When did fascism end? Did it end in July 1943, with the fall of Mussolini from power, or in April 1945, with Liberation Day? The argument of this article is that fascism was not simply a historical experience but a political form that attempted to transcend Italy’s social and political fractures with fantasies and unrealistic but nevertheless captivating expectations. Its hypnotic contagious power cast a mimetic spell that can be continuously reloaded: by blurring the boundaries between truth and lies; by exploiting crowd irrationality; by establishing boundaries between outsiders and insiders; by perpetuating negative sentiments of hostility, fear and envy within society; and by manipulating time. The argument, therefore, is that fascism has never ended, not merely in the sense of political and cultural continuity, but in the deeper sense of immanency within the body politic of Italy’s democracy. As such, it is meaningless to wonder whether fascism might come back. It is here and now, in the only form that current historical circumstances allow it to exist – and yet it might be countered by a process of rejection that individuals and political communities can and should exercise in their everyday life, adopting the political form generated by the Resistance.

This article offers the first comprehensive history of Anglo-American married couples who co-published together, c. 1870–1939. It departs from the tendency to solely focus on the detrimental impact of marriage on women’s professional lives and the framing of middle-class women as simply either marrying or working as ‘spinsters’ before the Great War. It instead centres couples who together carved out enviable new positions, arguing these endeavours should be recognized as a growing socio-cultural phenomenon of this era. Moreover, it unpacks the significance of the prominent public discourse circulated to readers across the English-speaking world about such relationships. The most ‘popular’ partnerships were celebrated as simultaneously ‘exceptional’ collaborators and ‘ordinary’ married couples. Their dual-working lifestyles and intellectual compatibility was held up as holding the key to unlocking greater marital happiness. However, invested in carving out their roles in a deeply hierarchical, capitalist world, ‘popular’ couples often remade and propagated regressive ideas about gender, class, and racialized difference. Still, the article contends that the paradoxes in this discourse facilitated the creation of an imaginative space where readers could explore and self-actualize new perspectives about the ways they, and those around them, might partake in work cultures and intimate relationships in twentieth-century society.

In eighteenth-century south-western Europe, actors involved in local conflicts reshaped both their views of corrupt behaviours and their political practices. While these historical phenomena occurred simultaneously, their relationship is far more complex than a straightforward cause-and-effect dynamic. Through four local case-studies, this article examines the multiple connections between changing perceptions of corrupt practices and political reform. New evaluations of abuses and frauds spurred reforms in some cases; in others, corruption was redefined once the reforms had been implemented, to justify those reforms (or their failure, if they did not succeed). Some case-studies show that there was no link between the two processes, while others reveal that the logics of the political changes prevented tackling practices which had started to be seen as corrupt. The article demonstrates that there was a transformation in the evaluation of certain practices that began to be classified as corrupt, and establishes links between these changes and the reforms implemented from the mid-eighteenth century onwards. Additionally, by placing south-western European regions within a broader framework, it challenges deeply rooted assumptions about the backwardness of these polities and their former colonies as a consequence of failed transitions to modern notions of corruption.

In 2021, the 44th session of the World Heritage Committee Meeting voted to list the Kaeng Krachan Forest Complex as a Natural World Heritage Site, seven years after it was first nominated for consideration by Thailand. A central point to the debate was concerns raised over human rights abuses relating to the Indigenous Karen people living inside the park boundaries. This paper undertakes an analysis of the World Heritage Committee discussion, unpacking key themes of Outstanding Universal Value, human rights, and the role of local communities to illustrate the impact that World Heritage – and the subsequent Authorized Heritage Discourse (AHD) it creates – can have on Indigenous communities.

This article explores the dynamics of court practice with regard to mercantile preinsolvency in later nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Belgium. In 1883, the Belgian legislature introduced the proceeding of concordat préventif, making it possible for insolvent entrepreneurs to remain outside the liquidation-oriented procedure of faillite. Instead, they could declare their financial problems and propose a scheme of payment to their creditors. Despite this goal, however, the 1883 law, along with subsequent laws of 1885 and 1887, imposed high majority voting requirements. Accordingly, in the Antwerp commercial court, the shortcomings of the legislation were amended to ameliorate its procedural and judicial practice. The new practices of the court resulted in higher rates of acceptance of applications. However, these success ratios were not evenly distributed among the groups of debtors who applied. Perceptions shared by both creditors and judges may have advantaged merchants, brokers, and entrepreneurs who belonged to the higher strata of the city’s business world.

