The decision by developing countries to open up their economies to foreign trade and investment in the 1980s and 1990s was a momentous event in world history. How and why did this trade policy revolution take place? Most accounts of trade politics stress domestic interest groups or trade agreements as driving policy changes, but these explanations fail in this period. This paper notes that many import restrictions were imposed for balance of payments purposes, as a way of avoiding a devaluation and protecting foreign exchange reserves from depletion under fixed exchange rates. A shortage of foreign exchange in the mid-1980s forced countries, under the guidance of economists, to shift to a more flexible exchange rate system that boosted export earnings and made import controls unnecessary for payments balance. Just as seen during the Great Depression, the exchange rate regime was a key factor in a country’s trade policy.

We evaluate the role of taxes on overseas trade in the development of imperial Britain’s fiscal-military state. Influential work, for example, Brewer’s Sinews of Power, attributed increased fiscal capacity to the taxation of domestic, rather than traded, goods: excise revenues, coarsely associated with domestic goods, grew faster than customs revenues. We construct new historical revenue series disaggregating excise revenues from traded and domestic goods. We find substantial growth in revenue from traded goods, accounting for over half of indirect taxation around 1800. This challenges conventional wisdom, attributing the development of the British state to domestic factors. International factors mattered, too.

Following a decade of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), how do Chinese state companies and governments react to international resistance to the initiative? Pushbacks against the BRI have been well documented, yet there is limited study on how China has responded to such resistance. Based on fieldwork in Kenya, Ethiopia, Zambia and China between 2014 and 2023, this paper presents two of the response mechanisms adopted by Chinese state actors in the face of institutional gaps and information deficits. The first is that Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) innovate public relations strategies and then promote these practices to Beijing for dissemination. The second mechanism allows information to be directly transmitted to Beijing, via the internal reporting system (neican), so that Beijing can respond promptly to overseas incidents. On a theoretical level, this paper contributes to the adaptive governance literature by analysing the overseas practices of Chinese state actors and underlining that host country social actors are key drivers of these changes. On an empirical level, this article focuses on the feedback mechanism of the Belt and Road Initiative in an attempt to fill the gap in related research in this field.

This article suggests that classification exercises were the quintessential modality for both the narrative and labour–management relations of occupational health and safety in Indian mines for the period 1895–1970. The extant literature has underestimated the cause-and-effect relationship that such classification practices had, including punitive safety regulation clauses, compensation clauses, the public image of firms, forms of knowledge, and stakeholder bargaining. The narrative of work hazards fundamentally forged casualty classification patterns. The ascertainment techniques applied to casualty, perceptions of occupational risk, and the politics of restitution shaped the narratives and defined patterns of casualty classification. Management devised various ways to present a decent picture of mining through casualty statistics. Later, critiques of this business practice exposed statistical discrepancies and flaws in the classification system, challenging the built-in business-blindness. From the late 1920s, the informed, organized mineworkers articulated their experiences of workplace risk; they confronted the managerial discourse of “unavoidable” work hazards and mineworkers’ liability for casualty. The mineworkers’ publicists and the government of the Republic of India took an interest in research on occupational health and safety and its regulation. They aimed at industrial efficiency and national reconstruction by creating a healthy, contented, and experienced workforce. All this steered the classification exercises of industrialists and public authorities towards favourable changes. The twin forces of capital and working people converged on the restitution measures articulated within the utilitarian paradigm. The latter, ironically, contributed to valorizing the narrative of risk and sacrifice in the lives of mineworkers.

This article looks at Byzantine dogs for the first time from the animal's point of view, i.e. not for what our textual sources tell us about their contribution to Byzantine human history, society, and culture, but for what they may enable us to trace regarding the dogs' own sensory and emotional experience, reactions and dispositions, individuality and agency. Methodologically this is made possible by using methods and insights from Animal Studies, especially by exploiting the benefits of a modern biological and ethological understanding of the nature of dogs, and of posthumanistic approaches that collapse the human–animal divide.

