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Recent studies have stressed the need for micro-histories of the environment so that important differences and similarities at local, regional and national level might be revealed. This paper analyses the process and patterns of environmental degradation at regional level by taking the case of deforestation in colonial Punjab by studying its implication at the level of empire. More specifically, it examines three aspects of how the operation and expansion of railways from 1869 to 1884, a peak period of railway expansion, affected the forests of the Punjab's plains. First, the paper analyses the reasons for large-scale railway expansion in the Punjab by discussing spatial and temporal expansion. Secondly, the impact of the railway firewood demand on the Punjab's forests between 1860 and 1884 is examined, specifically, the conditions that facilitated the increased dependence of the railways on firewood. Next follows an examination of the temporally varying nature of deforestation, given that railway firewood demand was determined by railway line openings. This section also includes a discussion on the nature of the colonial state response to the deforestation crisis and its role in maintaining the fuel supply to the railways. Finally, in the context of deforestation in the Punjab, the paper discusses how and why railway fuel changed from firewood to coal. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper traces the establishment of standardized railway time in colonial India between 1854 and 1905, and explores how the colonized—as passengers and population—negotiated the temporal re-structuring introduced through railways. Millions were affected by the process through which the time of a single meridian was selected as an all-India railway time, and gradually deemed civil time, continuing even today as Indian Standard Time. The paper explores everyday responses to this dramatic change in ‘time-sense’ engendered through railways, both as speedy transport and as standardized time. This allows for a historical analysis of how individuals and societies deal in practice with abstract technological transformations, and of how colonized populations have navigated the modernizing intervention of imperialist states. It argues that the ways in which the population of colonial India accepted, contested, and appropriated the temporal standardization instituted through railways and railway time challenged imperial policies determined by reified presumptions of metropolitan versus colonial ‘time-sense’. Since these responses were often analogous to how people and societies across the globe were responding to temporal standardization, they disrupt imperial strategies that used time-sense to locate colonized populations outside of History, in effect excluding them from their own present. They thus serve to materially de-stabilize a narrative of colonial time-lag and to reclaim the historical present as a time in which the colonizer and colonized exist contemporaneously. Consequently, they reconfigure modernity as an experiential rather than as a normative historical present. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the wide domain of finance, taxation is one of the issues to which public opinion is most sensitive. This paper explores why tax reform was hotly debated in Japan throughout the 1920s, focusing on the policies of the two main political parties. Though a topic rarely treated by historians, this controversy reveals a wealth of information on the concerns that lay behind policy choices in years that were marked by economic instability and social unrest; it shows, in particular, how the ruling elites tried to attenuate class conflict by enhancing the redistributive function of taxes, which had thus far been subordinated to the encouragement of rapid economic growth and the financing of state investment. While these attempts deserve attention as tentative steps towards the development of a welfare state, their limits indicate that the parties, in spite of extending the suffrage during this period, retained strong links with a restricted network of established constituents. This paper dwells especially on the earliest and least studied phase of the dispute on tax reform, in order to prove that the emergence of distinct party platforms did not stem simply from tactical considerations, but was rooted in broader policy visions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper sheds light on the long-distance politics of a small and rather young diaspora—the Acehnese overseas—which proved to be very influential on homeland politics despite its relatively small size, especially with regard to the separatist conflict in Aceh, Indonesia. Special attention is therefore given to the close connections between the politicized migrant population overseas and their involvement back home. Born out of the suffering of people in Aceh and in Malaysia—the main destiny for refugees—the Acehnese overseas started to organize informal associations and networks to foster mutual support. During the almost 30-year-long conflict, material, financial, and other forms of support were directed not only to members of the diaspora, but also to people in Aceh, as well as the separatists, which enabled them to continue their struggle for Aceh's independence from Indonesia. Unlike larger conflict-generated diasporas that can afford to send home large sums of money, the Acehnese diaspora's greatest strength was the ideological and moral support they provided to people back in Aceh. The evolution of the diaspora and its activities were closely linked to developments in the homeland. By emphasizing the dependence of diasporas on homeland developments, which dictates the level of their political engagement, this paper draws attention to the diaspora's support for both the perpetuation of conflict and conflict resolution. After the end of the conflict in 2005, the diaspora lost its prominent role, and became involved in rudimentary forms of long-distance engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper makes the case that in China's most severe food crisis of the first quarter of the twentieth century—the great north China famine of 1920–1921—considerable life-saving relief was generated by three largely-neglected segments of Chinese society: Buddhist and other native charity efforts working along parallel social channels to the better-publicized missionary and international relief groups; the Republic's much-maligned military establishment; and officials and residents of the stricken communities themselves who were operating largely ‘below the radar’ of the distant, mostly city-based chroniclers of the famine whose voices have been privileged in the later history-writing process. Despite the recent fall of the Qing and the beginnings of a fractured era of warring between provincial governors, this paper suggests that communities in the increasingly neglected periphery of 1920 north China were significantly more viable and attentive to social welfare needs than has been previously recognized. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since 1991, the absence of the concept of a Ukrainian nation and national identity has led to a controversial, often ambivalent process of identity formation. The aim of this paper is to analyze and map the widely shared concepts about national identity that exist in Ukrainian society after 20 years of independence. Analysis of 43 interviews with Ukrainian political and intellectual elites reveals five different shared narratives: (1) dual identity; (2) being pro-Soviet; (3) a fight for Ukrainian identity; (4) a recognition of Ukrainian identity; and (5) a multicultural-civic concept. Each narrative is characterized by three main features: a coherent structure with strong internal logic and justification of its legitimacy; connection to a specific conception of power and morality; and an opposition to other narratives. All these features lead to the perception of society as a zero-sum game where one narrative must prevail over all others. At the same time, all these features ensure that there can be neither an overwhelming victory of one narrative over others nor a satisfying compromise between them. The results shed light on the complex process of narrative construction of identity and power in newly independent states. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The test tank broadly embodied the late nineteenth-century endeavour to ‘use science’ in industry, but the meaning given to the tank differed depending on the experienced communities that made it part of their experimental and engineering practices. This paper explores the local politics surrounding three tanks: William Froude's test tank located on his private estate in Torquay (1870), the Denny tank in Dumbarton (1884) and the University of Michigan test tank (1903). The similarities and peculiarities of test tank use and interpretation identified in this paper reveal the complexities of naval science and contribute to the shaping of an alternative model of replication. This model places the emphasis on actors at sites of replication that renegotiated the meaning of the original Froude tank, and re-placed the local values and conditions which made it a functional instrument of scientific investigation. All the European [test tank] stations are modelled on the station at Haslar; [yet] each station had its own individuality which I will try to throw into relief, avoiding tedious repetitions or comparisons.1 [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

During its centennial celebrations in 2008, the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology (MVZ) at the University of California, Berkeley paid homage to its founding director, Joseph Grinnell. Recognized as a leading scientific institution, the MVZ managed to grow throughout the twentieth century, a period often characterized by the decline of natural history. To understand how and why research flourished at the MVZ, this paper looks closely at Grinnell's undergraduate course, the Natural History of the Vertebrates (NHV). Taught by MVZ affiliates since 1914, the NHV offers an important window on Grinnell's approach and legacy. This paper argues that the NHV contributed to the MVZ's long-term success by acting as, first, a gateway to natural history; second, a vector for the MVZ's research programme; and third, a shared faculty responsibility. Grinnell's significance in the history of science is understated, in part because his writing style de-emphasized the importance of his theoretical contributions, including his development of the niche concept, his emphasis on population thinking and geographic isolation in studies of evolution, and his effort to integrate speciation questions and genetics. Studying the NHV highlights these contributions because Grinnell freely communicated his ideas to his students. An analysis of Grinnell's course material shows that his theoretical and methodological approach pre-dated the evolutionary synthesis and inspired natural-history research throughout the past century. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the demise of the Crompton Company, which filed for bankruptcy in October 1984, causing 2,450 workers in five states to lose their jobs. Crompton was founded in 1807 in Providence, Rhode Island and when it went out of business it was the oldest textile firm in the country, having been in continuous operation for 178 years. Despite its history, scholars have overlooked Crompton, partly because most work on deindustrialization has concentrated on heavy manufacturing industries, especially steel and automobiles. I argue that Crompton's demise throws much light on the broader decline of the American textile and apparel industry, which has lost over two million jobs since the mid-1970s, and shows that textiles deserve a more central place in the literature. Using company papers, this study shows that imports played the central role in causing Crompton's decline, although there were also other problems, including the strong dollar, declining exports, and a reluctance to diversify, which contributed to it. The paper also explores broader trends, including the earlier flight of the industry from New England to the South and the industry's unsuccessful campaign to pass import-restriction legislation, a fight in which Crompton's managers were very involved. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

All the elements of twentieth-century politics in Tamilnadu cohere in 1918–1919: human and natural rights, women's rights, the labor movement, linguistic nationalism, and even the politics of caste reservation. Much has been written of how this politics was mediated by newspapers, handbills, and chapbooks, and the dominant narrative of such events privileges the circulation of print and print culture of vernacular language. This paper explores the relatively lesser-known story of the role and impact of vernacular oratory on the development of the mass political in Tamilnadu from the Swadeshi movement (1905–1908) to the formation of labor unions (1917–1919), and the explicit attempt to persuade non-elites into speech, action, and ultimately politics. I argue that Tamil oratory was an infrastructural element in the production of the political, at least the political as we understand it in twentieth-century Tamilnadu, where oratory became the defining activity of political practice. When elites made the conscious move to begin addressing the common man, when Everyman was called to join into the political, a new agency was formed along with a new definition of what politics would look like. The paper considers what such new agency and definitions entail in pursuit of a better understanding of what constitutes the political generally and the Tamil political in particular. