In the decades after the death of Iosif Stalin in 1953, Soviet foreign policy shifted away from isolationism to knowledge transfer and competition with the West, as well as robust engagement with the decolonising and non-aligned world. A core component of this reorientation was the reversal of the USSR’s temporary withdrawal from international organisations. This article explores the Soviet Red Cross’s involvement in the League of Red Cross Societies and argues that the two organisations engaged in a mutually beneficial partnership that was built upon shared visions of humanitarianism and development. In this period, the Soviet Red Cross co-hosted major international seminars and conferences with the League, helped to channel humanitarian relief to conflict zones, and supported the League’s development initiatives in the Global South. In return, the League offered the Soviets opportunities to forge links with newly independent countries of the decolonising world and advance narratives about Soviet superiority to international and domestic audiences.

This paper examines the writings of socialist scholars who played a pivotal role in shaping Friedrich Hayek’s perspective in The Road to Serfdom, including William Beveridge, Stuart Chase, Henry Dickinson, Hugh Dalton, Evan Durbin, Oskar Lange, Harold Laski, Abba Lerner, Barbara Wootton, and the contributing authors in Findlay MacKenzie’s Planned Society (1937). Many of these socialist thinkers held two main hypotheses. First, industrial concentration was inevitable under capitalism. Second, they argued, government ownership or control of key economic sectors was necessary to protect democracy from industrial consolidation in the capitalist system and to reduce political opposition to complete state ownership or control over the means of production. Despite sharing Hayek’s concern for socialism’s potential erosion of democratic freedoms, these socialist hypotheses have received much less scholarly attention than Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. We conclude that Hayek formalized socialist scholars’ fears and developed a well-defined hypothesis that central planning could threaten democratic freedoms.

The past decade has seen an increase in attention to Tangut, an extinct Sino-Tibetan language spoken by the rulers of the Western Xia xīxià 西夏 empire. The question of its classification has become a subject of discussion especially since the documentation of its closest relatives came to light recently. The present paper builds on the study of the Tangut verb template by Jacques (2011) to question the place of Tangut with regard to the Horpa languages (Beaudouin 2023b). By doing so, it identifies a phenomenon of attraction encompassing synchronic and diachronic analysis and proposes that verbal templatic morphology in West Gyalrongic is nuclear.

The Government Savings Bank of Jamaica (GSB) was created post-emancipation in order to serve the poor as a vehicle for precautionary savings and has been viewed as largely successful in this goal, at least after its restructuring in the late 1860s. We investigate this by examining GSB depositor behaviour after income shocks due to hurricanes. To this end, we combine digitized parish-level GSB account information with a hurricane damage index generated from historical storm tracks. Our results show little evidence of a precautionary savings motive by GSB account holders in that while net account balances and deposits drop after hurricanes, withdrawals and the number of accounts closed also fall. Additionally, the net decrease in account holders seems not to be driven by small savers, who are likely to be the poorest. Our findings are thus more in line with the GSB potentially being used to finance non-necessary consumption.

In the years between the turn of the century and the outbreak of World War I, business directories listed four commercial piano storefronts in Kraków and an even more impressive nine in Lwów, though the actual number was even higher. Additionally, each of the cities boasted multiple local piano factories. The presence of these factories and storefronts indicates an established market for the buying and selling of pianos in the two major urban centers of Austrian Galicia in the years prior to the war. While piano advertising continued both during and after the war, this was not necessarily an indicator of a lack of change. The instability and increasing inflation of the period served as a catalyst, forcing some owners to sell their pianos, while other citizens may have had the opportunity to capitalize on the economic situation, buying these status symbols for their households. The persistence of private piano classified advertisements for those hoping to buy and sell pianos throughout the war years was a symptom of social and cultural change within the middle class in urban Galicia. This article situates the dynamics of the region’s persistent piano marketplace alongside contemporary socio-political and economic trends to highlight an important indicator of social mobility amidst the widespread impact of World War I.

Rahmah bin Jabir (c. 1760-1826) is one of the most frequently mentioned persons in British sources from the Gulf in the first decades of the nineteenth century. He is also found throughout important Arabic-language chronicles. Despite his prominence in the sources, however, scholars have paid him relatively little attention, in either English or in Arabic. Though often cast as a pirate, this article argues that Rahmah bin Jabir was a political entrepreneur critical to shaping the international order of the Gulf in the first half of the nineteenth century. Reading against the grain of the colonial archive and synthesizing British sources with Arab chronicles, this article brings to life a textured political imaginary of the Gulf in the global age of revolutions, using Rahmah to weave overlapping political agendas between different emerging states, including the Omanis, the Saudi-Wahhabis, the Bahrainis, the Qataris, and the British. I suggest that Rahmah stands as one figure through whom historians can continue piecing together an age of revolutions in the Gulf that is more than Europe's emergence into modernity, one that highlights a complex and vibrant history of negotiation, endurance, and resiliency.

This article examines the scientific legacy of the first Glasgow Botanic Gardens and the part they played in the global circulation of botanical knowledge, from their creation in 1817 to their relocation to the West End of Glasgow in 1841. Located in a thriving industrial city with strong commercial ties to the British Caribbean, the gardens stood at an important crossroads of political and economic interests, scientific discovery, cultural innovation and imperial motives. They were managed by the talented English botanist William Jackson Hooker, who strove to transform them into a training ground for prospective botanists and a leading scientific institution. Yet, like many other botanical establishments of similar stature at the time, the gardens encountered many financial setbacks that hampered their success and threatened the scientific ambitions of Hooker and his peers. This article discusses the extent of the gardens’ scientific contribution within and beyond the borders of Britain and seeks to determine the degree to which science in these gardens was constrained by economic factors.