This article investigates the personal history of Luo Longji, a distinguished Chinese liberal in the twentieth century. A controversial figure, Luo has two contradictory images in history: a democratic warrior and an enemy of the people. The two contrasting images, this article argues, reveal a fundamental dilemma of twentieth-century Chinese liberalism, which tries to reconcile the tension between the protection of individual freedom and a quest for a strong nation-state based on popular sovereignty. Defining himself as a disciple of Harold Laski, Luo reinterpreted the latter’s political ideas in a new historical context. On the one hand, Luo applauded individual disobedience of the despotic state and protested Chiang Kai-shek’s autocracy in favour of human rights and freedom. On the other, Luo’s nationalist fervour deeply shaped his liberal programme, hoping for a democratic nation-state as the guardian of people’s rights and freedom. This national liberalism led him to cast aside Laski’s anti-statist pluralism and instead exalt state sovereignty to represent the Chinese people’s general will. As a result, Luo was made an enemy in the 1950s by the democratic and constitutional polity he actively helped to build. Chinese liberalism was thus defeated by its own logic in Mao’s China.

There has been limited research on African policy instruments’ historical and institutional nature in health policy literature. However, in the field of health systems research, there are many examples that show the permanent use of financing instruments inspired by liberal (pro-market) ideas such as user fees, performance bonuses, or private practice of medicine in Africa. Through an analysis of archives (1840–1960), this article shows the presence of these instruments in the health system during the French colonial period in Senegal. Thus, this study shows that these financing policy instruments’ institutional presence and longevity are part of a liberal approach that predates international organizations’ contemporary (and liberal) promotion. This study uses a historical and institutionalist approach to understand the context, actors, and underlying factors that allowed for this historical continuity, resulting in the permanence of these instruments.

This article investigates marriage as a site for the historical study of time. Focusing on Hindu marriage in South Asia between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, the article studies (a) how the moment of a marriage is made and documented through what the article calls ‘temporal practices’, and (b) how, once this moment is made and documented, it is put to use in and for a marriage ceremony. The article has three sections. In the first section, it discusses the device used to measure the time of the marriage ceremony: the water clock. This section also addresses how the water clock was used, and who used it, within the marriage ceremony; and registers a shift in the nineteenth century from the water clock to the mechanical clock. In the second section, the article discusses documentary practices that record the moment of a marriage and addresses historical changes related to these practices in the nineteenth century. In the third section, the article examines the work that the moment of a marriage does once it has been brought into being and documented. This section argues that the moment of a marriage frames and makes efficacious a certain action through which the bride and groom are transformed. The article concludes by arguing that the moment of a marriage temporally regulates the activities of the marriage ceremony and explores how this moment reconfigures relations to the past and future for the bride and groom.

This article examines a 40-year policy history of efforts to redress survivors of egregious violations, such as torture, massacres, and genocides. Using oral history interviews and document analysis, it first focused on the ideas and creative advocacy that undergirded a burgeoning redress movement. By juxtaposing classic ideas with a relatively obscure statute (the Alien Tort Statute or ATS) and modern strategies, advocates won an improbable court case. Their case inspired Congress to introduce, debate, and pass the Torture Victim Protection Act, explicitly to support, affirm, and expand the ATS and the idea of universal jurisdiction, locally and globally. After advocates further developed these ideas with new court cases and NGOs, the Supreme Court began whittling the policies away, despite congressional intent, prioritizing the ideas that Congress had rejected, until the Court stripped the ATS of its universal jurisdiction power. This human rights retrenchment in the United States drove the advocates to seek new bases for human rights justice and to develop their ideas abroad where legal actions have succeeded in advancing some redress. In expounding this history, the article sheds light on four phenomena: the power and limitations of aspirational and practical ideas in constructing new pathways to justice; the role of creative advocacy to frame and amalgamate ideas toward developing paradigm-shifting policy and law; the flow and interactions between government branches and civil society with the ideas and policies, including how the courts initially led in advancing human rights redress then later reversed and truncated the pathway counter to Congressional intent.