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The construction of New Belgrade as the new capital of socialist Yugoslavia was the most symbolic modernizing act initiated by the country's communist government. Yet, its precise meanings were suspended between the complicated and permanently transitory concepts of socialist Yugoslavia's federalism and its international aspirations. Focusing on three characteristic "snapshots" of the city's physical development, this paper analyzes how New Belgrade and its most important buildings represented the shifting concepts of socialist Yugoslavia as a multiethnic community and its even more changeable place in the world. The first snapshot deals with the years immediately following World War II, during which New Belgrade was conceived as the seat of a centralized Stalinist state in close alliance with the USSR. The second deals with the effects of Yugoslavia's break from the Soviet bloc in 1948, especially its rapprochement with the West and the start of the decentralization of the federal state. Finally, the third explores the late socialist period: the dwindling of New Belgrade's role as the political heart of the federation, and at the same time its emergence as a locus of Yugoslavia's ambition to play a leading role in international relations, especially through its activity in the Non-Aligned Movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The mixture of neo-Renaissance and neo-Classical forms of the National Assembly in Belgrade was to become a visual paradigm of the democratic course and national sovereignty of the Kingdom of Serbia, affirming the status of this newly horn nation-state in nineteenth-century Europe. Yet, the interpretation of political messages associated with the building's nineteenth-century architectural features is still in progress. The aim of this paper is to explore how the image of the National Assembly developed into the visual repository of different ideological connotations depending on the character of public events being organized, in the building or in the space in front of it either to support state ideologies or to fight against them. In addition to ideological settings of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this research will focus on political meetings and public gatherings of the post-WWII state constructs, from the socialist federation of Marshal Tito to the more recent emanations of Serbian statehood. Along with analyzing the architectural forms of the building serving in different political contexts, this discussion will illuminate the appropriation of space in front of the building by examining the overall staging of public events which have become embedded in the contrasting layers of a collective memory associated with the same image: the National Assembly as the backdrop. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today's pictures of Belgrade are not much different from late-nineteenth-century descriptions: messy streets, uncompleted infrastructure projects, lack of coordinated urban plans and strategies. No doubt all of this shows that the weak Serbian society never raised sufficient funds to invest in a glamorous-looking capital city. The most frequent excuse to justify the poor-looking conditions of the national capital has been found in the nation's struggle to fulfill an uncompleted project for national unification. For more than two centuries, the modern Serbian elite has remained unsatisfied with current national boundaries. This paper will address the question of how those unfulfilled national aspirations can be detected in the urban fabric of Belgrade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates some key questions regarding the socio-cultural implications of a relatively understudied print media, the literary miscellany, its production and consumption in early twentieth century British Bengal. Through a study of Ramananda Chattopadhyay's Prabāsī, a major literary journal that set the trend of sacitra māsik patrikā or illustrated monthly magazine in Bāṅglā, its literary innovations and editorial interventions, this paper explores how periodical reading and the notions of aesthetics and culture that it cultivated became intimately tied up with questions of middle class identity and class differentiation. It shows how this pioneering sacitra patrikā came to command a literary and visual space that, by the time of the Swadeshi years, was conceived as co-extensive with the future sovereign nation. Problematizing notions of a quotidian practice like leisure-reading that had become integral to the lifestyles of an expanding middle class, this study shows how Prabāsī not only lent new meanings to ideas of sustained interest and participation in public life amongst its readers, but that it also represented a self-consciously, high-brow cultural sensitivity that the Bengali bhadralok were to claim and safeguard as their own. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In terms of circulation and sales of albums, the most popular pop music found in mainland China today is the Mandopop imported from Taiwan. The pop music that is genuinely locally produced in China by mainland producers and artists, and which is most notable to the outside world is probably the Chinese rock music and the wave of ‘northwest wind’ pop music produced locally in China in the late 1980s. However, after 2005, there emerged a new kind of Chinese pop that is commercially successful and a product of the national Pop Idol-like singing contest. This paper describes and explicates the broad popularity of this new wave of Chinese pop. Putting aside the overly discussed topic of democracy that comes out of such politicised Supergirl contests, this paper focuses on the nature of the melody and lyrics of pop idol winner Chris Li's songs and how their unique formulation evolves into an important ‘short wave’ of Chinese pop. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper is intended to provide an outline of how the lead and line formed a vital, but often overlooked, role in safe navigation during the 16th Century, with some comments on its later use up to, and into the 20th Century. During this period, the development of the more mathematical dead-reckoning and the more exciting astro-navigation attracted the attention of the literate commentators who were responsible for record keeping while the often illiterate sailors got on with practising their craft. Also, May (1970), has commented that, “the navigators during the great age of discovery must have made extensive use of the lead and line, but references are extremely sparse, for all their rough log-books were destroyed and only the most important references to their navigational proceedings were copied into the fair accounts of their voyages which have come down to us.