Drawing on untapped, open-source commentaries from elite Chinese commentators, we show that since 2018, China has become fixated on preparations for a potential “financial war” with the United States. China appears to have adjusted its renminbi (RMB) internationalization strategy – and broader approach to financial regulation – accordingly. China's perceived vulnerability to dollar sanctions increases the urgency of RMB internationalization but also makes it unacceptably risky to liberalize the capital account. The sources suggest that China's solution is to pursue partial RMB internationalization by keeping the capital account tightly regulated while encouraging trade partners to sign up for RMB settlement platforms. As more foreign banks sign up for RMB payment systems, China is gaining confidence that its financial system could weather the sudden imposition of dollar sanctions. However, China remains vulnerable in principle to a “monetary sniping” attack on the offshore RMB market.

This article critically examines the antislavery activism of Francis P. Fearon, an African activist based in late nineteenth-century Accra. His correspondence with the Aborigines’ Protection Society (APS) provides a profound insight into the dynamics of African abolitionism. By analysing a collection of letters housed in the APS archive, this study sheds light on Fearon’s commitment to abolishing slavery, driven by his principled opposition to family separation. The article underscores Fearon’s active involvement in a network of African antislavery advocates who sought to disrupt the institution of slavery through legal challenges and international advocacy. This research extends the growing literature on African abolitionism, which primarily focuses on the efforts of African missionaries, educated elites, and grassroots movements, adding a new dimension by exploring the operations of a dedicated network committed to the abolitionist cause.

This paper investigates the labour market for female servants in England and Wales between 1780 and 1834, using previously unexplored archival materials alongside qualitative sources. After introducing the dataset, the study provides a micro-level analysis of wage determinants and traces the sources and evolution of employer market power. The findings show that real wages fell substantially during the early decades of the nineteenth century and stagnated throughout the period from 1780 to 1834. Amid rising cost-of-living pressures in the early 1800s, declining real wages were accompanied by increased nominal wage bunching, suggesting greater employer market power. These trends are contextualized with insights from servants’ autobiographies and household manuals. The combined quantitative and qualitative evidence suggests that service labour markets were highly localized, employers coordinated wage-setting and working conditions, and servants faced barriers to job mobility due to living in tied housing, difficulties in recovering unpaid wages, and the critical role of character references. The results indicate that employers in the largest segment of the labour market had considerable wage-setting power, which intensified during the early years of industrialization.

In Arabic treatises on algebra, Book II of Euclid’s Elements quickly became a traditional work of reference, especially for justifying quadratic equations. However, in many of these treatises we find a representation of Euclid’s notions that deviates from the “original Euclid.” In this article, I focus on the way in which propositions of Book II were understood and reported by al-Karaǧī (11th c.) in two of his algebraic writings. Inspired by the variety of arithmetical practices of his time, al-Karaǧī transposed these Euclidean propositions from geometrical objects to numbers and applied them to an algebraic context. This allowed him to combine various argumentative strategies deriving from different fields. Building upon al-Karaǧī’s work, al-Zanǧānī (13th c.) no longer needed to mention Euclid and instead conceived of a justification of quadratic equations (the “cause” of the equation) which is completely internal to algebra. These case studies provide evidence for the use of the Elements as a toolbox for the development of algebra. More importantly, they shed further light upon a typical feature of medieval mathematics, namely the existence of a plurality intrinsic in the name “Euclid.”

This article presents the newly reconstructed daily gold price from 1919 to 1968 for the world's primary gold market during the London Gold Fixing auction, when gold was the cornerstone of the world's monetary system. We assess whether this market conformed to the Efficient Markets Hypothesis, which posits that prices are unpredictable, or the Adaptive Markets Hypothesis, which posits that a market efficiency will evolve based on changes in the market structure. We find that the Gold Fixing price was inefficient in periods when prices were market-based from 1919 to 1925 and again in the 1930s when private hoarders began to have a significant impact on the market. We find the Gold Fixing was also inefficient during gold standard periods when central bank interventions limited gold's ability to react to new information, despite two episodes where prices rose above the official ceiling.