Previous accounts have suggested a potential divergence between Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang in their approaches to economic governance. This study examines the policy orientations of the two leaders concerning state–market relations, providing empirical evidence for the recent manifestation of what insiders have termed the “dispute between north and south houses” (nanbeiyuan zhi zheng) and its economic implications. By applying semi-supervised machine learning methods to textual data, this study demonstrates that Li favoured market-oriented policies, whereas Xi displayed a pronounced preference for state-centric strategies. The findings notably indicate an initial divergence in policy orientation, which was followed by a considerable convergence during Xi's second term. Our analysis further reveals that Li's market-oriented rhetoric was particularly prominent during “Mass innovation week,” indicating a campaign-style policy mobilization. Moreover, the analysis identifies that the discursive differences between the two leaders are associated with a decline in firm-level investment, suggesting that disparities in policy orientation may engender political uncertainty. This study contributes to the extant literature on the impact of leadership dynamics on economic policy, the implications of mixed signals from the central leadership and the phenomenon of campaign-style mobilization in China.

In this article, I argue that leaders of the U.S. Department of War and U.S. Army developed the organizational form and management practices of the modern corporation, decades before the advent of the railroads. Following Mark R. Wilson’s call to “bring the military in” to organizational analysis, I show how leaders of the U.S. military developed modern management practices and organizational structures as a way of maintaining control over officers, soldiers, and workers over long distances, as they provided the organized violence necessary for domestic imperialist expansion. By the time that elite merchants and real estate interests in the Atlantic port cities of the U.S. became interested in building railroads, in the late 1820s and 1830s, the U.S. Army already evidenced the key characteristics of modern business enterprise as defined by Alfred Chandler: a multi-unit organization coordinated by a hierarchy of professional, salaried, career-oriented middle and top managers. All the characteristic coordination mechanisms of the corporation: staff and line hierarchies, divisional and departmental structure, and bureaucratic systems of information gathering, surveillance, and control, were developed by the state in the course of building a continental empire.

In the first months of the Spanish Civil War, the Spanish doctor Frederic Duran Jordà developed a new method of blood transfusion which overcame the era of direct arm-to-arm transfusions. While Duran was experimenting in Barcelona and the Aragon front, hundreds of foreign doctors came to Spain with the help of internationalist associations and offered their services to the Republican government. The Czechoslovak Dr Karel Holubec entered Spain in May 1937 and practiced in a mobile hospital funded by the Czechoslovak Committee to Aid Democratic Spain, receiving blood from Duran’s laboratory. This article aims to study how Duran and Holubec transferred the method of blood transfusion to Czechoslovakia through interpersonal contact, conferences, and performances. This paper argues that while individual actors played a crucial role in the diffusion of medical practices, this circulation was determined by a unique historical and socio-political framework. The Spanish Civil War, the International Brigades, and the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Nazi Germany were not only the historical context of medical innovation but an integral part of it.

The maritime expansion of the early modern period and the discovery of new continents necessitated a profound revision in traditional cosmology, bringing into question the millennia-old practices that were framed around that cosmology. Among these practices was astrology, which in the early modern period reached an unprecedented level of popularity through the development of the printing press. The application of the astrological corpus in tropical and southern latitudes questioned many of the foundational Ptolemaic concepts. At the core of this problem was the reversal of the seasons in the southern hemisphere. Since Ptolemy had firmly grounded the natural explanation of astrological attributes of the zodiac and the planets on the seasonal qualities, their reversal would imply a complete change in the zodiacal and planetary properties. Authors such as Girolamo Cardano, Tommaso Campanella and Athanasius Kircher addressed this matter, but it never became a central point of debate in the astrological literature of the period. However, practitioners in the New World, whose empirical view was very different to that of European authors, reached different conclusions. This problem offers an example of the difficulty in reconciling traditional authority with new knowledge. At the same time, it exposes the sharp contrast between the theoretical perspective of Europe-based authors and the actual experience of astrologers practising in the New World.

Raymond Williams’ concept of “structure of feelings” with particular reference to the residual form, underpins experiences of deindustrialization in the embodiment of industry, gendering identities, and community values. This is a complex relationship between work, health, community and culture, where working life reached beyond the coalface. This article analyzes the significance of these interconnecting factors through the oral history accounts of former miners and residents within the Kent Coalfield. In drawing on Williams’ concept of “structure of feelings” with particular reference to “residual culture,” it reveals how ill-health was seen as “remarkable” and “traumatic,” yet equally “unremarkable” and “normal.” Having recognized the expectant inevitability of these issues, the discussion focuses on a particular understanding of community culture, social interactions and memories within the context of health and illness, which highlights the centrality embodiment in understanding deindustrialization as a process of change.