Scholars have long recognized the importance of so-called “Ghent” systems of unemployment insurance for working-class strength and therefore national capitalist development. While only three European countries currently maintain “pure” Ghent systems, nearly a dozen did so during the first half of the last century. This article investigates the discontinuation of these systems in two paradigmatic cases, Belgium and the Netherlands. By focusing on the irreconcilable nature of trade union goals regarding the delivery, range, and funding of unemployment insurance, the analysis explains how the discontinuation of Ghent in these two countries could occur under distinctly union-friendly governments and with the explicit consent of their trade union movements. By showing that both the Belgian and Dutch trade union movements displayed great uncertainty regarding the organizational costs and benefits of assuming responsibility for benefit delivery, the article also explains why Belgium subsequently created a semi-Ghent system that continued to significantly boost union membership, while the Netherlands did not.

This paper investigates a rather unexpected connection between the alchemy of vermilion, mercury sulphide (HgS), and the primary red highlighted in a colour theory that emerged in the late fifteenth century: trichromacy of colour mixtures. Some early supporters of trichromacy indeed identified the hue of vermilion as the ideal simple red they discussed in their books. The colours observed during the manufacturing of this pigment led to the alchemical colour sequence described in texts and images about the sulphur–mercury theory, and they are in some recipes the same primary colours of trichromatists. This paper also shows that the era of vermilion lasted until the late eighteenth century, when vermilion was finally rejected by other trichromatists.

During the nineteenth century, a growing sense of empathy toward non-human animals emerged within the Habsburg Empire. The new empathy toward animals took organizational form in voluntary associations that attracted men and women in urban settings. In 1852, one of the first such associations was born in the busy port city of Trieste (Trst/Triest), drawing members from the elite. These individuals criticized the animal care practices of the working class and rural population, repeatedly accusing them of “immorality” and even “inhumanity.”

As the article depicts, the guardians of the animal kingdom were not as compassionate as they might appear. In fact, the protectors of animals believed themselves far superior to the proletarians who supposedly whipped their horses. The way the growing bourgeoisie treated their animal friends ultimately served as a tool in the creation of the social distinction between the bourgeoisie on the one hand, and the workers and peasants on the other.

While Trieste’s animal protection society reflected a broader global trend, it also displayed unique characteristics shaped by the city’s distinctive social and cultural dynamics. The article sheds light on how these local traits influenced its development.

Shipwrecks are archaeological, economic, historical, and political time capsules waiting to be unlocked. Their discovery results in debates over matters relating to their protection including ownership, jurisdiction, and the manner of their preservation. Interested parties include flag States, particularly in case of sunken State vessels, States in the maritime zone of which the wrecks are found, private owners of items submerged with the wrecks as well as other States linked to the objects. Sunken State vessels involve the additional disputing issue of sovereign immunity. Africa has thousands of historic shipwrecks lying around its coasts. This article examines, in the context of the African Renaissance, laws from 22 select African States in protecting underwater cultural heritage, particularly sunken (State) vessels, in light of relevant international treaties particularly the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and the UNESCO Convention on the Protection of Underwater Cultural Heritage.

The 1677 invasion of Ukraine got the Ottoman Empire embroiled in war with Russia. Scholarship on the 1683 siege of Vienna rarely mentions the Ukrainian campaign although it significantly weakened Ottoman military capacities and may have saved Vienna. This article examines how the Porte’s decision to invade Ukraine came about. The sultan’s grandiose imperial visions and false intelligence of Russian military strength were key factors. Easy victory was expected and the original plan to seize Hungary and Vienna was not given up. Only a catastrophic defeat by the Russians in August 1677 challenged the Porte’s strategic priorities. But Kara Mustafa did not give up his preference for a Hungarian campaign. He promised the Hungarians that the Ottoman army would join the ongoing anti-Habsburg rebellion in spring 1678. Meanwhile he allowed them to attack the Habsburgs with French and Polish support. The analysis draws on German, French, Hungarian, Ukrainian, Russian, and Polish sources; they reveal that the invasion of Ukraine was not planned in advance and greatly contested among Ottoman leaders. The Habsburgs understood the geopolitical significance of the Ukrainian campaign but could not breathe a sigh of relief before the sultan finally declared war against Russia in April 1678.