This article explores Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s (1648–1695) strategic poetic approach, aimed at democratizing writing and knowledge among women during her period. It examines her engagement with the literary academy, Casa del Placer, believed to have included nuns from Portuguese convents and women of the nobility. Specifically, the study analyzes Sor Juana’s final poetic work, the Enigmas ofrecidos a la Casa del Placer (1695), comprising twenty unanswerable poetic enigmas. In this collection, Sor Juana departs from individual lyric expression, a shift I call a “poetics of dedication,” advocating for a communal cultural identity centered on her persona’s fame. Through this gesture, Sor Juana appropriates and challenges patriarchal narratives that labeled her as a “monster” due to her perceived exceptionalism. My article shows how, toward the end of her life, Sor Juana embraces and subverts discussions about her exceptional status and transatlantic identity, fostering a sense of transoceanic sorority among women writers of the colonial period.

This article uses a new database of 1,891 probate inventories from rural southern Sweden to investigate the development of rural households’ productive capacity from the late 1600s to the 1860s. Both labourers and farmers improved their material living standards – as measured by the contents of probate inventories – but the labouring households’ ownership of means of production decreased over time. This indicates increasing market involvement and dependency on wage labour. For labourers’ and farmers’ households alike, textile production at home became more important; in the 1860s, half of the labouring households owned spinning wheels and weaving looms, and for farmer households, the shares were even higher. Our study reveals not only the dynamism of the rural pre-industrial Swedish economy but also the unequal nature of this dynamism.

Through analyzing the compensation accounts and stock ledgers in the Bank of England Archive, this article explores how British firms—especially those in the City of London—profited from the unique business opportunity that arose through the payment of slavery compensation in 1835. It uses a new dataset with 18,930 observations to establish that a cohort of 27 “compensation agents” handled as intermediaries approximately two-thirds of the transactions associated with £5 million paid in compensation as government stock (3.5% Reduced Annuities) to slave owners in Barbados, Mauritius, the Cape of Good Hope, and the Virgin Islands. The article argues that this demonstrates how the City’s financial capacity, infrastructure, and business community were significant in delivering the efficient payment of compensation. It also underscores the need to understand the slavery compensation process as contemporaries did; as an important moment in the history of the City and its financial markets.

Many historians continue to regard the killing of prisoners and potential prisoners on the battlefield as having been an absolute exception during the Great War, something that was ‘episodic’ and happened only ‘in isolated cases’. One reason for this assessment might be the fact that the subject has rarely been examined empirically. This article is the first study directly to compare the actions of the British and the Canadians, the Empire’s two largest armies on the western front. Drawing on a wide range of primary source material, including, for the first time, unit war diaries and after-action reports, this article reveals that documentary evidence exists for scores of separate instances of prisoner killing by British and Canadian troops deployed against German forces between August 1914 and November 1918, with the number of dead ranging from individual enemy soldiers to several hundred victims at once. Examples are recorded of prisoner killing by enlisted men, NCOs and officers, acting either in groups or alone, and furthermore of officers at platoon, battalion, regimental and even corps level either encouraging prisoner killing or issuing explicit ‘take no prisoners’ orders. The level of acceptance that commanders showed for these practices, the openness with which soldiers discussed them in their letters home to mothers, sisters and wives, and the almost complete absence of any disciplinary action against the perpetrators indicate that – on some level – they were regarded as legitimate.

This article traces the evolution of Sidney Weintraub’s Post-Keynesian identity during the four decades following WW II, as seen through the eyes of his son E. Roy Weintraub. I explore Roy’s notion that Sidney’s career can be seen as the result of defense mechanisms associated with those of a borderline personality, such as splitting and projection. As Sidney transformed from an aspiring mainstream macroeconomist into a reclusive warrior for ideas, developing a polarized view of the economics profession, his work eventually became subsumed as a branch of Post-Keynesian economics. At the same time, he nudged his son into a symbiotic dependency, standing in for his career as a mathematical economist and coauthor, while also being made complicit in his adultery. Roy’s eventual distancing from this role ultimately led to a rupture prior to Sidney’s death in 1983. It was only then that Roy was able to establish a scholarly profile as a historian of economics and gain the understanding of his father that informs this text.

As relations between the United States and China have grown tenser, how has the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) portrayal of the United States changed? And what might portrayals of the United States tell us about domestic messaging in China? This study systematically investigates CCP messaging about the United States in the contemporary era. To do this, we hand code, categorize and analyse 1,761 editorials about the United States published between 2003 and 2022 in People's Daily, the Party's flagship newspaper. In addition to showing a sustained rise in critical portrayals since 2018, we identify and elaborate three distinct critical narratives about the United States: it is a dangerous hegemon abroad, it has poor values at home, and it is increasingly weak and in decline. These narratives appear both independently and in combination and are often framed to contrast with portrayals of China. We argue that these narratives are not just negative propaganda to discredit the United States but can also be a strategy to promote a positive vision of the CCP's virtues and governance at home. This study contributes empirically and theoretically to research on propaganda and legitimation in China.

In 2017, the authors supervised the recovery of a pre-Hispanic stone sculpture near the community of La Victoria, in the Sierra de los Tuxtlas, southern Veracruz, Mexico. The fortuitous discovery of this monument afforded a rare research opportunity to conduct a controlled, systematic archaeological investigation of a known, but poorly documented, Early Classic–period (a.d. 300–450) sculptural tradition. Moreover, this archaeological salvage project facilitated a crucial dialogue with local stakeholders regarding the recovery and final disposition of the monument. This collaborative effort enabled researchers to wed governmental oversight and academic interests with the concerns of local stakeholders, thereby furthering the investigation, conservation, and public appreciation of Classic-period archaeology along Mexico's southern Gulf Lowlands.