Datos históricos, lingüísticos y etnográficos muestran que, cuando se utilizan para apoyar la existencia de mercados durante la época prehispánica en el área maya, demandan una interpretación más cautelosa y crítica. En este trabajo se argumenta que fue hasta finales del período posclásico cuando las plazas funcionaron exclusivamente como lugares de mercado de forma cotidiana, ya que antes de ese período las plazas fueron los espacios donde se celebraron numerosos eventos sociales donde también ocurrió un intercambio de mercado, aunque de manera periódica. Además, ciertos términos económicos del lenguaje maya sugieren que transacciones de compra y venta, así como el intercambio por trueque, canje o permuta, pudieron haberse utilizado desde el período preclásico en esos acuerdos económicos. Ambos tipos de transacción forman parte de los intercambios de mercado y, en este artículo, se profundiza en la explicación de cómo pudo haber operado el trueque o canje, tomando en cuenta que, hasta hoy día, la permuta de bienes y/o servicios continúa jugando un papel importantísimo en las transacciones económicas que se realizan en diferentes mercados de México. Un tercer tema analizado en el presente artículo se enfoca en mercaderes quienes concurrían o reunían con otros mercaderes en “puertos francos” o centros de comercio o trasbordo para el intercambio de mercancías, ya sea por trueque o por compra y venta. Estos mercaderes parecen haber sido proveedores de productos que pudieron haber vendido al por mayor a otros mercaderes, o bien, los vendieron a otros comerciantes quienes a su vez realizaron ventas al por menor.

La Milpa, situated in northern Belize, stands out as one of the region's largest archaeological sites, having served as the capital of an ancient Maya city-state. Its significance is indicated by extensive monumental architecture, with the epicenter covering approximately 8.8 ha. The site's corpus of monuments, comprising 23 stelae and several altars, underscores its prominence in northern Belize, rivaling the corpora of sites such as Nim li Punit and Caracol. Despite its remote location, La Milpa has garnered the attention of researchers, particularly since the first modern survey of the site in 1988. Subsequent studies—in particular, that by Nikolai Grube in the 1990s—has provided detailed analyses of the site's corpus of carved monuments. Recent efforts, including epigraphic documentation in 2019, serve to enhance our understanding of La Milpa's dynastic history through traditional epigraphic and computational photographic methods. Utilizing field observations, raking light photography, and 3D photogrammetric models, we have refined previous analyses and provide new insights into the iconography and textual segments of the monuments. Here, we present the results of these recent efforts as well as our new analyses of a selection of monuments.

Dominant historiography in Singapore celebrates Sinnathamby Rajaratnam as one of the city-state’s founding national fathers, and the intellectual superintendent of state-sponsored multiculturalism in what has been characterized as an ‘illiberal democracy’. Little attention, however, has been paid to the extensive periods of Rajaratnam’s life in which he was not in governance with the People’s Action Party, and thus had considerable intellectual autonomy. This article examines the first of these periods—his sojourn in London from 1935 to 1947—marked by connections with overlapping communities of anti-colonial intellectuals drawn from Africa, the Caribbean, and East and South Asia. Close reading of Rajaratnam’s London lifeworld, his published fiction and journalism, and the many annotations he made in the books he read reveals a very different intellectual history than the one that we think we know, and allows us to better understand his lifelong uneasiness with capitalism and racial governmentality. Re-reading Rajaratnam as an autonomous intellectual disembeds his early intellectual life from the story of the developmental state, enabling a focus on the role of affect and form in his writing. The process also offers new insights into Singapore today, where the legacies of state-sponsored multiculturalism are increasingly challenged, and where citizens, residents, and migrants seek new forms of solidarity in and across difference.

Asking the simple question of why writers in one language commented on works composed in another opens up a set of questions and problems for thinking through the relationships between languages and literary cultures and their development over time. The archive of Hindi literature—a set of literary vernaculars that came into use at the end of the fourteenth century and were assimilated into the modern standard language of Hindi during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—contains a wealth of commentarial literature, including commentaries in which Hindi writers commented on texts in Sanskrit—the privileged ‘cosmopolitan’ language of literature, science, and scripture. Despite the ubiquity of such commentaries, they have received almost no attention from modern scholars—the result of certain nationalist modes of literary historiography that counterpose Hindi and Sanskrit. This article attempts a preliminary history of commentarial writing in Hindi, outlining the motivations, strategies, and techniques behind different types of commentaries that were composed during the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries. Even this brief survey of commentarial writings reveals not only how writers thought about the relationship between Hindi and Sanskrit—which they understood to be two distinct species or modes of language—but also the techniques and operations through which they created new lexicons and metalanguages in the vernacular of Hindi. These commentaries reflect a type of renaissance that occurred during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries in northern India, characterised by new types of interpretive and analytical engagements with ‘classical’ works.

With the economic and political support of the United States, in July 1947, Turkey signed contracts with the Westinghouse Electric International Company and J.G. White Engineering Corporation to construct its first international civilian airport, Istanbul's Yeşilköy Airport. As this article will argue, the building of Yeşilköy (1949–53), through a partnership with two American engineering firms, is essentially an early Cold War narrative of transnational exchange involving the multidirectional flow of technical knowledge, expertise and resources between the United States and Turkey; the circulation of geopolitically significant (and frequently competing) military, civilian and government actors; and the local and global implications of these transmissions. Yet the Yeşilköy construction narrative also illustrates how post-war technology transfer was a highly political process of constant adaptation, modification and negotiation. Fraught with unforeseen friction and thorny challenges, Yeşilköy exemplifies the complicated American Cold War strategy of creating and maintaining alliances through engineering knowledge, personnel and practices, often with unintended consequences. Moreover, as a case study, Yeşilköy opens a new window into the cautious science diplomacy that occurred along the Iron Curtain, while filling a notable historiographic gap with respect to aviation in early Cold War Turkey.

