Village India, edited by McKim Marriott and included in a series on cultures and civilisations edited by Robert Redfield and Milton Singer, was a widely read and influential book published in 1955 at the beginning of the ‘village studies era’ in modern Indian anthropology. For Redfield and Singer, the two main questions were whether the Indian village as a ‘little community’ was ‘isolable’, and how Indian culture and civilisation could be understood through village studies. But for several of the eight contributing authors to Village India, especially M. N. Srinivas—who edited India’s Villages, also published in 1955—the principal subject matter was the structure of the village community itself, together with its unity and autonomy, and most readers tended to take the same view. There were various reasons for this, including Redfield and Singer’s failure to explain the book’s aims and objectives clearly in their foreword. Moreover, only Marriott seriously discussed their question about understanding Indian civilisation. Also important was Louis Dumont and David Pocock’s article reviewing both Village India and India’s Villages. Dumont and Pocock’s insistence that the village is not a crucial ‘social fact’ in India, together with Srinivas’s later response, strengthened the belief that the village’s ‘sociological reality’ and unity, rather than its relationship with Indian civilisation, was the key question discussed in Village India. This retrospective analysis of Village India sheds new light on its production and reception, and on its role in the development of modern Indian anthropology.

This article examines the postwar Franco-Italian struggle over Sudameris (Banque Française et Italienne pour l’Amérique du Sud), a multinational bank operating across South America. After 1945, Paribas sought to transform Sudameris into a French institution, backed by government pressure and asset sequestration. Italy’s Banca Commerciale Italiana (BCI) resisted, regaining majority control in 1948 through strategic share acquisitions. The ensuing conflict (1948–1955) centered on executive power. Paribas relied on French corporate law to maintain managerial dominance, while the BCI finally succeeded in appointing an Italian managing director in 1955. Under Italian leadership, Sudameris shifted from transactional to relationship banking in South America, reversing stagnation and achieving renewed growth by 1960. Sudameris’s early postwar history reveals how postwar European economic rivalries extended into South America and how multinational banks adapted to nationalist environments amid the contradictory forces of regional integration and global competition.

This article analyses the fifteenth-century Arabic panegyric for Sultan Jaqmaq (r. 1438–1453), Taʾlīf al-ṭāhir fī shiyam al-Malik al-Ẓāhir (The pure composition on the character of the King al-Ẓāhir), by the Syrian poet-historian Aḥmad ibn ʿArabshāh (1389–1450). It focuses on how the author engages with the Dulgadirid and Aqquyunlu Türkmen in the context of the new sultan’s attempts to repair fraught, decades-long relationships with these groups. Challenging the expectations of a highly literary text praising the ruler, Ibn ʿArabshāh’s writing offers sophisticated engagement with the political tensions of the time and provides insight into how the Cairo Sultanate navigated the complex networks of its northern frontier through rhetoric and realpolitik. By examining layered political commentary on the former rivals, allies, and antagonists of fifteenth-century Cairo—the article argues that Ibn ʿArabshāh utilised the previous 60 years of Türkmen–sultanate relations to stage a narrative of closure and reconciliation, in the wake of Barsbāy’s disastrous frontier campaigns, to better present Jaqmaq as a sovereign capable of reversing past missteps and ushering in a revitalised and prosperous geopolitical order.

In 1897, an Indian dancer named Piaree Jehan petitioned the Bombay government seeking justice for her two granddaughters—Begum Jehan and Vajir Jehan—who died and allegedly disappeared, respectively, during their 1895–1896 England tour. As traditional sources of patronage for the performers declined owing to the colonial criminalisation of prostitution and rising anti-nautch sentiment in the second half of the nineteenth century, certain groups of Indian women performers started travelling to the British metropole for contractual performances. Despite promises of lucrative salaries and foreign travel, life in the imperial exhibitory spaces proved to be quite precarious. Through a close reading of Piaree’s petition and contemporary British newspaper reports, this article presents a microhistory of Indian women performers’ experience in the racialised and sexualised imperial circuits of performance. It shows how the British imperial government adopted a certain ‘politics of convenience’ to selectively sexualise Indian women performers to erase their contributions as transcultural workers for the empire. By doing so, the empire continued to economically and culturally benefit from the dancers’ labour while avoiding any responsibility towards remedying their working conditions. At the same time, focusing on Piaree’s affective argumentation, the article also demonstrates how the performers used the British legal system to make their voices heard. By writing petitions, demanding unpaid wages, refusing sexual offers, and forging kinship ties, Indian women performers repeatedly foregrounded their identities as professional creative workers. In doing so, they disrupted narratives of passive victimhood, challenged their hypersexualised colonial representations, and brought their overlooked contributions to the late nineteenth-century British stage to the fore.

Focusing on the late eighteenth-century kulliyat by Lutf un-Nisa ‘Imtiyāz’ (1733?–?), arguably the first published Urdu poetess, this article seeks to explore the mobility—primarily metaphorical rather than physical—of a remarkable woman overlooked in historical accounts dominated by the male gaze. This mobility is enacted through her metaphysical, emotional, and literary navigation of time and space, rather than through geographic movement. Imtiyāz’s maṣnavī, functioning as an autobiography, employs time and space metaphors to offer a counter-archive for early women’s writing, providing a unique perspective into early modern feminine subjectivities. The examination underscores Imtiyāz’s agency in shaping her narrative, intertwining religious intercessions, canonical compositions, and literary sophistication. The metaphoric navigation through space and time illustrates the resilience and creativity of this woman, transcending her geographical and temporal constraints. At its core, Imtiyāz’s maṣnavī stands as a testament to her innovation, interwoven with convention through life-writing, crafting a rich narrative tapestry resonating within and beyond South Asian realms.

This article explores how socio-ecological crises reshape the Köyceğiz-Dalyan region, Turkey’s first Special Environmental Protection Area, through a more-than-human approach. Based on multi-stage qualitative research conducted between 2018 and 2023, we argue that the region is experiencing interconnected socio-ecological crises that are transforming a long-standing multispecies web of life unique to the area. Our findings highlight two major shifts: first, deforestation, driven by agricultural land clearance, mining activities, and forest fires, has dismantled collaborative practices such as beekeeping, goat keeping, and small-scale agriculture, all of which sustained multispecies partnerships that maintained both biodiversity and traditional livelihoods. Second, waves of lifestyle migration, from middle-class retirees in the 1980s and 1990s to remote workers during COVID-19, have altered village demographics and transformed landscapes through construction that replaces agricultural lands and forests with residential developments. These interwoven transformations demonstrate how socio-ecological crises simultaneously unravel multispecies relationships, eliminate traditional sustainable livelihoods, and fragment life networks that once sustained both human communities and biodiversity.

Throughout the Russo-Japanese War, Lat Pau and Thien Nam Sin Pao, both based in Singapore, followed the war closely, fueling the nationalism of their readers. Far from portraying China as a passive non-belligerent, both newspapers drew attention to both China’s precarious international position and her self-strengthening efforts. Chinese nationalism was born out of an international outlook among the overseas Chinese, who were concerned with the fighting in Manchuria, even though the battlefields were distant from both their hometowns in southern China and Southeast Asia. To them, the Russo-Japanese War was not simply a localized conflict on East Asia’s periphery; China’s fate hinged on its outcome, and it threatened to escalate into a worldwide conflagration anytime. The keen interest displayed by overseas Chinese in the war is indicative of their international outlook, and the nationalism that partly resulted from this attention to the war ultimately fueled their participation in the 1905 anti-American boycott as well as revolutionary activities.