McGill-Queen's University Press

Awash in a sea of rum describes the years between the 1670s and the 1830s in the colonies that would later become Canada. Millions of litres of the sugar-based liquor were imported every year to supply a comparatively small population of colonists and Indigenous people. Why rum, and why so muc? um was cheap and plentiful. Intimately connected to the West Indian slave plantation complex, rum shipped to early Canada and around the Atlantic World was part of the early modern expansion of intercontinental trade known as the first globalization. Canada in the Age of Rum shows what happened to the vast quantities that came to Canadian shores. Rum was especially important to workers in the early Canadian staples industries. Fishermen and fur-trade voyageurs drank rum in massive quantities, supplied on credit and at grossly inflated prices by their employers, an arrangement that served to claw back wages and ensure the profitability of enterprises that would not have been viable otherwise. Traders deliberately sought to get hunting peoples hooked on rum in order to ensure a steady supply of pelts – alcohol was not so much a commodity for sale as it was a gift used to induce hunters to conform to the ways of the capitalist economy. However, Indigenous people drank rum in their own ways and for their own reasons; and when drinking became a serious social problem, they organized to resist it. The story ends in the 1830s when the combined effects of the temperance movement and the rise of whisky led to a sharp decline in rum consumption. This brilliant history follows the thread of a single commodity from West Indian plantations to Newfoundland, Quebec, and the west, revealing rum as a critical lubricant of the social life of early Canada and its particular version of early capitalism.

Eastern Poland’s inclusion in the Soviet Union through the 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact initiated the local Ukrainian population’s long and bloody resistance to Soviet rule. Even after the end of the Second World War, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) persisted in their fight for an independent Ukrainian state. The continued confrontations between the Ukrainian underground and the Soviet security service lasted until the late 1950s. While existing scholarship has focussed on the political aspects of this conflict, women’s participation in opposing Sovietization is largely ignored. Women in the Ukrainian Underground foregrounds women’s experience in the resistance movement during the conflict with the Soviet secret service between 1944 and 1954. Olena Petrenko describes various methods and waves of women’s mobilization in the OUN and the UPA, and examines women’s role as agents in the underground struggle. The book also considers female sexuality as an instrument of power and gendered experiences of violence. Petrenko’s examination of archival records challenges stereotypes of female insurgents as bloodthirsty, easily compromised, or unthinking subordinates and considers women’s representation in film and literature. Changes in memorialization practices demonstrate how the perception of women’s activities in the nationalist underground has been shaped by competing historical views – in the USSR, among Ukrainian exiles, in post-Soviet Ukraine, and in Russia. Drawing on both Soviet and underground documents, as well as oral histories, Women in the Ukrainian Underground depicts the fates of the individual women involved in fighting communism.

Literatures of small nations represent a minuscule portion of the global literary marketplace, where books written in English outnumber translated works. The struggle for visibility in relation to dominant languages and cultures is not new in Slovakia, a nation of five million whose literary history has been shaped by the influence of more widely spoken languages including Hungarian, Czech, and Russian. Home and the World in Slovak Writing brings Slovak literature out of this isolation to tell the story of how a nation's literature can survive and thrive despite a small domestic audience and relatively limited circulation in English translation. The book demonstrates how historic events such as the post-Stalin Thaw, the Prague Spring, and the Velvet Revolution moulded the Slovak canon and situates contemporary Slovak literature in broader regional and global contexts. Through case studies of the transformations and adaptations of Slovak literature, contributors examine the changing social roles of writers, the tensions between tradition and innovation, and the dynamic interactions between influences from the outside world and domestic sources of inspiration. Home and the World in Slovak Writing maps the relationship between geopolitical destiny and literary production at a critical moment. As relations between the East and the West are destabilized by war, the question of cultural identity has again become a matter of national survival in Central Europe.