What does empire look like from spaces where multiple imperial projects converge? Through analysis of Molla Nasraddin, a pioneering satirical magazine from the early twentieth-century Caucasus, I reveal local engagements with empire that defy traditional binaries of center versus periphery, indigenous versus foreign, and resistance versus accommodation. While critical scholarship has powerfully demonstrated how imperial power shapes local life—from technologies of rule to cultural categories and patterns of inequality—such analysis is typically conducted through the lens of a single empire. In the Caucasus, where Russian, Ottoman, and Iranian empires overlapped, Molla Nasraddin developed a distinctive blend of visual satire, character types, and multilingual wordplay that functioned as a form of satirical pedagogy, cultivating what I term “inter-imperial literacy”: the capacity to recognize deep connections between neighboring imperial worlds while maintaining critical distance from each. Through sustained correspondence with readers across three empires during their near-simultaneous revolutionary upheavals (1905–1908), the magazine gave voice to a public defined not by fixed identities but by their capacity for protean transformations across imperial boundaries. While nation-states would eventually redraw the Caucasus, Molla Nasraddin provides a window into a moment when historical borderlands—not imperial centers—offered the most penetrating insights into the workings of empire. In these spaces, elements adopted from competing empires become creative resources for local expression, while apparent cultural alignments conceal critical distance, enabling views of empire at once intimate and askance.

With the oil crises of the 1970s as a backdrop, this article explores the oil industry’s efforts to present its own interests as aligned with those of future generations in order to justify state disinvestment and environmental deregulation. Although histories of neoliberalism’s cultural dimensions have typically been treated as distinct from scholarship on the oil industry’s anti-environmental campaigns, this article bridges these histories’ intersections in the 1970s. Using Mobil Oil as a case study, I focus on three venues of address—advertising, television sponsorship, and education—to analyze how the industry naturalized its role in American life in a moment in which energy consumption and corporate power were called into question. By promoting its investments in children and families, Mobil bolstered its reputation as a socially responsible corporation committed to the public good. Ultimately, I argue that the oil industry participated in constructing “cultures of privatization,” sidelining alternate visions of economic redistribution.

Coventry Cathedral and the Dresden Frauenkirche, both destroyed in the Second World War, are often mentioned in the same breath, treated as architectural, commemorative, and religious equivalents. Nothing could be further from the truth. While the ruins of Coventry Cathedral were transformed into a site of—and memorial to—postwar reconciliation, the Frauenkirche was neither a revered shrine nor an unintentional monument, but simply a gutted structure suspended in limbo for some forty years. It was only in the course of the 1980s, and especially in the aftermath of German reunification, that the Frauenkirche ruins became invested with specific meaning. Support from Britain and, above all, Coventry, was crucial in this process. Methodologically, the article fuses memory studies with church/architectural history and comparative/transnational research.

This article analyses the performance of the Chinese judiciary in administrative ligation during the recent period of reform using a dataset of over 1.6 million judicial documents. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we find compelling evidence that the judiciary has become increasingly significant in checking the power of the government. Courts accepted 79 per cent more cases from 2014 to 2020, and plaintiffs’ win rate against the government rose from 33.2 per cent to 42.2 per cent. This increase is even more pronounced in cases with a strong impact on local government, such as those reviewing land expropriations and police penalties. Judicial authority has improved, with chief government officials attending more than 50 per cent of trials as defendants. Our findings illustrate a judiciary that is on the rise, but there are fundamental limits to its ascent. Courts remain silent on citizens’ political rights. Judges are reluctant to conduct substantive reviews of government actions beyond procedural matters. These findings support a tripartite theory for understanding the rule of law in China, where the law and the judiciary are instrumental in routine and even hard cases, but their power rapidly wanes in the face of politics.

The Chinese Rites Controversy (c.1643–1724) marked the most significant rupture in seventeenth- to eighteenth-century Sino-European relations. Fourteen Chinese Roman Catholics on the fringes of political and cultural circles, neither a part of the state authorities nor influential literati, defended the legitimacy of Chinese rites. Among them, Xia Dachang grounded his analysis on an exhaustive study of the Confucian ‘Book of Rites’ (Liji). This article, focusing on Xia’s treatises, proposes a novel approach to reassessing the Controversy by analysing the role of the human body in Neo-Confucianism. It aims to reveal previously overlooked yet essential aspects of the debates: the Neo-Confucian conception of the human ‘being’ and the interconnectivity between external physical presence and actions, and internal moral values.

