The founding fathers of the Turkish Republic worked to create “an imagined community” that would define them as Turks, regardless of their ethnic differences or primordial bonds with the “homeland.” Their rules were simple: if someone identifies as a Turk, they will be accepted as one. Within that framework, Afro-Turks, descendants of Africans brought to the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century, became part of the new nation through citizenship, linguistic assimilation, and everyday participation in the civic rituals. Their visible difference did not prevent their integration, reflecting a model that operated through legal and cultural criteria rather than formal racial hierarchy. Yet their recent articulation of an “Afro-Turk” identity raises deeper questions about the mechanisms through which Turkishness is produced, negotiated, and transformed, particularly amid the post-2000 identity landscape, where new nationalist discourses and large-scale migration have reshaped how difference is perceived and accommodated. Drawing on in-depth interviews and historical analysis, this article demonstrates that Afro-Turks’ long-standing incorporation reflects the workings of everyday nationalism, symbolic whiteness, and conditional inclusion. Their experience shows that the republican promise of equality is realized most fully when difference is demographically small, politically unthreatening, and culturally unobtrusive, revealing the tacit norms that continue to structure belonging in Türkiye.

This article explores the evolving relationship between li (rites) and fa (law) in early China amidst social transformations. It demonstrates that although li and law initially existed in tension following the publication of penal law in the late Spring and Autumn period, they gradually moved towards the process of reconciliation through Shang Yang’s legal reforms in Qin and Xunzi’s theoretical synthesis during the Warring States period. Ultimately, the integration of li into Qin’s legal framework marked the culmination of this process, with li and law collectively structuring the state’s social and familial hierarchies. The article demonstrates that the convergence of li and law was based on their shared nature as impersonal and authoritative rules regulating socio-political life beyond specific circumstances, while their differing scopes and methods of enforcement were gradually harmonised.

The imperial rivalry between the Ottoman Empire and the Habsburg monarchy is widely recognized as one of the defining conflicts of early modern Eurasia. Until recently, historiography has focused on wars and seemingly intractable differences between them, although their shared history is equally marked by communication and pragmatic efforts at mutual understanding. Drawing on the cultural history of diplomacy and theories of Orientalism, this study examines the seventeenth-century Habsburg monarchy’s concept of the Ottoman Orient within the empire’s highest decision-making forums, based largely on unpublished archival documents. At the center of this inquiry is the Aulic War Council (Hofkriegsrat), the institution responsible for Eastern affairs in the monarchy. As a starting point, the study presents the specific geopolitical context in which the Habsburg image of the East covering Eurasian space developed. It then provides an overview of the Habsburg diplomatic apparatus within the War Council, explaining its structure, key actors, and operational mechanisms. Focusing on a specific diplomatic genre—the final report—it also shows how decisions regarding the Ottomans and the Eastern world were made, emphasizing the role of knowledge accumulation, strategy-building, and overarching political objectives in shaping Habsburg policy.

Drawing upon archival records from the Republic of China and first-hand memoirs of direct witnesses, this article examines the June 15 and August 10 incidents of 1948 in Thailand,1 highlighting the intricate interplay between anti-communist and anti-Chinese politics. While existing scholarship has largely located these events within Phibun Songkhram’s anti-Chinese educational policies, this article moves beyond conventional narratives by uncovering their deeper political implications. The June 15 Incident primarily targeted overseas Chinese communists, the Qiaodang, substantially undermining its mobilizational and organizational capacities, whereas the August 10 Incident predominantly affected prominent Chinese merchants and Kuomintang-affiliated groups, reflecting broader anti-Chinese objectives. The article argues that anti-communist and anti-Chinese agendas were mutually constitutive, strategically intertwined by the Phibun regime to garner international support from Western powers and consolidate domestic control. By employing flexible diplomacy and deliberate ambiguity, the Thai government adeptly navigated Cold War tensions and internal political pressures, minimizing geopolitical risks while strengthening regime stability. Ultimately, these incidents reveal the profound consequences of instrumentalizing ethnic and ideological tensions, which significantly reshaped diasporic Chinese communities and the trajectory of Thailand’s early communist movement.

