woes of overpopulation and urbanisation."

Why these supercharged fantasies for famously laid-back Goa? Perhaps the promise of manageable size, with per-capita GDP and human development statistics dramatically higher than the neighbours? Both Singapore and Goa are centuries-old pockets of globalisation, with relatively cosmopolitan leanings. If it could happen there, it could logically follow that it can also happen here.