Everywhere in the world, higher education is in crisis, and institutional autonomy and academic freedom are under threat. In this article, I propose a continuum of university autonomy in relation to academic freedom, with ‘little or no autonomy’ on one end, followed by ‘low autonomy’, ‘somewhat-balanced autonomy’, and with ‘balanced autonomy’ on the other end. Then I analyse the role of the government in influencing institutional autonomy and academic freedom. My conclusion is that the government plays a key role in determining what kind of autonomy a university enjoys, and balanced autonomy can be achieved if higher education is operated as a federation where different actors, including the government, the board of trustees, the president, faculty and students, work together, one way or the other, as partners. Only then can the university as a public good rightfully fulfil its aims and purposes for the benefit of all humanity.

The purpose of dividends is to distribute income to shareholders. Many stock market investors have only a few shares in their portfolios. For these investors, selling one share to generate income is not an attractive alternative to receiving dividends. We describe the dividend decision process in Sweden and provide detailed analysis of how Swedish listed companies manage dividends around new issuance of shares and stock dividends. We also examine how companies facilitate financial planning for shareholders by separating special and regular dividends, decomposing annual dividends into interest and profit, and smoothing dividends relative to earnings.

This article explores the peculiarity of struggles over memory in Soviet-era planned cities in the Russian Far East. It focuses on the contested history of Permskoe, a village founded by peasant settlers from European Russia in 1860, which was later subsumed by Komsomolsk-na-Amure, an urban industrial center constructed in the Stalinist period in the 1930s. Built with the participation of Young Communist League volunteers recruited from across the Soviet Union, the city was held up as a symbol of the triumph of socialist modernization throughout the twentieth century. But following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, the city suffered a dramatic reversal of fortunes, with a massive outflow of residents and resources leading to an economic crisis that also occasioned a crisis of identity. One manifestation of this crisis is an initiative seeking to recalculate the city’s age based on the date of Permskoe’s founding. This proposal has been denounced by many residents as an attempt to erase the city’s Soviet history and to downplay the role of communist volunteers in the city’s construction. Drawing on the debates which erupted around this periodization controversy, I argue that the collapse of the Soviet imaginary of linear progress and inability to articulate a new frontier myth resulted in “asynchronous belonging,” characterized by radical polarization around memory and irreconcilable allegiances to different moments in local history.

This article examines Coimbra City Council’s role in meat supply from the seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries. Focusing on public–private dynamics, it highlights how private contractors were tasked with providing fresh meat. The article explores how transaction costs and risk influenced contract delegation, revealing the council’s risk-averse preference for indirect supply. While this approach shaped contract decisions, it proved insufficient in limiting rising real meat prices or boosting per capita consumption. Using Coimbra as a case study, the article illustrates broader challenges in municipal supply systems and their limited ability to ensure both the affordability and availability of essential foodstuffs.

Historians of capitalism have put monopoly corporations and slavery at the heart of the history of a political-economic system long mythologized as founded on free markets. Liberal political economic theory, presupposing and demanding a private economic realm free from state intervention that would drive world-historical progress, was partly a reaction to the long sway of corporations that collapsed distinctions between private and public. The categories of liberal social-scientific thought have now come to so thoroughly structure historical writing aimed at wider audiences that scholarly review isn't sufficient guard against its accidental and artificial separation of public and private in a manner reinforcing liberal myths about historical evolution. This essay shows how writerly habits that posit untenable distinctions between state and private actors, that invoke models of development invented in the colonial era, and that neglect critiques by minoritized scholars, extend myths about British imperialism and industrialism's fundamentally developmental (rather than exploitative and extractive) role and imperialism's economic benefit to only a narrow sector of British society. These theoretical and historiographical assumptions expand the space for politically motivated challenges to well-established knowledge that Britain prospered economically from empire and slavery. This essay places Philip Stern's Empire, Incorporated and Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson's Slavery, Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution in conversation with work by scholars (often from formerly colonized regions) who have more decisively diagnosed Britain's debts to the imperial past, to illustrate how the framing of these books eases the downplaying of the economic effects of imperialism and slavery in debates about Britain's past.1

In December 1937, influential physician and politician Lord Dawson of Penn introduced an Infanticide Bill into the House of Lords. Seven months later, following minor amendments, Dawson’s Bill passed into law as the Infanticide Act, 1938. This legislation significantly altered the earlier provisions of the Infanticide Act, 1922, which introduced the offence of infanticide into English and Welsh courtrooms for the first time. Under Dawson’s reforms, a woman could be found guilty of infanticide rather than capital murder if the killing of her child, aged no more than one year old, could be attributed to a disturbance in the balance of the mother’s mind following childbirth or from lactation. Although the language and implications of the 1938 Act have ignited significant debate within legal scholarship, the creation of Dawson’s Bill and the leading role medical practitioners played in its enactment have received limited attention from historians. This article helps to address this gap by analyzing the critical response of the inter-war British medical profession to the question of infanticide reform against a backdrop of growing psychiatric ambivalence about a causal link between insanity and female reproductive states. Crucially, this paper contends that ancillary concerns over citizenship, motherhood, and the health of the nation informed Dawson’s motivations and justification for infanticide reform during the 1930s. It also seeks to foreground the physician’s distinct contribution to the birth of the 1938 Act by underscoring his efforts in devising and promoting the Bill within Parliament and among inter-war medical and legal communities.

The article investigates whether the Bank of Japan followed the so-called rules of the game under the classical gold standard. The article, by estimating a vector autoregressive model of monthly timeseries data for October 1897 to July 1914, finds that the Japanese central bank systematically raised the discount rate in response to a fall in the ratio of monetary gold to banknotes, a worsening of the trade balance, or a depreciation of the Japanese yen against the British pound. In contrast, the discount rate hardly responded to the Bank of England's Bank Rate, suggesting Japan's limited financial integration with Europe. The article argues that the Bank of Japan used the trade balance and the yen–sterling rate as the signals of a proximate or prospective movement in monetary gold. The findings, therefore, strongly suggest that the Bank of Japan sought to preserve gold convertibility as the primary objective of monetary policy. The Japanese central bank's rules-of-the-game-like behaviour challenges the semi-consensual view in the literature that violations of the rules were frequent and pervasive under the classical gold standard.