During the course of our exploration of the history and architecture of central India, Mukhtar Ahmad Khān, a school teacher and local historian, directed our attention towards a collection of unpublished legal documents pertaining to the shrine of Shaykh Kamāl al-Dīn Chishtī in Dhār, Madhya Pradesh.1 As a corpus, these documents are concerned with grants of land, revenue, and legal issues regarding the management of the shrine, but they give, nonetheless, incidental information about the Chishtīs and the religious activities for which they were responsible. The shrine at Dhār—more correctly a dargāh—has enjoyed a continuous history from the fourteenth century to the present and is preeminent among the many Sufi places of pilgrimage in central India. Despite its manifest importance, the institutional, religious, and social histories of this dargāh await scholarly attention. The present article takes a first step in this direction by focusing on one crucial document that dates to the late seventeenth century.

During the First World War, British military bands went on tours to Paris (1917) and Italy (1918) to generate support for the Allied war effort. These ‘propaganda tours’ marked the culmination of a trend that emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century when military musicians assumed the role of cultural envoys of the state. With retreat from ‘splendid isolation’ at the turn of the century, the nascent entente cordiale witnessed a burgeoning relationship between British and French military bands. While the impetus for these tours came from outside government, the Foreign Office’s cancellation of a tour to Germany in 1907 against King Edward VII’s wishes shows that these activities were considered more than benign gestures of international musical co-operation. After over two years of war, professional propagandists harnessed the mass appeal of military music by organizing concerts designed to reverse dwindling morale and present a unified Allied war effort. Although it is hard to assess their effectiveness, contemporary accounts and similar missions in the interwar period suggest that they met their objectives. By consulting a wide range of materials, from concert reviews to diplomatic correspondence, this article aims to bridge the gaps between political, military, and cultural history by showing the relevance of military music to all three sub-fields.

This article estimates several causal counterfactual parameters of the effect of being an Historically Black College/University (HBCU) on college/university endowment, and on the probability of a college/university failing as a function of its financial health, which is proportional to endowment. Our various counterfactual causal parameter decomposition estimates suggest that the racial distinctiveness of HBCUs causes, and can account for cumulative HBCU/non-HBCU endowment disparities between $11.5 billion and $58.9 billion for the HBCUs in our estimating sample. This is consistent with, at least in part, racial discrimination against HBCUs in philanthropic endowment contributions/gifts. With respect to failure, as HBCU status contributes to higher failure probabilities that are a function of college/university financial health, reducing the HBCU/non-HBCU endowment disparity would also enhance the ability of HBCUs to continuously exist. We suggest two public policy interventions to close the endowment disparity. First, increase the tax subsidy for contributions/gifts to HBCUs relative to non-HBCUs, as a way to incentivize more gifts to HBCUs from wealthy foundations and individuals. Secondly, to the extent that the wealth of HBCU alumni—who give back to their alma mater at higher rates than their non-HBCU peers—has been constrained due to the legacy of Slavery and discrimination, a distribution of reparations to the descendants of Black American Slaves would close Black-White wealth disparities that could translate into larger endowment contributions/gifts from HBCU alumni.

This paper reconsiders long-standing debates in Canada about the relationship between language, race, and culture. Federal policies focused on official bilingualism (1969) and multiculturalism (1971) animated local movements of parents, students, and other community members demanding greater linguistic and racial inclusion in schools. This paper examines two instances of these grassroots politics, namely activism on behalf of heritage-language education and Black cultural-heritage programs, in Toronto, Ontario, between 1970 and 1987. Our analysis reveals key instances in which temporary forms of solidarity emerged between heritage-language and Black activism, as well as contradictory trajectories in this activism that undermined what Roseann Liu and Savannah Shange have theorized as “thick solidarity.” In this paper, we argue that absences of thick solidarity ultimately weakened efforts by heritage-language and Black activists alike to reorganize schools in ways that were more linguistically and racially just.

This article examines the intertwined processes between China’s making of anti-slavery laws and the evolution of international legislation against slavery in the early twentieth century. By tracing international interventions into domestic servitude issues in Chinese communities both in China and Southeast Asia, the article analyses how the international legal regime was absorbed into the domestic laws of late Qing and Republican China. Drawing on two threads of scholarly discussion—namely, the histories of humanitarian internationalism and modern China’s legal reform—this article argues that late Qing and Republican jurists intentionally maintained an ambiguous definition of domestic servitude. This ambiguity served to affirm the humanitarian governance of the modern state while simultaneously preserving social customs, in defiance of international law.

In this study, we hypothesize that positive, explicit racial appeals to Black voters from White politicians will be seen as pandering if not accompanied by an endorsement from a Black elite, which would increase credibility of the appeal. To test this, we use a preregistered survey experiment with approximately 400 Black Americans. Contrary to our expectations, we find that pro-Black appeals can function to increase support for the politician, even without an endorsement. In the full sample, the candidate enjoyed increased support when only using a positive appeal, when only receiving an endorsement, and when making an appeal and receiving an endorsement—relative to the control condition. Qualitative analyses of open-ended responses reveal that respondents saw the politician as pandering in all conditions—an appeal was not necessary to evoke pandering. We conclude that campaign strategies like appeals and endorsements can function to boost support even when the candidate is perceived as pandering.

This article analyses the philanthropic practices of wealthy businessmen in West and Central Africa and how they are rooted in different political economies. Current debates on African philanthropy focus on horizontal gifting as a form of solidarity. Drawing on observations, interviews and original data on the activities of corporations and foundations, we identify three types of philanthropic practices that support different forms of economic accumulation and social reproduction. They also promote new forms of governance and transnational networks. First, gifts to parties and governments contribute to neo-patrimonial dynamics. Second, in the wake of democratisation processes, some business elites started to use grants and partnerships with civil societies and international organisations to promote the rule of law and constrain prebendalism. A third type of practices comprise venture philanthropy, seed funding and incubators claims to ‘Africanise’ capital flows. It positions finance professionals as intermediaries between the offshore world and the new leaders they support.