Este artículo cuestiona la suposición común de que las organizaciones negras son inherentemente antirracistas, enfatizando la necesidad de explorar cómo esas organizaciones desarrollan perspectivas antirracistas que se integra en su trabajo y prácticas. A partir de una experiencia de trabajo con Sankofa Danzafro, este estudio analiza los resultados de seis laboratorios de danza realizados con niños, adolescentes y jóvenes afrocolombianos. Estos laboratorios culminaron en la creación de “Ancestros del Futuro”, una obra de danza inspirada en el afro-futurismo y el Black joy, interpretada por la compañía de danza afro contemporánea en Colombia. Esta investigación resalta cómo la perspectiva antirracista en la danza afro contemporánea se forma a través de una combinación única de estéticas que emergen de prácticas de danza rutinarias y una dimensión afectiva que evoluciona en momentos clave en las trayectorias de vida de los bailarines. Esta fusión desafía los discursos antirracistas dominantes que generalmente enmarcan el antirracismo como una agenda programática estática, presentándolo en cambio como una conciencia política-afectiva dinámica desarrollada mediante un compromiso reflexivo con el cuerpo a través de la danza.

This article examines the pioneering yet largely forgotten magazine Hitavadi, the first Telugu Christian monthly magazine and the earliest Telugu monthly journal. Founded in 1862 by Rev. John Edmund Sharkey, Hitavadi played a crucial role in shaping the intellectual, religious and social discourse in the Telugu-speaking regions of colonial India. Despite its significance, the history of the magazine has remained elusive due to the disappearance of most issues from public libraries and archives. The scarcity of issues reflects the fragility of nineteenth-century print preservation, making this article the first detailed attempt to reconstruct the legacy of Hitavadi. Through its vernacular focus, Hitavadi blended Christian teachings with secular knowledge, addressing gender reform, education and social transformation. It was not merely a missionary tool but a platform for intellectual engagement, connecting local concerns with global ideas. This study explores the role of the magazine in constructing a Telugu public sphere and contributing to the broader Protestant mission of literacy and moral reform. In doing so, it sheds light on the dynamics of colonial print culture, vernacular journalism, and the challenges of recovering lost archival material.

Avicenna’s distinction between external existence and mental existence is seminal to logic and philosophy in the Islamic tradition. This article examines philosophers who depart from Avicenna’s external-mental existence framework. They view the former as failing to support a general analysis of reality and truth, as mental existence is neither necessary nor sufficient for analyzing propositional truths, i.e., true propositions are true irrespective of “the very existence of minds” and “the perceptual acts of perceivers.” They propose that Avicenna’s semantics for categorical propositions needs revision, as there are true metathetic and hypothetical propositions, i.e., subject terms need not exist – in external reality or in a mind – for such propositions to be true. This counter-Avicennan current of thought articulates a third distinction in the analysis of reality, which focuses on the mind-independent nature of propositional content – particularly propositions with empty, hypothetical, or impossible subject terms – as a way to think generally about reality, in contrast to the Avicennan emphasis on the existential status of terms and essences. Notably, the analysis of mind-independent reality is supported by a novel semantics of “real” (ḥaqīqī) categorical propositions, which avoids external and mental existence conditions.

Nous entendons dans cet article éditer, traduire et analyser un texte datant du xiiie siècle dans lequel figurent des preuves arithmétiques de la proposition selon laquelle la somme des carrés de deux nombres impairs ne peut pas être un carré. Cette proposition avait déjà été démontrée par al-Ḫāzin au xe siècle par le biais des propositions 3 et 5 du livre II et de la proposition 22 du livre IX des Éléments d’Euclide.

This article investigates the lexicon of dispute settlement in early modern Inner Austria, exploring the broadest legal, social, and emotional dimensions of the concept of “enmity” to better understand the nature of dispute settlement and social relations in coeval Central Europe. In particular, the article examines how litigants and courts understood and used “enmity” and its cognates, and how changes in criminal law impacted its usage. The article focuses on interpersonal conflicts and violence among nonnobles, who constituted the vast majority of Inner Austria’s population. It demonstrates that well into the 1700s among local urbanites and peasants, “enmity” and its key synonyms expressing ill-will, discord, or hatred—as opposites of love, concord, and friendship—signified a social state of mutual hostility closely related to violent retribution rather than unrestrained feeling.