This article examines Ottoman grand vizierial correspondence as a central yet understudied medium of early modern Ottoman-Habsburg (and Ottoman-European) diplomacy. While scholarship on Ottoman diplomatics has extensively analyzed the philological, grammatical, structural, and material features of high-political letters, what we name the diplomatic textuality of grand vizierial correspondence, consisting of rhetoric, linguistic tone, emotional register, and any politically meaningful communicative content, remains insufficiently explored. Building on recent observations concerning the rich subtext of Ottoman epistolary practice, we argue that grand vizierial letters were not merely stylistically ornate products of chancery conventions nor “empty bombast”; they constituted the principal working interface of Ottoman diplomacy in the absence of permanent embassies abroad. Through a serial reading of the correspondence between Grand Vizier Sokollu Mehmed Pasha and the Habsburg emperors Maximilian II and Rudolf II, we demonstrate that these letters functioned as dynamic instruments of negotiation, hierarchy-making, and diplomatic communication between Constantinople and Vienna. We argue that a diachronic and serial analysis of early modern grand vizierial correspondence may reveal previously unexamined correlations between shifts in international politics, changing balances of power, and transformations in Ottoman-European diplomatic language.

This essay examines the Peasants Land Bank, a state-run financial institution established in 1882 to accelerate the transfer of land to peasants in the Russian Empire. Initially designed as a credit provider, the Bank gained new powers in the 1890s, when the government granted it unprecedented authority to assemble its own land fund. This shift transformed the institution into a key instrument of imperial governance. By controlling access to land and credit, it privileged the idealized “all-Russian” Orthodox peasantry and systematically excluded groups outside this category, including indigenous groups (such as the Bashkirs), non-Orthodox subjects, individuals of foreign origin as well as women and urban dwellers who technically belonged to the peasant estate. The Bank’s practices of exclusion enable us to examine how a state financial institution, rather than a neutral intermediary, can perpetuate multiple hierarchies through its routine credit decisions.

Motivated by the existential threat of Ottoman expansion, Vienna required a constant flow of information from Constantinople as early as the first half of the sixteenth century. Following the establishment of a resident embassy in the Ottoman capital in 1547, Vienna soon built a dense network of diplomats, Sprachknaben, and other agents, enabling the Habsburg monarchy to develop a sustained system of information production on the Ottoman Empire. By the early eighteenth century, the original urge to achieve, through diplomacy, a near certainty about prospective political or military developments in the Ottoman Empire evolved into a full-fledged knowledge ecosystem, which I term the “Habsburg diplo-Wissen regime.” As this article demonstrates through three case studies of record-keeping and archival preservation from 1682, 1699–1700, and 1719–20, the distinctive quality of this diplo-Wissen regime lay in an asymmetrical flow of information from Constantinople to Vienna, which remained unmatched on the Ottoman side until the early nineteenth century.

In the early twentieth century, the Malayan pineapple was the cheapest but most consumed canned fruit in Britain, most of which was produced by local Chinese enterprises in British Malaya. Current historiography of the Malayan pineapple industry has highlighted its lack of automation and branding that made the canned pineapples low quality and therefore cheap; a consequence of colonial commodity production framework that prioritized rubber exports. A key assumption is that Britain’s high demand for Malayan pineapples was mainly driven by the harsh economic conditions during the Depression years. However, using previously unexamined colonial newspaper reports and archival sources on the Empire Marketing Board, this study sheds light on how two representatives of the pineapple industry—Tan Kah Kee and Lee Kong Chian—actively leveraged colonial ties and production cheapness to corner imperial markets. This study’s contribution is two-fold. First, it expands the Malayan pineapple industry’s current historiography by situating it within the broader debates on imperial marketing, commodity chains, and local entrepreneurship. By focusing on the marketing strategies which Chinese entrepreneurs devised within a colonial framework, it adds nuance to the literature on local entrepreneurship and the trajectories of a secondary commodity sector in British colonies. Second, it challenges the predominantly ethnically essentialist readings of Chinese business strategies under colonialism of Southeast Asia, by demonstrating how intra-ethnic cooperation was not always effective in business modernization. In this case, leveraging colonial and imperial ties to navigate colonial logic in commodity trade and production was more useful, even though its success was transient.

