jack@CS.GLASGOW.AC.UK (Jack Campin) (01/18/90)
I got into a dispute about Panama in a Usenet discussion recently, and couldn't get to the bottom of the issue with the resources I could find. I was curious about the human costs of building the thing, both in the French and the American phases of construction: - how many workers were involved? - how many of them died? - where did they come from? - why? how were they recruited? - what were working conditions and labour relations like? I have only found sketchy answers to these questions in the stuff in our local library (whereas balance sheets and cubic yards of earth shifted are covered in minute detail). By far the worst offenders are political histories of Panama written by American academics, who simply don't mention the well-nigh genocidal death toll of the enterprise at all. So, has anybody looked at the Canal from this viewpoint? -- Jack Campin * Computing Science Department, Glasgow University, 17 Lilybank Gardens, Glasgow G12 8QQ, SCOTLAND. 041 339 8855 x6044 wk 041 556 1878 ho INTERNET: jack%cs.glasgow.ac.uk@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk USENET: jack@glasgow.uucp JANET: jack@uk.ac.glasgow.cs PLINGnet: ...mcvax!ukc!cs.glasgow.ac.uk!jack