Taiwan became a Japanese colony in 1895 and in the Second World War was geographically central in Japan’s wartime possessions and strategically important, with military airfields, ports, and a copper mine. Its sixteen prisoner-of-war camps included four labour camps. Taiwan was also the first place to which senior officers and colonial officials were dispersed after the Allied surrenders in Hong Kong, Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines. Forty-five doctors from the British, Australian, Dutch and American forces were identified who spent at least part of their captivity on Taiwan. This article uses their personal accounts, official documents and secondary sources to describe them and their work. Although the oldest had experience in the First World War and some had practised in the region, others were young, recently-qualified generalists. Most were transferred between several camps, with one consequence that few contemporaneous medical records survive. Doctors shared the risks and hardships of all prisoners: they lost weight and had the same nutritional disorders, infections and infestations as their patients. Two died. They became significant, scrutinised figures in the camps. Their patients valued their work and understood that they lacked resources for fully effective medical practice.

Bob (or R.J.) Morris was probably best known in academic circles for his histories of class and specifically the British middle class. This essay traces his thinking about class in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain from an early study of class consciousness to his later attempts to rework ideas about social structure and culture in a post-Weberian direction. A feature of this intellectual trajectory was the increasing importance of the city and urban place in the account of class formation, most evident in his work on Leeds. In the process, Bob carved out a distinctive type of urban social history which has proved highly influential in historical studies of social structure not only in Britain but in Europe and beyond.

In 1934, the much-publicized engagement of Japanese noblewoman Kuroda Masako to Ethiopian nobleman Araya Abebe made headlines worldwide, epitomizing the transnational dream of a racially anti-hierarchical world. Starting from this unrealized wedding, this article showcases the voice of Kuroda Masako, a racially equal imperial feminist who tried to foster her vision of women participating in the empire-building process even in new settings like Ethiopia. By featuring her practices, we are able to understand why they resonated not only in the women’s press but also in a much larger intellectual scene that comprised Pan-Asian and Pan-African activists. Because of such significant resonance across various non-governmental actors worldwide, the Kuroda-Araya engagement became dangerous to state-endorsed agendas in many countries, which were unwilling to countenance an unprecedented alliance between Ethiopia, Japan, and the African American community at the expense of Western and white civilization discourse. As a result, the engagement created a rupture between popular sympathy and the state, eventually resulting in Japan’s official disengagement from Ethiopia well before the Second Italo-Ethiopian War.

Department stores have served as significant commercial and cultural institutions, transforming retail systems, consumption patterns, and people’s tastes in many countries since the late 1840s, when the first department store emerged in Paris. However, the adaptation of their business models and influence varied depending on social contexts. This article examines Japanese department stores from the 1900s to the 1930s, focusing on the role of restaurants within these establishments. Department store restaurants not only redefined the customer experience through innovative food services but also played a crucial role in reshaping the business itself. Central to this transformation were the waitresses, often referred to as “restaurant girls,” whose emotional labor became integral to the department store’s operations. Their work introduced the incorporation of personality into business management, highlighting how the performance of personality—both gendered and productive—was leveraged in the modern commercial world.

Postwar decolonisation in the global South sparked a range of political imaginaries and experiments in postcolonial governance. Among the most prominent and least understood of the roads not ultimately taken was that of federation. The federal model seemed to offer something to almost everyone—Cold War hegemons, metropolitan officials, anticolonial nationalists, ‘pan-’ racial visionaries—and a dozen such unions were proposed or attempted after 1945. Yet almost none lasted even a decade before shrinking or collapsing. Their demise, despite occurring at the height of the Cold War, had little or nothing to do with that conflict. Rather, the concurrent rise and fall of two such unions—the West Indies Federation and Malaysia—demonstrates that they succumbed to a number of fatal flaws, above all one that connects this decolonisation story to the long territorial-imperial era preceding it: the centrifugal force of the ethnopolitical identities embedded within them.

