This paper traces how geological surveys and prospecting across two centuries shaped Afghanistan’s enduring characterization as a mineral-rich “El Dorado.” By investigating the shift in survey methods from comprehensive terrestrial to aerial reconnaissance, I show how geological knowledge production served purposes far beyond imperial resource identification and extraction. Drawing from historical and ethnographic research, including insights from a current emerald mine operator, I uncover how precious stones’ physical properties and circulating narratives about hidden riches propelled—and continue to propel—a vast network of individuals into mining enterprises: from state authorities and local powerbrokers to foreign geologists, mineral collectors, and international aid organizations. The result is the creation of new narratives about extractable wealth that interweave scientific practices and global market dynamics to transcend conventional periodization such as pre-Soviet, Soviet, and United States. These narratives have emerged from and reinforced asymmetrical relationships in both labor and expertise, ultimately positioning Afghan participants precariously within global mineral markets, made riskier still in times of conflict.

This article explores how figurations of children from India changed in the children’s magazine of the Church Missionary Society in connection with its new internationalist ideals. Analysing the content of The Round World, as it was then known, it examines how India and Indian children mattered to the internationalist imaginaries the Church Missionary Society (CMS) was promoting from the 1920s. From the late 1920s, the CMS Young People’s Department and its Education Secretaries fostered ideas of ‘world-friendship’. Against this backdrop, the article explores how children from India not only entered this conversation within the magazine, but were also seen as becoming part of an international Anglican network. Through an unpacking of various categories of narratives, the article argues that this recasting was connected to the political and geographical imaginaries of the interwar years, and explores the closely enmeshed institutional and personal agendas that aided these children’s entry into a ‘world’ of the CMS’s making.

In the late 1930s, children in three Malawian villages were subjected to a peculiar test for vitamin A deficiency devised by Dr. Benjamin Platt, director of the Nyasaland Nutrition Survey and a leading colonial nutrition scientist. Platt constructed a makeshift adaptometer, appropriate for field conditions, that could be placed over a subject’s head to measure retinal adaptation to light. He built this contraption from simple materials, including a five-pound tea-box and sticking plaster. This article takes the curious commingling of commodity objects and scientific materials (where a discarded tea-box finds new life as an experimental technology) as an entry point for examining how scientific practices are woven from semiotic and material threads, demonstrating how heterogeneous social and material elements overlap and influence one another. The article first analyses how Platt’s tea-box adaptometer – and the discourses and ambitions framing the Survey – imagined a new kind of nutrition research hinged to the space of the field rather than the laboratory. It then proceeds to consider how the tea-box, an incipient manifestation of ‘appropriate technology’, points us towards the more tacit ways that tea wove itself into the fabric of the Survey and colonial society, as a gustatory discourse steeped in racial anxieties. Attending to the ‘stuff’ of scientific work cued me to broader imperial circuits and interests that shaped colonial nutrition research.

This article deals with the French botanist Nicolas Joseph Thiéry de Menonville who in 1777 went to Oaxaca (Mexico) in search of cochineal. Although cochineal was one of the Spanish Empire's best-kept secrets, he managed to go there, acquire knowledge about its cultivation from local planters, and smuggle the insects on cacti to Saint-Domingue, where he successfully raised them. His voyage is, thus, a paradigmatic case that illustrates how botanical knowledge and objects from local Indigenous farmers were transferred into the networks of European science. The analysis of how the botanist managed to gain access to a space and knowledge that was actually closed to him is embedded within a broader contextualization: starting with the examination of its main source, Voyage à Guaxaca, the article reconstructs the scientific and economic discourse that led Thiéry de Menonville to undertake his voyage. It concludes with contemporaries' evaluation of Thiéry de Menonville's transfer of knowledge about cochineal and its cultivation and the impact that his successful mission had on comparable endeavors.

This article investigates tuberculosis mortality in Hermoupolis, the capital of the Greek island of Syros, during the period of continuous cause-of-death reporting from 1916 to 1940. Contemporary reports identified Greece as having one of the highest levels of tuberculosis mortality in Europe, with Hermoupolis ranking at the top within the country. In the early twentieth century, Greece launched an anti-tuberculosis campaign, primarily supported by philanthropists due to limited state intervention. The study examines the actions, if any, taken by the local authorities in Hermoupolis and analyzes mortality attributed to tuberculosis by age group and sex. The results reveal that tuberculosis mortality declined across all age groups in the 1930s, particularly among females. Deaths were concentrated in infancy, early adulthood (20–39 years), and the elderly. Clear differences in tuberculosis fatality rates among occupational classes were found, although they did not markedly differ from all-cause mortality patterns. Factors such as the lack of sanitary reforms, poor living standards, inadequate nutrition, and overcrowding could have potentially played key roles in the high tuberculosis mortality in the city. Considering the inefficacy of sanatorium treatment before the mid-1940s, it is plausible that improvements in factory working conditions and the decrease in industrial activity in the city may have contributed to the reduction in tuberculosis mortality in Hermoupolis during the 1930s.

Pregnancy encompasses core socio-political issues: kinship, demography, religion, gender and more. In any society, the ontology of the pregnant body and the embryo-fetus holds core existential concerns. Is a pregnant body one or two beings? When does personhood begin? Yet pregnancy is still a marginal topic in archaeology and its onto-political consequences have scarcely been raised. It would be ludicrous to claim that pregnancy or childbirth is part of the grand narratives of prehistory. Also in scholarship centring theoretical perspectives on the body and personhood the pregnant body is absent. This article poses fundamental questions of the body-politics of pregnancy. We develop concepts from material feminism, medical ethics and philosophy to interrogate pregnancy and provide a case study to demonstrate how these concepts can work in practice from the Viking Age. The questions posed, however, are not limited to the Viking period. Our overall objective is to centre pregnancy as a philosophical and political concern in archaeology writ large. We develop new thinking and language to this end, which can be used to examine the politics of pregnancy in other periods and regions. Ultimately, we discuss the absence-making of pregnant bodies from our sources as well as from archaeological discourse.

In this article, we discuss the introduction and reception of the theology of natural and divine laws in late Ming China. Natural law and the twofold divine laws appear collectively as an object of discussion and exposition in a number of writings by Jesuit missionaries and Chinese Catholic converts of this time. We focus primarily on Michele Ruggieri’s Tianzhu shilu 天主實錄 (The True Record of the Lord of Heaven) and then consider additional texts by Yang Tingyun and Giulio Aleni, referring to other works in passing. While laying out in more detail than previous scholarship the scholastic basis of these discussions, we nonetheless emphasize that these texts do not reflect a fixed version of scholastic teaching but accommodate their discussions to Chinese cultural sensibilities and/or philosophical concepts. Our historical analysis serves as the basis for a comparative philosophical consideration of the relationship between the doctrine of natural law and the Chinese concept of liangzhi 良知 “innate moral knowledge”.