Marking the bicentennial of US-Brazil relations, this article assesses the fraught inception of the bilateral relationship and where it stands today. The United States, fueled by the ideals of its revolution, viewed itself in the nineteenth century as a beacon of democratic principles beset by powerful European discontents. Brazil’s position as an independent nation with deep ties to Portugal bred suspicion. The promulgation of Brazil’s 1824 Constitution offered a modicum of common ground, creating space for a political rapprochement culminating in formal recognition. The relationship thereafter was proper but distant. Brazil today is not a rival of the United States, but some worry that it has not done enough to distance itself from Washington’s antagonists. Indeed, while friendship and commonality have been common bywords of leaders in both nations, suspicion and ambivalence have been ever-present. If anything, the surprise is that both countries remain as close as they are today.

Mark Goldie is a towering figure in the historiography of early modern England, with a wide body of work concerning the origins and formations of political and religious institutions, including nascent party groups. His essays and edited collections inform most other accounts of the period, and his cohort of influential supervisees is legion within academia.

In the second half of the twentieth century, the British printing industry seemed to epitomise the United Kingdom’s status as the sick man of Europe, worn down by changing patterns of consumption, lagging technological modernisation and all-powerful trade unions. Especially the latter were more often than not seen as the problem, not the solution to the industry’s problems. An extravagant set of so-called restrictive practices, critics alleged, was used to hide that print workers were not putting in the work they were paid for while giving them undeserved bonuses that were choking corporate profitability. Print workers and their representatives offered a very different reading, in which the incriminated practices reflected a thoroughly earned privilege to define and distribute waged work. By looking at shop floor practices and conflicts, the article argues that print workers’ defence of non-working intervals articulated a broader vision of their own place in capitalist production.

The Codex Angus (Add. MS 40 in the University of Sydney Library's Rare Books and Special Collections) is a Byzantine Gospel lectionary meant for liturgical use. The findings presented here corroborate this catalogue description. There is ample evidence of its heavy use, which indicates a public not a private setting. After a brief description of the manuscript, particularities of its content and appearance are discussed, all of which point to a small rural community, in Northern Greece, as its original owner and user. Together with introducing the codex, this article casts light on the Christian community that might have used it.

Between 1814 and 1826 four members of the family of Jane Talbot and her cousin William Henry Fox Talbot had an active and varied interest in the study of mosses, which included the collecting, drawing and naming of specimens. This article explores the textures of their developing practice of learning natural history, and considers their activities within the framework of the circulation of knowledge, their reading and skill development, and the networks that supported them. Their social status and connections provided access to the expertise of numerous British botanists, including Lewis Weston Dillwyn, William Jackson Hooker, and James Dalton, placing the family as a locus of knowledge (re)production and transmission. This work illustrates the pedagogical practices of an elite group as they engaged with botany in a domestic setting, and makes suggestions as to their motivations and stimulations, as well as the conditions that maintained or diminished their interest. At a time when mosses were little-studied even by professed botanists, it demonstrates how a family group including many young women filled their leisure pursuits with these small plants, and reveals how an extended family with no previous expertise in formal botany could be actors in early nineteenth-century knowledge exchange.

By 1849 the kindergarten spread across the German Confederation as an alternative space of revolutionary politics and protest. I argue that the kindergarten worked alongside the barricade as a key location to protest traditional forms of state and religious authority and cultivate a new humanity that centered on women's gendered labor and children's education. For the founder of the kindergarten Friedrich Fröbel and his supporters, the classroom was a garden for the future in which educators and children alike could “perform utopia.” For female revolutionaries, the kindergarten provided a forum to make political claims in ways not open elsewhere. This article provides insight not only into the history of Central Europe in the Age of Revolutions, but also into the histories of emotions, gender, and education. I argue that historians should examine how ideas of “utopian hope” have been utilized in moments of upheaval to create new spaces of opposition.

We are happy to publish a roundtable debate based on the discussions carried out at the webinar organized by our journal to discuss Ayşe Buğra’s latest book, Social Policy in Capitalist History: Perspectives on Poverty, Work and Society. Buğra’s important contribution to the field of social policy is critically evaluated by Guy Standing, Andrew Fischer, and Tuba Ağartan. Social policy is an important field for New Perspectives on Turkey, one in which we try to publish research articles, book reviews, and commentaries. We are hoping that this roundtable debate, by revisiting the theoretical and historical foundations of social policy via Standing’s, Fischer’s, and Ağartan’s takes on Buğra’s arguments, will contribute to the enhancement of the ongoing critical discussions at a time during which the capitalist economy is going through a major transformation at the end of the first quarter of the twenty-first century. We are grateful to Başak Akkan for organizing and moderating the webinar and seeing through the publication process and our associate editor Z. Umut Türem for making it possible.

When considering the ideas behind economic and monetary union, most of the scholarly attention has focused on Germany and its ordoliberal tradition. The role of smaller countries such as the Netherlands, however, has yet to be considered. The Netherlands has long been one of Europe's staunchest fiscal hawks. To explain Dutch hawkishness, the international business press has reverted to the cultural trope of Calvinism. In contrast, this article traces this hawkish stance to the Dutch neoliberal turn of the 1980s, in particular the rise of public choice theory. In early 2012, during a meeting in Brussels, the Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte described the need for fiscal discipline as ‘the lesson of the 1980s’. Building on institutional analysis and intellectual history, this article shows how Dutch policymaking elites conceived of EMU as a response to that lesson.