In this article, I discuss the Cold War as a label, meaning, and referent in academic research. I consider how the label “the Cold War” focuses attention on the conflict between the United States and USSR and draws attention away from the Global South. I show how academics often use the category the Cold War as a diminished subtype of interstate war, with the adjective cold calling attention to the absence of direct military combat. I analyze the meanings and referents associated with different ways of “casing” the Cold War: a case of cold war, a case of interstate rivalry, and a case of empire building. I also examine the separate meanings of the Cold War when it is treated as a world-historical time versus an event. Using the essays in this special issue, I examine how sociologists study the Cold War as an empirical referent. I find that the cultural orientation of sociology emphasizes symbolic and performative aspects of the Cold War that are not traditionally emphasized in work on the Cold War.

On the first landing of the staircase, there is a door with a name tag: “D. Graeber.” I am inside an eighteenth-century Venetian palazzo, Ca’ Corner della Regina, which since 2011 has been turned into an exhibition space by the Fondazione Prada (the contemporary art foundation of the famous fashion brand). From 1834 to 1969 the palazzo was home to the municipal pawnshop, called Monte di pietà after the lending institutions for the poor established in the fifteenth century by Franciscan friars in various Italian cities, although not in Venice. These Franciscan lenders were partly conceived to counteract Jewish pawnbrokers. Monte di pietà is also currently the title of an immersive installation housed in the same palazzo, designed by the Swiss conceptual artist Christoph Büchel and timed to coincide with the Sixtieth Venice Art Biennale, which runs from April to November 2024.

This article focuses on an exceptional primary source—nearly eighty letters addressed to the crew of a single French ship captured during the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763) but never read, as their still-sealed envelopes attest. Letters to sailors, which helped maintain relations endangered by distance and uncertainty over whether they would return, offer clues to the resilience of familial bonds in wartime. Rather than interpreting these documents as a sign of the emergence of the nuclear family and modern intimacy, they are here approached as an object of social history. This correspondence played a key role in the circulation of information and the survival of familial unity. Letters were not markers of personal, private, and intimate exchanges, but rather part of the very fabric of complex social relations structured by both family ties and neighborliness. Both their writing and their reading engaged multiple individuals well beyond their signatory and their addressee. Ultimately, the article highlights, in their very materiality, the social dynamics that formalized the expression of emotions.

Holding on precariously to their small steeds, the Spanish conquerors attempt to break through the ranks of Atahualpa’s army, whose men defend on foot the fate of the Inca Empire. The scene is messy, at once tense and playful owing to the performers’ advanced state of inebriation. This choreography, which plays out the tragic events of 1532, has been reenacted on various patronal festivals throughout the central Peruvian Sierra since the first half of the seventeenth century. Although nowadays these reenactments may vary in configuration from one place to the next, all are financed by lay volunteers and include masses, processions, drinking, banquets, collective dances, fights, musical entertainment, and occasionally a bullfight. These festive performances are part of a connected history of the circulation and reconfiguration of representations of moros y cristianos (Moors and Christians) in the Iberian world. This article attempts to grasp the institutional dynamics, at the intersection between politics and religion, that have ensured the success and longevity of these performances in the Andes. It also questions the texture of this long time-span and its articulation with other temporalities. Based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Chiquián (Áncash), the analysis focuses on the temporalities of the ritual: What past, present, and future horizons are woven into these performances’ frameworks of interaction?

This study examines the political communication strategies of the Italian Marxist-Leninist and neo-Stalinist party, Sovereign and Popular Democracy (DSP), through a qualitative thematic analysis of its online discourse. The analysis identifies the core elements of the party’s agenda and assesses their potential alignment with the red-brownist movement, often linked to the pro-Russian far right. The research investigates the historical and political intersections between the Stalinist communist sphere and the postfascist Eurasianist and red-brownist factions. Particular attention is given to their shared anti-Western stance and historical connections to ‘left-wing fascism’ in the post-Second World War era. Italy provides a crucial case study, given its postwar role as a hub for radical movements on both the left and the right. The analysis also considers the ideological trajectory of the Italian far-right, particularly the Jeune Europe movement, to situate DSP’s discourse within broader historical and ideological frameworks.