Stained-glass windows were a dominant focal feature within the pre-Reformation parish church building, where they were invested with multiple layers of spiritual meaning. A large and rich variety of stained-glass fragments survive in parish churches today, alongside textual evidence of lost glass, providing valuable insight into parochial religious experience. However, these sources have traditionally been marginalized in the art-historical canon in favour of fuller, sequential stained-glass programmes located in ‘greater’ ecclesiastical sites, such as cathedrals and minsters. This article places fragments and lost schemes at the centre of discussion. It traces and contextualizes three iconographic patterns that emerge from a closer study of fragments and textual accounts from the South-West of England. In doing so, it demonstrates the potential of such piecemeal evidence to illuminate the nature and function of the decorative arts in pre-Reformation worship.

Historians of the Reformations have increasingly explored a comparative ‘British’ dimension, seeking to transcend the separate national historiographies of England, Scotland and Ireland. To date, however, little attempt has been made to survey patterns of religious change across the multiplicity of islands that came to form part of the composite British monarchy: in particular, the Channel Islands, Isles of Scilly, Isle of Man, Western Isles, Orkney and Shetland. This article argues that attention to the collective experience of islands enhances our understanding of the implementation and reception of religious change, requiring us to think more carefully about questions of environment, law, language and culture, and about the aims and achievements of confessional state-formation. The ‘frontier’ status of islands also underlines the interconnectedness of British Reformations with developments elsewhere in Europe.

In 1053, the archdiocese of Hamburg-Bremen became patriarchate of the North as part of a process of centralization with which the Curia sought control over Scandinavia and the North Atlantic. Although these ambitions risked being cut short by the German archbishops, who aspired to larger margins of independence, Gregory VII (1073–85) was able to secure the Icelandic diocese of Skálholt as a supporter of Roman reforming ideals. Bishop Gizurr Ísleifsson (1082–1118) maintained direct contacts with the Curia and organized the Icelandic church as a loyal Gregorian agent. In the absence of royal and archepiscopal authority in Iceland, Gizurr was considered ‘king and bishop over the country’: arguably, the pontiff of his own diocese. Through the analysis of Latin and Norse sources, this article explores how Gregorian ideals reached Iceland during the Investiture Controversy and how papal supremacy was built into the foundations of the northernmost diocese of Christendom.

In May 1843, around two-fifths of the clergy of the Church of Scotland resigned in protest over the ‘intrusion’ of the state in matters relating to ecclesiastical governance. The greatest single challenge facing the newly established Free Church of Scotland was financial: how to pay the stipends of its ministers. The solution was the Sustentation Fund, the aim of which was to guarantee a minimum stipend for all ministers by redistributing funds raised. This article describes and analyses the development of the Sustentation Fund, highlighting its critical role in financially cross-subsidizing congregations in peripheral rural areas. In analysing the direction and scale of cross subsidy, the results throw new light on two questions. First, the extent to which, across geographical location and time, rural congregations were dependent on urban cross subsidies. Second, the geographical location and financial commitment across time, of the church’s urban, net contributor, congregations.

This article examines the process of conversion to Christianity of Scandinavians who left their homelands in the ninth and tenth centuries and settled in Christian societies in the West. The churches that were involved left us no accounts, but fragments of evidence ranging from papal letters to stone sculpture help to construct a picture of diversity, wherever routes to conversion can be glimpsed across this Scandinavian diaspora. Two contrasting settings – Normandy, soon after the Viking Rollo was put in charge in 911, and northern England, under the authority of Scandinavian kings from the late ninth to the mid-tenth century – are discussed, highlighting the agency of churchmen at the interface between paganism and Christianity. The sources hint at contrasting dynamics and a range of strategies, from creativity to coercion, as churches faced the challenge of bringing immigrant Scandinavians into the Christian centre.