Free movement of labour was established as a so-called principle, that is, one of the four fundamental norms governing all community policy, in the Treaties of Rome in 1957. Yet already from this beginning, what was to be understood as labour, and what was not, was up for debate. In due course, judicial disputes would arrive at the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg, most of them related to migration. While claims to social security benefits by Italian miners played the most important part in the first couple of years following the Treaties of Rome, over the course of the decades a vast variety of welfare and social policy issues came to be associated with free movement of labour. As time went on, the trajectory pointed to a broader, both more complex and more flexible understanding of what constituted labour as the number of cases brought to Luxemburg increased that dealt with activities previously not regarded as work. Students and sex workers, unemployed and sick persons were demanding national benefits through European channels, transcending the boundaries of national welfare state systems and helping re-define labour and work in the process. This article will chart this development by studying a sample of cases that arose in Belgium from 1972 to 1988, tracing the social transformations that gave rise to the legal claims and analysing how these were translated into the language of Community law and endorsed or rejected by the Court.

In the 2000s, Estonia’s self-avowedly neoliberal government institutionalised voting over the internet, becoming the only country in the world to use online voting in national elections. This innovation was branded as a key component of Estonia’s ‘digital republic’, articulated as an alternative to the bulky welfare state as well as to Soviet authoritarianism. This article suggests that by focusing on the sociotechnical infrastructure that underpinned the e-voting project, specifically the Estonian digital ID, we can reframe the history of post-Cold War development. It argues that reforms of post-Soviet state institutions were driven by a fragile coalition of civil servants, looking for ways to accomplish new challenges under serious budgetary constraints, computer engineers, who shared an ethos of experimentation developed at the Soviet-era Institute of Cybernetics, and banks, who offloaded their R&D initiatives to the state. This coalition was fraught with conflict, did not last long and had no singular goal – and thus could later be framed as a victory for democratic reform as well as another example of state capture by private interests. Further, the infrastructural basis of e-voting helps explain how Estonian policymakers could defend the institutions against criticisms that prevented its widespread adoption elsewhere.

This article focuses on the writings of female Icelandic socialist intellectuals and activists during the twentieth century and analyses how they perceived of time spent on work dedicated to the socialist education of the Icelandic working class. It will neither try to evaluate the impact of intellectuals’ work, nor will it attempt to deconstruct the class dichotomy and power structures inherent in intellectuals advocating on behalf of workers. Instead, the focus here is on intellectual women's conceptualisation of time devoted to advocacy, broadly defined, in light of their gender, authority, and privilege. In Iceland, as in many other places, writers and intellectuals were at the forefront of the ideological battle between communism and capitalism that took place during the Cold War. Earlier, in the interwar period, intellectuals also led the way in terms of advocating for Soviet style socialism in Iceland, and they took their role as educators very seriously.

The first diaspora of Portuguese subjects originating from Macau (the Macanese) to various port cities in East Asia began in the 1840s with the British colonisation of Hong Kong. By the early twentieth century, their presence in Macau and resettlement in the Shanghai International Settlement, British Hong Kong, and Kobe led to complex diversification of the “Portuguese” identity. This study examines Macanese experiences in their navigation through notions of cosmopolitanism and patriotism in East Asian territories that were neither fatherland nor homeland. The debates show not only the vulnerability of Portuguese solidarity amongst the Macanese but also unprecedented ideas of being “Portuguese” in a relatively liberal British port city. Through the analysis of two national celebrations organised in British Hong Kong that caused tension, I explore how the shaping of cosmopolitan-minded Macanese in colonial port cities complicated notions of Portuguese patriotism, which oscillated between a love for the pátria (fatherland) and a sense of responsibility to fight for a progressive and just Macanese future. Their initiatives show that, away from the political centres of Portuguese power, the Macanese negotiated their relationship to the Portuguese Empire and competed for the authority to define “Portugueseness” across the East Asian littoral.

Perceived intergenerational mobility profoundly influences individual attitudes and behaviour, carrying important implications for social stability and development. How do Chinese citizens perceive the intergenerational persistence of family advantages, and how do these perceptions compare with reality? This study conducts multiple randomized vignette experiments across two online surveys to assess public perceptions of correlations between various socio-economic indicators of parents and their children. Respondents estimate moderate to moderately strong correlations across generations. By leveraging the comparability of perceptions and objective estimates made possible by our novel measurement instrument, we find that respondents often overestimate the likelihood of equal opportunities for children from families with differing educational backgrounds. Alongside these largely optimistic perceptions, we also uncover signs of emerging pessimism. These results offer a nuanced snapshot of perceived social mobility in China, highlighting its multidimensional manifestations and divergence from reality, while also providing methodological insights for future research on its evolving dynamics.

This study explores the first East Asian encounters with Western museums by travelers in the nineteenth century. In contrast with our contemporary familiarity with this institution, these travelers had to translate their new discovery into their own meaningful categories. In translating the word “museum,” East Asian travelers composed several words using Chinese character compounds that reveal much about their understanding of the concept in terms of their own culture and language. Moreover, the underlying conceptual categories they invoked shaped their perception of the displays they saw in the various museums they encountered. We see their struggle to settle on a shared term for “museum” so that Kume Kunitake (1839-1931), for example, differentiated the British Museum, the Mauritshuis Museum, and the Swedish Nationalmuseum by employing different common nouns. However, their insights, bewilderment, and even their “misunderstandings” offer us an opportunity to reconsider the modern museum from an external perspective.