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Leo Tolstoy was one of the most prolific religious figures of his time. Yet his religious thought and its influence have seldom been explored by church historians. Drawing upon themes within his literature, non-fiction and previously unconsidered primary sources, this paper considers Tolstoy's religious position in relation to other similar nineteenth-century religious movements. It exposes Tolstoy's links with British Unitarians and also considers Tolstoy's influence upon the founder of Britain's first interfaith organisation, the World Congress of Faiths. It is argued that Tolstoy provides a paradigmatic example by which to examine the relationship between the legacy of the Enlightenment and changing attitudes towards non-Christian religions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Responding to calls to 'decenter' American penality beyond the carceral apparatus, this article ethnographically examines administrative process and dissects how it interlocks with criminal justice. To do so, it draws on an admittedly unusual, but theoretically generative, case: administrative gun boards, charged with issuing, denying, revoking, and suspending licenses to conceal carry a firearm. While scholars have examined gun ownership and gun carrying as a social practice, less attention has been paid to gun licensing as a state practice. Drawing on observations of over 900 cases from gun board meetings in two counties in Michigan, this paper examines how administrative process mimics, supplements, and facilitates criminal justice through three mechanisms: procedural pains, in which administrative process resembles criminal justice; parallel punishment, in which administrative process supplements criminal justice through withholding of benefits, entitlements or licenses; and valve-turning, in which administrative process funnels, or threatens to funnel, claimants into the criminal justice system. Revealing how administrative process and criminal justice become mutually reinforcing, the findings extend and integrate scholarship that shows the material, symbolic, and psychic implications of criminal justice contact, on the one hand, with the increased tendency of administrative contexts to resemble criminal justice institutions, on the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historical accounts of the evolution of child labor are limited to the United States and to the core European economies. The experience of countries outside the prosperous European core has rarely been investigated. This paper draws on data from censii, labor force, and household surveys and qualitative information such as the testimonies of various stakeholders and news articles to provide an analysis of the evolution of child labor in Portugal. The Portuguese experience is set against the backdrop of the country's economic structure and economic growth, demographic changes, educational expansion and schooling, and labor legislation. Our assessment suggests that the longrun evolution of child labor in Portugal was determined mainly by the needs of the economic structure of the country and it was the progressive adoption of skill-biased technologies that pushed children away from work. While the passage of compulsory schooling and minimum working-age laws may have provided additional impetus, they were not the main drivers as changes in these laws tended to follow declines in child labor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper focuses on the work of Lorenz Oken (1779–1851) in an attempt to make sense of the role played by Romantic Naturphilosophie in the development of natural history in Germany at the turn of the nineteenth century. It first focuses on the role played by Schelling and his Würzburg circle in the development of Oken's early views on natural history, then reconstructs Oken's mature programme for a reform of animal classification. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Archaeologists have long debated the potential role of iconographic repertoires in reconstructing prehistoric ontologies and symbolic systems. The rich and complex imagery unearthed at Pre-Pottery Neolithic Göbekli Tepe (Turkey) has offered a promising ground to address this issue further. Previous interpretations have focused on the symbolic meaning of the depictions, often highlighting their male-centred and violent connotations, while overlooking the spatial and performative contexts of the depictions. This paper engages with this scholarly work in order to propose a new interpretation based on the anthropological framework of relational ontologies and on the analysis of some stylistic and contextual aspects of the iconography. Based on these premises, the curvilinear enclosures of Göbekli Tepe are interpreted as places of encounter devoted to interpersonal relationships among human and non-human agents, enabled by the intermediary role of images. The use of particular techniques of visual representation--including cues of motion and an emphasis on threedimensionality--along with the centripetal orientation of the animal figures contributed to the animation of the depicted animals and to a sense of convergence of human and nonhuman beings in the social space of the enclosures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fragments of possible fired clay found at Boncuklu Höyük, central Turkey, appear to derive from rudimentary vessels, despite the later ninth- and early eighth-millennium cal. BC and thus 'Aceramic' dates for the site. This paper will examine the evidence for such fired clay vessels at Boncuklu and consider their implications as examples of some of the earliest pottery in Anatolia. The discussion will examine contextual evidence for the role of these fragments and consider their relative rarity at the site and the implications for the marked widespread adoption of pottery in southwest Asia c. 7000-6700 cal. BC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The prominence of the island city of Corcyra in Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War presents a puzzle. It appears in the opening of the work in a conflict with its mother city Corinth (1.24–31), after which representatives of both Corinth and Corcyra deliver speeches at Athens (1.32–44). Further conflict between the two cities follows, with Athens supporting Corcyra (1.45–55). Later on, Thucydides depicts two unusually graphic episodes of stasis at Corcyra (3.70–85, 4.46–8). This prominence is surprising, given that the historian himself explicitly states that the initial set of events involving the island does not in fact represent the beginning of the war (1.66.1), and that the Corcyrean stasis is not the first in the war, and that, as has been often observed, it is not even particularly remarkable or influential in it. In what follows, I seek to clarify Thucydides’ use of the island first by exploring ancient views of Corcyra's ‘predecessor’, Homer's Phaeacia, and by arguing that perceptions of the mythical