This article investigates personal and public facets of the life and work of Hannah Whitall Smith (1832–1911) as a lens through which to explore the complexities of marginalization and belonging within the late nineteenth-century Holiness movement. Despite her significant contributions as a lay Christian leader, prolific author and social activist, Smith’s legacy remains largely understudied. Examining selections from her extensive collected works, including correspondence and Smith’s file of ‘fanaticisms’, this article investigates how supposed margins and peripheries are not places of obscurity or insignificance, but fertile contexts of religious dialogue and innovation.

This article explores the self-representations of marginality found in the indulgence petitions addressed by Transylvanian supplicants to the papal chancery during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. As one of Hungary’s border provinces, Transylvania was located on the eastern frontier of late medieval Latin Christendom. Although Transylvanian Catholics often expressed a sense of marginality in their petitions to the pope, this sentiment was not primarily defined by the petitioners’ distance to the Apostolic see; rather, it was described in relation to the Greek Orthodox Christians in Transylvania and, later, to the approaching Ottoman Turks. To illustrate this point, the article presents three case studies of indulgence petitions submitted by Transylvanian supplicants between 1350 and 1450, highlighting how the petitioners’ discourse about marginality changed over the course of this period. In addition, this article emphasizes the role attributed by petitioners to papal indulgences in converting the ‘schismatics’ in Transylvania to the Latin faith.

This article examines the role of the Catholic Church in the Brazilian city of Recife, in the aftermath of the Republic’s Proclamation and the subsequent separation of church and state in Brazil. The study focuses on Friar Casimiro Brochtrup, OFM, who arrived in Brazil in 1894 and settled in Recife. His efforts in the impoverished Santo Amaro neighbourhood, particularly at Sítio da Macacheira, involved founding a church, chapels, schools and associations. The study aims to understand the Catholic Church’s impact on urban territorialities amid ecclesiastical transformations and political shifts before the emergence of the theology of liberation in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It argues that the church’s expansion from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century involved territorial boundary expansion and rationalization of social assets. Drawing on diverse sources, including newspapers, ecclesiastical documents, reports and personal correspondence, this article illuminates the dynamic interactions between the Catholic Church, urban development and societal changes in Brazil during this period.

The Chinese Civil War (1946–9) and the Korean War (1950–3) contributed to the beginning of Hong Kong’s evolution from a British colony occupying a geographically peripheral position in South China, to a world centre for Chinese Protestant Bible publishing and distribution in the Cold War era. In 1948, the China Bible House (CBH), the de facto national Bible society of China, decided to establish an emergency office in Hong Kong, responding to the prospect of the Communist takeover of China. Subsequently, as the Korean War unfolded, the CBH, owing to political pressure, desired to sever its connection with the emergency office in 1951. This resulted in the transition of the emergency office into the Hong Kong Bible House (HKBH), the British and American Bible societies’ agency for Chinese Bible publishing and distribution. Thanks to the work of the HKBH, Hong Kong came to be the major source of Bibles for Chinese Protestants outside mainland China.

This article examines the distribution of medieval English churches and chapels dedicated to St Gregory, arguing that this distribution reflects Gregory’s symbolic significance in the pre-Conquest church as a figure who could connect centres and margins. Early dedications in ecclesiastical and royal centres recall the Gregorian mission and the connection it forged between Britain, on the margins of Christian Europe, and Rome at the centre. Concentrations of later dedications in East Anglia and the South-West asserted the connection of these more peripheral regions with the newly formed English nation, through veneration of its patron saint. The decline in numbers of Gregory dedications after the Conquest reflects the transfer of Gregory’s status as founder of the English church and patron of the English nation to other saints.

Under the 1980s authoritarian regime of Doo-Hwan Chun, a young Christian group emerged from the evangelical majority of Korean Protestantism. On the margins of Korean evangelicalism, this group started to redefine what it meant to be evangelical and to challenge its conservative-leaning socio-political and missiological orientation. This theme of ‘new evangelicals’ or ‘the evangelical left’ has been covered by many scholars in relation to America and Latin America, but not in Asian contexts. This article illuminates the Korean story by analysing the new evangelical experiments of Korean students from 1986 to 1989. It looks at their socio-political and ecclesial background, the tensions between this group and mainstream evangelicalism, and their contribution to the wider Korean evangelical community. Based on in-depth research of Korean primary sources and oral interviews with its key members, this article explores how a new evangelical group at the margins of Korean evangelicalism challenged the centre.