This essay is a study in bureaucratic knowledge production using the example of the postal system in German East Africa. There is a great deal of historical literature that focuses on bureaucratic-knowledge-as-power: bureaucracies produced information that was used to quantify and, ultimately, to control populations both in the metropole and the colony. In this piece I want to emphasize another kind of bureaucratic knowledge production: namely, information about the bureaucratic system that was created through bureaucratic practice — what I call “studied bureaucratic knowledge.” Beyond understanding German attempts to translate (linguistically, administratively, and culturally) one understanding of bureaucracy, the historian who pays attention to the users of colonial bureaucratic structures can uncover bureaucratic knowledge created by those who encountered those structures in their daily lives — and how that information in turned shaped their use of the bureaucratic system.

Avicenna is well-known for rejecting Aristotle’s dichotomy between perception and the intellect by introducing the so-called estimative power, which connects perception and the intellect. The estimative power is similar to sensory cognition because what is estimated is always mixed with the sensibles. Additionally, the proper object of estimation is the individualised macnā, which seems similar to the object of the intellect as the intelligible macnā. Given the special role of estimation, scholars have recently begun debating whether Avicenna has a conceptualist theory of perception. This article contributes to that debate by focusing on Avicenna’s discussions about the perception of externals in Al-taclīqāt. I argue for a reading that steers between Mohammad Azadpur’s conceptualist reading and Luis Farjeat’s anti-conceptualist reading. For Avicenna, the presence of the sensible form in a sensory power is non-conceptual, but the perceptual judgement exhibits a weak epistemic conceptualism.

This study tries to shed further light on Avicenna’s (d. 1037) philosophical and linguistic innovations as suggested in his various accounts of the problem of individuation. To better contextualize his discussions, a background is given from both Porphyry’s (d. 305) Isagoge and Fārābī’s (d. 950) remarks in his Isāġūǧī. I have also enumerated all the candidates for the principle of individuation in Avicenna’s œuvre. It is argued in this paper that the pre-Avicennian Peripatetic tradition hardly engaged, both epistemologically and ontologically, with individual per se as having its own unique identity. Instead, individual was ontologically treated as instantiation of universals and epistemologically it was inquired about to the extent that it could be only told apart. Introducing the notion of individuation as tašaḫḫuṣ, instead of the traditional individuation as tamayyuz, Avicenna offers a new way of looking at intra-species differences for a more complex understanding of the individual per se. According to this view, individual with its unique šaḫṣiyya must be understood on its own through sense perception. This approach appears to propose that the individual should not be deemed as subordinate to Aristotelian universals whose assemblage, in Peripatetic thought, was vainly expected to lead to the knowledge and definition of the individual.

Since 2008, growing scepticism about the ability of market forces to ensure financial stability and environmental sustainability has revived interest in credit controls. Credit controls were common in Europe before the ‘neoliberal turn’ of the 1980s. However, the decline in support for these policies in the 1970s is not well understood. This article examines Italy's shift away from credit controls, focusing on the role of central bank economists and the Bank of Italy's monetary policy ideas. By analysing the discourse and research of central bankers from 1973 to 1983, the article shows that persistent fiscal deficits were the main driving force behind both the introduction and the subsequent abolition of credit controls. It also highlights the influence of a new generation of economists, such as Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa and Mario Monti, on Italian economic policy, providing a case study that contextualises the economic ideas shaping policy making in the European Monetary Union.

The history of European overseas expansion has traditionally been studied from a national perspective. However, the rise of Atlantic history, global history, and a revitalized maritime history has prompted scholars to question the rigidity of Early Modern borders assumed by these conventional national or imperial frameworks. In parallel, researchers have contested the state-centric viewpoint by advocating for an actor-focused approach to Atlantic System history, emphasizing the role of private merchants and their informal, international networks. These approaches have uncovered the involvement of entrepreneurs belonging to polities without a formal empire in the colonial ventures of other nations. This paper examines one such trans-imperial enterprise: Romberg & Consors, a firm operating from the Austrian Netherlands. During and after the American War of Independence (1775–83), Romberg & Consors leveraged evolving Spanish attitudes toward the slave trade and the establishment of neutral trade to organize slave trade expeditions to Cuba. By closely analyzing the operations of this Imperial firm, this study illuminates a decisive phase in Spanish imperial history while contributing to the often-overlooked Atlantic history of the Habsburg Monarchy and the Austrian Netherlands.