place mirror and reinforce beliefs about its successor Corcyra. An interpretation of Phaeacia as a representative of excess luxury, weakness and friendlessness requires an aggressive reading of Homer. As Rose and others have made clear, however, this position is defensible even if not all readers may choose to accede to it. A significant strand of ancient opinion seems to have adopted a similar attitude as well, perhaps projecting a fifth-century prejudice identified by Rusten back onto Corcyra's Homeric forerunner. In the second part of this paper, I argue that this background influences Thucydides’ presentation of Corcyra, and that the historian emphasizes the story of the island in order to illustrate a pattern of extravagant wealth followed by civic collapse that would have been readily recognizable to an ancient audience. The fact that Thucydides’ Corcyra-story traces all the stages of this process, from a nod to Homeric opulence through pre-war selfishness to wartime collapse, effectively explains his conspicuous use of the city. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Hellenistic and Roman acrostich inscriptions are usually full of verbal and visual clues, which point the reader in the direction of the ‘hidden message’ contained in the vertical lines of the text. The authors of such inscriptions want their audiences to appreciate the skill that has gone into their composition. There are several complementary ways in which the presence of an acrostich might be signalled to the reader or viewer and their attention directed towards it. These include direct verbal statements, or more subtle allusions, within the text of the inscription. But, even without having read its text, the viewer of an inscription containing a ‘hidden message’ is often immediately aware that some kind of wordplay is at work. Acrostichs, palindromes and various kinds of word square are all graphically striking, or their appearance may be enhanced to make them more so. Regular spacing, the repetition of the acrostich in a separate column and the use of painted or incised grids are all ways in which the layout of the text on the stone can invite the viewer to play a word game. In some cases, as I will argue in this paper, acrostich makers envisaged—even intended—the participants in this game to include the illiterate as well as the literate. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper uses documents generated by the 1594–1595 composiciones de tierras in Cuzco, Peru, to discuss the economic transformation of the former heartland of the Inca Empire and the impact of Spanish administrative policies implemented in the early 1570s. The diverse social and environmental landscapes of rural areas lying to the west of Cuzco provide a range of local case studies that reveal how settlement and tribute policies of the viceroy Francisco de Toledo failed to produce sustainable colonial towns of Christian Indians. Detailed records of indigenous land repartition in the area show gender- and status-based patterns of individual allocations, as well as ecological differences in landholding between communities. The local records indicate the continuing importance of Inca-era community identities and local leadership for maintaining possession of community lands. By contrast, documents related to the composiciones among private landowners reveal vast inequalities in land access, as well as the rapid growth in the demand for indigenous labor to produce important agrarian commodities. We argue that Spanish administrative policies accelerated the transformation of the means of production in rural Cuzco, creating peasants instead of Christian Indian subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Teams from the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH) and the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) have put forth a new chronology for Chichen Itza that challenges recent scholarly opinion favoring a date of roughly a.d. 800/850-1000/1050 for the so-called "Toltec" or Modified Florescent occupation. The new chronology instead argues for the placement of this occupation between a.d. 950-1150, a span favored by scholars prior to the 1970s. This paper presents a critique of the ceramic, radiocarbon, and stratigraphic foundations of these arguments, arguing that, on present evidence, Chichen Itza experienced a tenth-century florescence. Although the site may very well have been occupied into the next century, at present we have no absolute dates after a.d. 1000 and no evidence for later monumental construction. Furthermore, arguments for a proposed hiatus or discontinuity at the onset of the Modified Florescent period are rejected in favor of a model of continued development of Toltec ideas from the late ninth century onward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How “historical” is Canadian political science? This paper sets out to answer this question through an analysis of historically oriented articles that have appeared in this journal from its first volume, in 1968, to 2015. We suggest that historical research in this journal is at once enduring and uneven, a pattern that we then explore in more detail in a case study, spanning forty years, of historical articles that focus on the interconnected themes of the constitution, courts, and federalism. The unevenness of this pattern suggests that the intellectual and methodological foundation of “historical” Canadian political science may not be as firm as it appears. We therefore conclude with a description of some methodological and conceptual tools, originally fashioned within the historically oriented subfield of American political development in the United States, that Canadian political scientists might deploy to probe important and enduring questions of Canadian politics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Revising the diffusionist view of current scholarship on the Pasteur Institutes in China, this paper demonstrates the ways in which local networks and circumstances informed the circulation and construction of knowledge and practices relating to smallpox prophylaxis in the Southwest of China during the early twentieth century. I argue that the Pasteur Institute of Chengdu did not operate in a natural continuity with the preceding local French medical institutions, but rather presented an intentional break from them. This Institute, as the first established by the French in China, strove for political and administrative independence both from the Chinese authority and from the Catholic Church. Yet, its operation realized political independence only partially. The founding of this Institute was also an attempt to satisfy the medical demand for local vaccine production. However, even though the Institute succeeded at producing the Jennerian vaccine locally, its production needed to accommodate local conditions pertaining to the climate, vaccine strains, and animals. Furthermore, vaccination had to conform to Chinese variolation, including its social and medical practices, in order to achieve the collaboration of local Chinese traditional practitioners with French colonial physicians, who were Pastorian-trained and worked at the Pasteur Institute of Chengdu. Thus the nature of the Pastorian work in Chengdu was not an imposition of foreign standards and practices, but rather a mutual compromise and collaboration between the French and the Chinese. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This round table discussion takes the diversity of discourse and practice shaping modern knowledge about childhood as an opportunity to engage with recent historiographical approaches in the history of science. It draws attention to symmetries and references among scientific, material, literary and artistic cultures and their respective forms of knowledge. The five participating scholars come from various fields in the humanities and social sciences and allude to historiographical and methodological questions through a range of examples. Topics include the emergence of children's rooms in US consumer magazines, research on the unborn in nineteenth-century sciences of development, the framing of autism in nascent child psychiatry, German literary discourses about the child's initiation into writing, and the sociopolitics of racial identity in the photographic depiction of African American infant corpses in the early twentieth century. Throughout the course of the paper, childhood emerges as a topic particularly amenable to interdisciplinary perspectives that take the history of science as part of a broader history of knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Scholarly discussion of the abdāl (substitutes) has been limited to their appearance as the members of a saintly hierarchy first alluded to by al-Ḥakīm al-Tirmidhī (d. 295/905–300/910) and systematized by Ibn 'Arabī (d. 638/1240). However, unlike the other members of this hierarchy, the abdāl are also known through the hadith, one of which is attributed to 'Alī b. Abī Ṭālib. This article explores this hitherto unstudied hadith material arguing that the concept originated in hadith circles with a specific purported context, the showdown between the Syrians and Iraqis at the Battle of Ṣiffīn (37/657). A gradual loss of this context went hand-in-hand with the emergence of the mystical saintly abdāl. As monistic Sufism penetrated all elements of Mamluk society, the boundary between the abdāl of the traditionists and of the mystics became porous. This paper concludes with an examination of the ensuing debate on the authenticity of the concept. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The subject of the present paper is a prophetic tradition found in some compendia of eschatological aḥādīth which has received considerable scholarly attention since Wilferd Madelung dedicated an article to it in 1981. Whereas Madelung shares the opinion of earlier scholars that only some of the incidents “prophesied” by this tradition are historical, this study aims to show that it is a wholly ex post facto composition which, in its various strata, remarkably captures episodes from the Zubayrid war of propaganda against their rivals as well as their later attempts to redeem the memory of their lost cause as a just one. The discussion closes by producing a highly singular Syrian tradition most certainly put into circulation with the intent of countering these Zubayrid propaganda efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article aims to fill in some of the lacunae that still exist regarding the Cohuixca ethnicity of the northeastern part of the State of Guerrero. To do so, it introduces a qualitative methodological approach into ethnohistory, which discerns pervasive patterns of special understanding that guided indigenous testimony in the colonial Spanish courtroom. It emphasizes that early colonial Cohuixca testimonies were deeply influenced by what are called, in Western terms, cadastral maps or cartographic histories or, in Nahuatl, amoxtli tlalamatl altepeamatl (“land papers,” titles of each town and district) in the former Cohuixca province of Tepecoacuilco (Cohuixcatlacapan), these geographical elements being heavily reinforced by oral retelling. Therefore, in order to establish a seemingly coherent plot of the past that would overcome fragmentation and chaos, the indigenous witnesses appearing in our sources relied heavily on unique visual schemata that assisted them in assembling the mental shreds and remnants of past experiences to restore them within the traditional framework and formulae of information transmission only modestly affected by the Spanish conquest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the rise of “industrial heritage” and the forms of memorialization proliferating around it. The site is Sesto San Giovanni, Italy's “City of Factories,” which was also a bastion of communist mobilization and which is now bidding to be recognized on UNESCO's world heritage list. Sesto's bid is an attempt not just to recuperate and reinvigorate the landscape of Sesto's ruined factories and its massive, crumbling machinery, but also to capture and render visible and graspable the traces of what this built environment expressed and left behind—the sentiment of solidarity. I thus argue for an understanding of solidarity not just as an emotion or value, but as a structure of feeling mediated by specific material and corporeal forms, in bodies collectively inhabiting a built environment and rhythmically moving within and out of infrastructures and lived landscapes. Such a materialist conception of solidarity must account for bodies and embodiment, rhythm and refrain, as well as for how certain material forms allow for the generation of proximities, coordination, and likeness across difference. It means thinking of solidarity as an arrangement and assembly of bodies in time and space, and of these bodies and their movement as generative of political feeling and action. Based on ethnographic and archival research in Sesto San Giovanni between 2011 and 2013, I tell the story of the afterlife of a twentieth-century sentiment and its fate in an era that has rendered solidarity precarious. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

