This article examines socialist globalization from the perspective of technical-labor internationalism in Mozambique, focusing on the final stage of the Cold War. First, it analyzes the four main pathways through which international technicians arrived in Mozambique: Latin American exile, socialist intergovernmental cooperation, European postcolonial humanitarianism, and African regionalism. It offers a cosmopolitan perspective on the relations that socialist Mozambique forged with the world. It then provides an inventory of the models of integration of these international technicians into the Mozambican state apparatus, presenting a framework emphasizing organizational rather than ideological aspects. It concludes that, while these paths were singular, they were not mutually exclusive. More importantly, they were instrumental in shaping the political affinities and frictions between international technicians in that cosmopolitan universe.

This introductory essay establishes the site of the neighbourhood and the social fact of urban proximity as crucial, conflicted and volatile conditions of colonial society. We show that the colonial neighbourhood was a highly contested space where diverse populations, stark inequalities and asymmetric power distributions played out in the most palpable manner. At the same time, it also emerged as an incubator of sociability, solidarity and protest across communal lines. The constant tension between physical proximity and profound inequality defined much of the social dynamics in the colonial city, making neighbours and neighbourhoods a most promising terrain of enquiry.

‘No nation has produced more anthologies or collections of women’s poetry than late imperial China’, according to Kang-i Sun Chang. Indeed, the open-access database of Ming–Qing Women’s Writings at McGill University Library includes 5239 women writers and 431 poetry collections. Yet virtually no trace of this phenomenon, or of these women writers, can be found in transcultural literary histories and anthologies of world literature published in the West in the twentieth century and beyond. How is this possible? The reason is not simply the lack of translations of many of the poems, but rather it has to do with the lack of canonization of these women poets in Chinese literary history until the late twentieth century, when they were ‘rediscovered’. This article investigates this neglect with the aim of showing that there were several different reasons for it, related to poetics, genre hierarchies, anthology editing practices, etc., in the imperial era, and to aspects of Chinese literary historiography in the twentieth century. Two women ci poets, Liu Shi and Qiu Jin, are briefly introduced to show that the reasons for their exclusion, as well as their later inclusion in the national literary canon, also need to be addressed on an individual level.

Studies of women religious during the early modern period have often focused on questions surrounding lack of choice, usually about whether they had been coerced to join a convent. This article argues that, in the case of the English convents formed in continental Europe after the Tridentine reforms, not only did most women opt to enter convents of their own free will, but that there was a further level of choice involved. Namely, women chose which convent they wished to enter, a decision process largely neglected by the existing historiography. It opens by considering the regulations the convents operated under as part of the Catholic Reformation, and argues that both the communities and individual women were involved in the decision process surrounding entry to convent life. The second section explores how women navigated any external influences, while the third section argues that spirituality was a key motivating factor for a woman choosing a community. In short, women were not just choosing to become nuns, but were exercising their own agency in deciding which convent to join. Committed candidates meant a strong community and, in the case of the English convents, it meant they could navigate the extra challenges of exile.

The Elizabethan reign has lately emerged as a formative period for English ideas about the liberties of the subject and the ‘ancient constitution’ of the realm. Recent work has described the development of such ideas as having been driven by an organized campaign against the English ecclesiastical courts: a legal and intellectual effort that had emerged from the misgivings of certain ‘puritan’ lawyers about the powers claimed by new prerogative jurisdictions. The primary grievance of the campaign has been identified as having been the church courts’ use of the oath ex officio, and the campaign’s primary defensive tool has been identified as having been the twenty-ninth chapter of Magna Carta. But overlooked manuscripts reveal a more complex story. This article shows that the law of excommunication was as important to the campaign in question as Magna Carta. In addition, a re-examination of the life and work of James Morice, one of the principal lawyers responsible for the campaign, demonstrates that the law of excommunication deeply structured his understanding of the royal supremacy, and of the legal relationship between England’s secular and ecclesiastical polities – particularly as they had existed in the distant medieval past.

Galen’s most deeply held professional values included clarity of expression and the epistemological importance of clinical experience. Therefore, it is not surprising that he thought and wrote about communication with patients. His stories about patients show that he questioned them about their symptoms and history, and some stories explicitly teach the lesson that this type of questioning is important. His stories often quote patients indirectly or directly; they are often told partly from the patient’s perspective, and some contain constructions indicating that Galen paid attention to an individual patient’s exact words. In On the Affected Parts, his discussion of the vocabulary of pain – a problem in medical communication still important today – he privileges the common usage of patients over the technical vocabulary invented by Archigenes. He argues that only by listening to patients and their words can we construct a useful vocabulary of metaphors for pain that can bridge the gap in experience between physician and patient. He does not dismiss the words of women or enslaved patients; on the other hand, in a few stories where the patriarch of a family is present and the patient is female or enslaved, Galen’s dialogue tends to engage the head of the household rather than the patient. While some of his stories show off his ability to diagnose patients without talking to them, and others raise the problem of the lying patient, none of these stories would have meaning unless the patients’ words were normally crucial to clinical practice.

Among all the situations scrutinised by the International Criminal Court (ICC), Guinea has received the least scholarly attention. This article fills that gap by analysing the ICC's preliminary examination of Guinea (2009–2022) and testing claims that it represents a success for the Court. Based on 25 interviews in Conakry, it examines the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) and its diplomatic engagement with state authorities, showing that Guinea is a partial success story. However, this success extends beyond the textbook application of complementarity rules – it reflects lessons learned by the OTP following previous diplomatic missteps in Guinea and other contexts. The analysis underscores that ICC scrutiny is deeply shaped by political dynamics, with favourable domestic and international conditions playing a crucial role. This case study not only sheds light on ICC-state relations but also offers insights into how the Court can navigate political challenges to fulfil its mandate.

This paper compares concerted efforts to unify early instructional practice in the US in the early twentieth century and in the twenty-first century. The first effort began with the founding of the National Council for Primary Education in 1915; the second began in 2005 with calls for pre-K-3 alignment. Analysis of relevant sources indicates that today’s unifiers are attempting to achieve three of the same goals that their predecessors pursued in 1915: increased child activity, teacher autonomy, and use of early instructional practices up through grade 3. During the early twentieth century, kindergarten served as both the model for the upward extension of activity-based early instructional practice into the early primary grades and the locus of efforts to defend against the downward extension of skill-based elementary practice from the primary to the lower levels. During the second round of unification in the twenty-first century, however, preschool has become the model for extending and the locus of defending early instructional methodology.

The artificial language of Esperanto would achieve remarkable success in early twentieth-century Europe. Its popularity there is not surprising: though designed as a universal language, Esperanto was essentially European in its grammar and lexicon. But this Europeanness – or, more precisely, this near-Europeanness – also spoke to communities living further afield. In India before the First World War, groups regarded as Europeanized by most Indians but as Indian by most Europeans found Esperanto a literal language with which to articulate their social location. As an ‘Esperantist’, there was no contradiction between being Indian and participating in European society, and to claim the label offered a shorthand that others (whatever their relationship to the movement) could readily grasp. This article considers these dynamics against the backdrop of a visit to India by the Irish Esperantist John Pollen, an event that sheds light on both the inner workings of the Indian movement and the importance that non-Indian Esperantists assigned to it. The popularity of Esperanto would eventually decline in India with the First World War, but until it did, the movement – indexical of Europe yet resonant in India – would promise a transnational community to which many in India felt they could aspire and belong.