In 1974, the International Species Information System (ISIS) was launched as a computerised database for zoo animals. Developed by a small group in Minneapolis, ISIS is now used by over 1,300 zoos on five continents and recognised as a crucial tool for ex situ conservation. The founders aimed to transform long-standing global patterns of zoo animal management. Rather than places where wild-caught animals went to die, they envisioned zoos as interconnected hubs supporting the global breeding and survival of endangered species. This article examines how the ‘infrastructural globalism’ of ISIS took shape. At first sight, the system appears to be a universal instrument for collecting neutral data. Yet, using the lens of ‘infrastructural inversion’ and examining the legal, socio-political, and scientific contexts in which it was developed, the article highlights how locally rooted ambitions and global competitions shaped its design and operation. Despite its aura of global reach, the effectiveness of ISIS relied on continuous local human effort, which explains its limitations. On a broader level, the history of ISIS reminds us that the influence of infrastructural globalism extends to non-human animals, and the ways they move around the world.

This article explores the ways that ecclesiastical record books produced by national and local Church courts in Scotland were bound up in the contests for legitimacy around the Scottish Revolution. The article argues that adherents to the National Covenant used paper record books and the practices that surrounded them, as well as their printed output, to legitimise their protest movement and to attack their opponents. Reconstructing the Church in paper represented an essential part of the Covenanters’ protest, reconstructing the Church after the fall of episcopacy.

We chart and assess the scope and utilisation of state-supplied hospital infrastructure in British Africa, c. 1900–60. Using archival sources, we examine the heterogeneity in colonial administrations’ investment into curative healthcare provision across various regions of British Africa. Our research highlights significant disparities in healthcare provision during the colonial period. These disparities were shaped by a range of observable factors, including differences in colonial policies, budgets, investment priorities, and the availability of medical personnel. We test stylised facts about public goods provision derived from previous literature and highlight the importance of understanding the historical context in shaping healthcare systems in Africa today.

Though not among the most famous of the Baroque’s architects and builders, the Bregenzerwald Baroque Master Builders, who were heavily involved in the creation of a sacred landscape of churches and monasteries in the wider Lake Constance area, have attracted scholarly attention since the nineteenth century. This article attempts to recontextualize these builders by taking them out of the usual framework proposed by art historians who, not least due to a chance discovery of an important source in the mid-twentieth century, tended to interpret the remote alpine valley of the Bregenzerwald as some kind of “rustic Florence.” Instead, this article rereads these builders in the context of the more mundane social and political realities of the Bregenzerwald. It suggests that in order to better understand this fascinating group of builders and craftsmen, it may be helpful to avoid reconstructing their sociopolitical history from their artistic achievement (How were they able to accomplish this?), and instead to reverse this approach to uncover the sociopolitical structures in which they lived (Who were they before they accomplished this?).

This article uses the case of the economist John Malcolm Blair as a vehicle for examining the durability of the institutional tradition in US economic policy making. Over a multidecade federal government career, Blair played an important role in focusing policy debate on institutionalist concerns like economic structure and corporate power even through the heyday of the Keynesian Revolution. Indeed, Blair stood as representative of an overlooked postwar policy-intellectual current that strove to anchor the study of macroeconomic issues like inflation and unemployment upon solid microfoundations: what I call Institutional Keynesianism. A primary influence behind such policy developments as the Celler-Kefauver Anti-Merger Act of 1950 and the wage–price guideposts implemented by the Kennedy administration, Blair’s work sheds light on the meaningful yet often neglected links between different schools of economic thought and policy domains.

Prior to the Civil War, the US and state governments required the modern licensing of only three occupations, doctors, lawyers, and ship pilots. Most other references to licensing in the 15,000 surveyed antebellum statutes referred to licensing in general terms. Those that referred to the “licensing” of occupations clearly referenced a type of tax or regulation of occupations thought sinful or diplomatically sensitive, like Indian trading and privateering. In other words, the presumption of occupational freedom that developed in medieval and early modern Britain transferred to the colonies and the United States. Only with the rise of Progressivism did modern occupational licensing become common, thus adding weight to economic critiques of the current system.

The Dutch city of Leiden experienced economic and demographic growth from the last quarter of the sixteenth century onwards. This article analyses its effects on the urban private housing market by charting both the ratio of owners to tenants and the spatial patterns of housing wealth. Housing inequality increased in Leiden, reinforcing existing economic disparities and patterns of residential segregation. These dynamics were mainly caused by migration, which created great demand for housing. Gaining an insight into the pre-modern housing market also helps us to understand how inequalities were (re)produced and how they affected the daily lives of urbanites differently.