During Czechoslovakia’s first decade, the state promoted public health reform and sponsored research surveys on healthcare and social welfare resources. Czechoslovak government leaders and healthcare professionals embraced a rhetoric of American progressivism and de-Austrianization to portray their country as forward-looking, democratic, and rational. Through the work of President Tomáš G. Masaryk’s daughter, Alice G. Masaryková, Czechoslovakia developed partnerships with American organizations, such as the Rockefeller Foundation and the Young Women’s Christian Association, which provided funding, training, and personnel. A major undertaking of the early 1920s was the Social Survey of Greater Prague, a massive study based on American sociology methods, which helped determine state priorities in health and welfare. Yet, this strategy of partnering with American professionals and organizations obscured key continuities with the Habsburg era. Despite the influence of American health professionals in Czechoslovakia, the new state’s public health system developed within a centralized bureaucratic and legal structure inherited from Austria. As the capital of a centralized state, Prague replaced and even exceeded Vienna’s former role as the arbiter of health and welfare policies and practices.

Taiwan’s partisan politics have long centered on Cross-Strait relations with Mainland China, yet over the past decade, cultural and moral issues—such as same-sex marriage, the death penalty, and surrogacy—have introduced new axes of division and intensified polarization. This article traces how civic groups and party actors during the same-sex marriage campaign and the Sunflower Movement framed and mobilized moral debates, and it uses two decades of Taiwan Social Change Survey data to show the rise of issue partisanship around civil rights and family values in the mid-2010s. These cultural cleavages persisted through 2020 without displacing Cross-Strait relations as the dominant divide. Taiwan’s case illustrates how cultural polarization can develop within a geopolitically constrained democracy and East Asian context, contributing to comparative debates on culture wars and partisan polarization.

This article examines the rise of craft brewing in Canada as a window onto a broader transformation in the cultural logic of post-Fordist capitalism. It argues that craft did not reject markets but reorganized the criteria by which markets conferred worth. In an industry marked by intense postwar consolidation, sensory standardization, and national branding, value had long been anchored in scale, efficiency, and managerial coordination. Craft brewers disrupted this settlement by reattaching moral and aesthetic significance to locality, visible labor, and artisanal care, transforming authenticity into a competitive resource.

Drawing on corporate memoranda, advertising debates, liquor-board files, and acquisition records, the article treats legitimacy as a historically recoverable form of symbolic capital—produced through processes of authentication and convertible into market power. It traces a sequence of conversions: consolidation generated efficiency but justificatory fragility; craft entrepreneurs reorganized evaluation around proximity and provenance; incumbents responded through mimicry, acquisition, and portfolio governance. As authenticity became legible and economically valuable, it became portable and vulnerable to “inauthenticity discounts” when ownership disrupted recognition.

The Canadian case demonstrates how markets metabolize critique by converting dissent into governable value, and it invites business historians to treat legitimacy not as reputational residue but as infrastructure within modern enterprise strategy.

The commander in chief of the British forces in North America functioned as a linchpin for many of the colonial reforms that British ministries implemented after 1763. The office’s existence outside the authority of any single colony made the commander in chief a critical instrument for metropolitan reformers seeking to systematize and subordinate colonial governance. Aside from enforcing the Proclamation Line, regulating Indigenous trade, implementing the American Mutiny Act, ensuring peace in the west, and overseeing the expanded American establishment, the commander in chief also policed colonial resistance in the emerging imperial crisis. Yet the advent of a peacetime commander in chief in America is often overlooked as a reform in and of itself. While questions of sovereignty during this period often focus on the place of colonial assemblies, the creation of this new military commander in the colonies produced its own contests for authority from 1763 to 1774. Particularly for officials such as colonial governors, the division in authority between civil and military power represented a contradiction in sovereignty—an imperium in imperio. Men skeptical of this centralized power, as well as many who were merely self-interested, challenged the authority of the commander in chief and revealed the contradictions in British approaches to the structure of North American governance.

This article reconceptualizes Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics (Xi Thought hereafter) not as a coherent doctrine but as a rhizomatic ideological formation. Drawing on the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, it treats Xi Thought as a configuration in which coherence is not presupposed but produced through the continual recombining of fragments across institutional sites. Based on an analysis of official publications, including collected works, excerpt volumes and study readers, the article shows how Xi’s speeches are disassembled and reassembled across domains such as law, economy, diplomacy and culture. These recompositions render ideology modular and resilient, allowing elements to be activated, re-weighted or sidelined without destabilizing the system as a whole. The article further argues that ideological coherence is generated through distributed and compulsory participation by Party and state actors, who are required to embed fragments of Xi Thought into institutional practice. Conceptualizing Xi Thought as a rhizome shifts analysis from doctrinal meaning to the operational logic through which ideology acquires administrative force within the Chinese party-state.