From the mid-1970s through the mid-1980s, a network of young urban migrant men created an underground pulp fiction publishing industry in the city of Dar es Salaam. As texts that were produced in the underground economy of a city whose trajectory was increasingly charted outside of formalized planning and investment, these novellas reveal more than their narrative content alone. These texts were active components in the urban social worlds of the young men who produced them. They reveal a mode of urbanism otherwise obscured by narratives of decolonization, in which urban belonging was constituted less by national citizenship than by the construction of social networks, economic connections, and the crafting of reputations. This article argues that pulp fiction novellas of socialist era Dar es Salaam are artifacts of emergent forms of male sociability and mobility. In printing fictional stories about urban life on pilfered paper and ink, and distributing their texts through informal channels, these writers not only described urban communities, reputations, and networks, but also actually created them. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Bacheeishdíio ("Place Where Men Pack Meal"), now culled Grapevine Creek in English, is the subject of Crow oral traditions that document the cultural significance of the landscape and celebrate centuries of bison hunting in the drainage. We report an ongoing, community-based project that integrates archaeological field training and research goals into a collaborative indigenous archaeology project supporting the expressed goal of the Crow Tribal Historic Preservation Office to prepare a district-level nomination for the Grapevine Creek drainage basin. This paper describes findings from field investigations that document buffalo jump locales, a previously unreported bison bonebed, and associated archaeological features in the drainage, grounding Crow oral traditions that document buffalo jumps and large-scale bison hunts firmly into the landscape. We take a holistic approach that incorporales multiple lines of evidence to assess the archaeological record associated with bison jumps and bison hunting on the Crow Reservation in southern Montana. Results of this project include an enriched understanding of the Grapevine Creek archaeological record, greater awareness of buffalo hunting strategies on the northwest Plains, and, through field training, enhanced cultural resource management capabilities for the Crow Tribal Historic Preservation Office. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The historical timing and movement of Navajo communities in the U.S. Southwest continué to be key, hut unresolved, issues. This paper analyzes tree-ring data to consider initial Navajo settlement patterns in the Little Colorado River watershed. Black Mesa, and nearby regions in northern Arizona. We are critical of previous studies that deem all tree-ring dates to be equally valid, so we present a new approach to systematically identify potential early Navajo sites. After analyzing hundreds of tree-ring specimens from 774 sites, we conclude that dendrochronological evidence offers moderate-to-high confidence that 18 Navajo sites in the study area were settled prior to 1882. These dendrochronological data support the hypothesis of a westward Navajo migration from the Dinétah, reaching Black Mesa in Arizona about 1840, other areas north and east of the Hopi Mesas in the 1850s, and land west of Hopi in the 1870s after the release of Navajos from Fort Sunnier in 1868. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What were the consequences of penal transportation to the New World for eighteenth-century British criminal justice? Transportation has been described by scholars as either a replacement of the death penalty responsible for its decline, or a penal innovation responsible for punishing a multitude of people more severely than they would have been punished before. Using data from the Old Bailey Sessions Papers and the Parliamentary Papers, this study examines sentencing and execution trends in eighteenth-century London. It takes advantage of the natural experiment provided by the passage of the 1718 Transportation Act that made transportation available as a penal sentence, thus enabling one to assess the 'effect' of transportation on penal trends. This study finds that the primary consequence of the adoption of transportation was to make the criminal justice net more dense by subjecting people to a more intense punishment. While it was also associated with a small decline in capital sentences for some types of offenders, the adoption of transportation was also associated with an increase in the rate at which condemned inmates were executed. The study closes with a discussion of the conditions that may lead to law's unintended consequences, including the mesh-thinning consequences observed here. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bhakti is viewed as a movement that is subversive of orthodoxy, and inverts the societal norms prescribed by the dharmashastras. This paper looks at the Bhakti movement's long history and transformations into the nineteenth century in Punjab. If womanly dharma within the normative tradition is defined by sexual containment through marriage and wifehood, the accumulated Bhakti legends and hagiographies are examined to see the place of the prostitute in it, and the limits of its revolutionary potential are brought to the fore. By looking at the writings of the Muslim prostitute Piro who comes to live in the establishment of a ‘Sikh’ guru Gulab Das, in Chathianwala near Lahore during the period of Ranjit Singh, this paper attempts to read Piro's use of Bhakti legends and imagery to build support for her unusual step. The imbrication of the Gulabdasis in hybrid practices that borrowed elements from advaita, Bhakti and Sufi theologies is also delineated. The paper shows Piro's engagement with the radical potential of Bhakti, but also maps her move towards social conformity—the paradox that makes her look at herself simultaneously as a courtesan and as a consort. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the late nineteenth century, Qajar Iran, like its neighbor the Ottoman Empire, faced the dual challenges of colonialism and modernity. This paper considers the role of art education and art production in its response to these forces, focusing on the leading court painter of the late Qajar period, Mirza Muhammad Ghaffari, Kamal al-Mulk (1848–1941), whose career bridged the late Qajar period and the early twentieth century. Early in his career, Ghaffari was recognized as the leading exponent of academic painting, yet by the constitutional period his art had evolved into a style representing contemporary Persian life, a style which was informed by nationalistic discourses current in intellectual and political circles. This paper's consideration of the evolution of his style from a European modernism to an authentic Iranian modernism includes Ghaffari's training as a painter, the role of photography in the development of his style, his travel to Europe, and parallels with the art and career of the Ottoman painter Osman Hamdi. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The materiality of ritual performance is a growing focus for archaeologists. In Europe, collective ritual performance is expected to be highly structured and to leave behind a loud archaeological signature. In Australia and Papua New Guinea, ritual is highly structured; however, material signatures for performance are not always apparent, with ritual frequently bound up in the surrounding natural and cultural landscape. One way of assessing long-term ritual in this context is by using archaeology to historicize ethno-historical and ethnographic accounts. Examples of this in the Torres Strait region, islands between Papua New Guinea and mainland Australia, suggest that ritual activities were materially inscribed at kod sites (ceremonial men's meeting places) through distribution of clan fireplaces, mounds of stone/bone and shell. This paper examines the structure of Torres Strait ritual for a site ethnographically reputed to be the ancestral kod of the Mabuyag Islanders. Intra-site partitioning of ritual performance is interpreted using ethnography, rock art and the divergent distribution of surface and sub-surface materials (including microscopic analysis of dugong bone and lithic material) across the site. Finally, it discusses the materiality of ritual at a boundary zone between mainland Australia and Papua New Guinea and the extent to which archaeology provides evidence for Islander negotiation through ceremony of external incursions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Lewis Hine's child-labour photographs are among the best-known social-documentary photographs ever taken, yet historians have neglected his photography of children working on the streets of America's cities. This paper explores the disputed symbolism of Hine's street-labour photographs. Far from simply depicting another appalling form of child labour, Hine's child street labourers, and the newsboys he photographed in particular, represented a range of ideas from masculinity and entrepreneurial spirit to the dangers of the new urban life and the apparent ignorance of immigrant parents. The symbolic newsboy was often far removed from the reality of child street labour, but he became an important figure in discourse surrounding the nature of childhood and the organization of public space in the United States of the early twentieth century. In exploring these subjects, this article takes on a neglected part of American history, yet an important one. Studying child street labourers reveals much about children, their choices, and the urban environment in the United States during the Progressive Era. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Ordeals (by fire, by water, etc.) are a judicial institution in which defendants try to prove their innocence by divine judgement. In a recent law and economics paper, Leeson (2012) suggests that (medieval) ordeals “work” because, and if, ordeal takers have sufficient belief in them and because the priests administering ordeals “manipulate” them in an appropriate manner. We find that Leeson's theory also helps us understand Indian ordeals. Interestingly, some dharma texts require that the accuser agrees to the ordeal too, a requirement absent in Leeson's theory. We extend Leesons's model accordingly. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The papyri of Roman Egypt provide some of the most important quantifiable data from a first-millennium economy. This paper builds a new dataset of wheat prices, land prices, rents, and wages over the entire period of Roman control in Egypt. Movements in both nominal and real prices over these centuries suggest periods of intensive and extensive economic growth as well as contraction. Across a timeframe that covers several severe mortality shocks, demographic changes appear to be an important, but by no means the only, force behind changes in factor prices. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Under what circumstances can non-state actors become successful local peacemakers? A growing body of research documents the involvement of non-state actors in local conflict resolution in Africa. However, there is large variation in such actors' power, legitimacy, and ultimately their ability to contribute to conflict resolution. The ways in which contextual and dynamic factors at local and national levels, and in particular the relationship between non-state and state actors and institutions, affect local conflict resolution are not sufficiently understood. To address this gap, this paper analyses the peace process addressing a long-standing conflict in Kerio Valley, Kenya. The analysis illustrates how the failure of the state to provide security and basic services led non-state actors to fill important roles in governance. Through this process, they were endowed with legitimacy and power which enabled them to play key roles in a peace process that led to a mutually acceptable peace agreement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, I examine the unpublished First World War diaries of Giovanni Pirelli - heir to the helm of the Pirelli tyre company - for their account of how the war and fall of Fascism may have catalysed his dissociation from his family, his class, and his ideological foundation. In the post-war period, Pirelli traced the source of his rejection of his inheritance to his experiences during the Russian retreat, but in the moment, the expression of this kind of transformation is fragmentary and complex. Scholars often look to war diaries and letters for their testimony to the state of the individual in combat. Through close reading, I trace how Pirelli's writings negotiate his immense privilege and his attempt to construct a moral identity in the midst of war. I consider how they demonstrate his break with his wartime ideals and Fascism and how they anticipate his later transition from industrial heir to socialist activist. My examination of these diaries reveals the ambiguities inherent in this transformation of Fascist and bourgeois subjectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents an abstract of a research paper entitled `China and the Spanish Empire,' by Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giraldez, presented at the annual meeting of the Economic History Association.

Presents an abstract of the paper `Family Labor Market Activity and the Effects of the Great Migration: African-American Nonmigrant Men and Women in the South, 1950-1960,' by Craig W. Heinicke, during the fifty-fifth annual meeting of the Economic History Association.

Presents an abstract of the paper `Property Rights, Competition and Depletion in the Eighteenth-Century Canadian Fur Trade: The Role of the European Market,' by Frank D. Lewis, during the fifty-fifth annual meeting of the Economic History Association.

Presents an abstract of the paper `Cane Fires and Crisis Management: Why Were Sugar Cane Supply Contracts Different in Cuba and Hawaii? 1899-1925,' by Alan Dye, during the fifty-fifth annual meeting of the Economic History Association.

Presents an abstract of the paper `Prices and Famine in Early Modern England: An Analysis of Tudor-Stuart Public Policy,' by Randall Nielsen, during the fifty-fifth annual meeting of the Economic History Association.