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While historians have analyzed and discussed the fragmentation of life in transatlantic societies by focusing on economics, law, or politics, we propose that a focus on biomedicine in the period since 1970 adds important perspectives on the shifting public role of science and of medicine. Biomedicine (the convergence of biological research and of medicine within the life sciences) moved to the center of public debates after the end of the Cold War. The papers in this special issue highlight how it became a prism through which societies, governments, and states renegotiated the roles of the medical and scientific professions, the opportunities, risks, and limits associated with scientific research and medical technologies, the responsibilities of individuals and of the professions in making life-or-death decisions, and important norms shaping the lives of individuals, families, and communities. Historians have analyzed and discussed the impact of market-oriented governing rationalities and of shifting discourses about the societal roles of individuals by focusing on politics, economics, or law. The contributors to this special issue propose to expand the focus towards biomedicine in order to include developments that otherwise would remain distinct from evolving narratives in recent contemporary history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By exploring the career of the German forester Johann Albrecht v. Monroy from the 1920s to the 1950s, this article seeks to further differentiate and expand the historiography on development. It reveals that experts like Monroy who were deeply involved in the National Socialist quest for hegemony in Europe took an active part in shaping the Food and Agriculture Organization's (FAO) forest-related development activities after the Second World War. The article provides two explanations why Monroy became a lauded development pioneer: Firstly, he was a widely acknowledged and well-connected member of a transatlantic expert community that he had helped to shape in the 1920s and 1930s. Secondly, he enormously benefitted from German expansionist policies. In the 1930s, Monroy became a senior official responsible for turning forestry and wood processing industries into a central branch of Germany's war economy. During the war, he was in charge to establish the most modern wood processing plant in Slovakia. Monroy based this project on a specific approach to development that he had elaborated since the mid-1930s and that adapted schemes shaped for colonial contexts to the very special international environment of German-controlled Europe. That Monroy could realize this project in Slovakia turned him into an expert wanted by the FAO due to an almost unrivalled experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on decolonization in settler contexts is characterized by an almost exclusive focus on the Anglo-French world, and by a marked emphasis on violence as the predominant feature of the settlers' reaction to change. This article aims to challenge this assumption. Eritrea – like the other former Italian colonies – is certainly a peculiar case of early, top-down decolonization; but the actors on the field were anything but passive spectators. In the 10 years in which the international community decided the fate of Eritrea, there were a lively political confrontation and an armed struggle with anti-colonial nuances, while the settlers organized themselves politically to defend their interests. The complex variety of strategies with which they reacted to the end of colonial power constitutes an example of the non-binary relationship between former colonizers and former colonized; it enriches our knowledge of how whites reacted to decolonization in Africa; and it helps to complicate the monolithic idea of settlers as an undifferentiated transnational category. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]