Suchergebnisse

In the middle of the nineteenth century, the three Southeast Asian societies of Thailand, Burma, and Vietnam were confronted rather suddenly with a large and growing foreign demand for their principal product, rice. Without detailing the development of this demand, we may note that during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European countries had begun not only to consume large amounts of rice as a cheap dietary staple, but also to make use of it in the brewing industry, as a supplement to wheat in flour products, as a starch for sizing textiles, and as feed for livestock. At the start of the nineteenth century, new milling and processing techniques enabled European consumers to look abroad for their rice needs, and the Indian provinces of Bengal and Madras and portions of the southern United States became major sources of supply. Towards the middle of the century, the Indian Mutiny and the American Civil War disrupted these sources at a time when improvements in transportation were making it possible for European importers to purchase their rice in even more distant areas, primarily Southeast Asia.

This paper is an attempt to apply an analysis of negative freedom to the position of handicapped people. Negative freedom is defined in terms of both possibility and eligibility of action and, in addition, the emphasis is placed upon the intention of human agents to restrict action (or the omission to prevent such restriction). This analysis of freedom is applied to the areas of prevention of handicap and the employment, access problems, and education of handicapped people in Britain. The conclusion is that, though we recognize that aspects of handicapping conditions inevitably restrict some activities, handicapped people are, either through intention or omission, less free than the able-bodied.