This study investigates the importance of interregional mobility along the Eastern Silk Roads during the Mongol period, highlighting the interconnectedness of postal and pilgrim networks in eastern Central Asia, with a particular focus on mid-fourteenth-century changes in the multifaceted dynamics of overland mobility under Mongol rule. By referencing an extensive corpus of Old Uyghur and Middle Mongolian administrative texts, as well as pilgrim inscriptions, the research provides a nuanced understanding of the relationship between the Mongol administration and the postal system within it, and how they were connected with pilgrim activities. The article uncovers valuable insights into how mobility patterns changed over time. Furthermore, a comprehensive analysis of the geographical aspects of these networks reveals enduring links between the Eastern Tianshan Region and the Gansu Corridor, whilst also underlining the expansion of pilgrim networks during the Mongol period. The research also explores the societal implications of these mobility networks, highlighting the importance of religious affiliation and social status in overland mobility. This comprehensive analysis illuminates the Eastern Silk Roads and presents a unique perspective on the interplay of political, religious, and socio-economic factors that shaped the history of the region during Mongol rule.

The debates on the ownership of contested cultural objects bring forth questions regarding the representation of history. But might these debates also lead to the fabrication of history? Previous research has analyzed how the British Museum’s anti-restitution position contributes to its distortion of British (Museum) history. Instead, this article considers if – and, if so, how – history is distorted to argue for restitution. It examines the eulogized publication The Brutish Museums (2020) by Oxford professor Dan Hicks asking whether his claims regarding British mass atrocities in the conquest of Benin in 1897 can be substantiated by the documentary evidence. The investigation shows that this is not the case. The article also scrutinizes what the source material reveals about the death toll of the events of 1897. The results of the inquiry question oversimplified notions about culprits and victims in the wake of colonial conquest. It is argued that an incomplete understanding of the past impairs efforts to repair past wrongs and that questions about the ownership of colonial collections could productively be linked with questions about the representation of history, such as whose and which histories are told – or not – through contested objects.

This article unpacks a Nahuatl metaphor based on the kin term hueltiuh, “man's elder sister,” used in multiple sixteenth-century Nahuatl texts and their Spanish derivatives. Through a minute analysis of several Nahua stories, the article identifies various roles described with this term: spies, “toothed-vagina” femmes fatales, heart-eating monsters, and seducers. Applying a method borrowed from cognitive linguistics, it then constructs a model of “man's elder sister,” which explains the application of this metaphor to different contexts. In Nahua stories, hueltiuh is usually a female mediator who throws the male characters off balance, leading to a new status quo. Confusingly, this metaphor often appears where one would expect a real kinship term and in a way that makes identifying its symbolic meaning difficult. These complications have led scholars to see (only) genealogical information in stories concerned with symbolic rather than genealogical relations between elite members or deities. The results presented here allow for refining our understanding of some famous Nahua narratives, such as the one on Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl's abandonment of Tollan. They also invite a rethinking of our views on the Nahua (Aztec) pantheon of gods, whose figurative “family bonds” may, in fact, indicate complex nonkinship relations and dependencies.

The fragmentation of the Ilkhanate (1258–1335) midway through the fourteenth century coincided with the publication of several verse histories that were based upon the Blessed History (Tārīkh-i Mubārak) of Rashīd al-Dīn Hamadānī (d. 1318). Seen by many as lacking originality, these texts have often been treated as a new form of literary expression rather than a source of information about key episodes in Ilkhanid history. While it may be true that the verse histories are largely reliant on other sources for information about events that occurred before their time, the choice of what to copy and how it was presented reveals a great deal about changing attitudes to power, religion, and class as the Hülegüid Dynasty weakened and new power brokers appeared. This article will analyse how four verse histories—the Shāhnāmah-yi Chingīzī of Shams al-Dīn Kāshānī (1312–1316), the Ẓafarnāmah of Ḥamdallāh Mustawfī Qazvīnī (1335), the Shāhanshāhnāmah of Aḥmad Tabrīzī (1337), and the Ghāzānnāmah of Nūrī Azhdarī (1361)—reproduced the biography of the prominent Ilkhanid commander, Amīr Nawrūz (d. 1297), to gauge how changing circumstances influenced their view of the past. It will be shown that, although these stories may not offer much in the way of new information about Nawrūz, they do show how writers attempted to reshape their narratives to reinforce values of piety, justice, and loyalty during the Chinggisid crisis of the fourteenth century.

Este artículo analiza la importancia de los movimientos sociales rurales en los procesos de transición de la agricultura convencional hacia prácticas agro-sostenibles. A la luz del concepto de decrecimiento, a través de un análisis comparativo entre cuatro unidades rurales (campamento/asentamientos) con y sin presencia del Movimiento de los Trabajadores Rurales Sin Tierra (MST) en el Gran São Paulo, la investigación reflexiona sobre la presencia de elementos esenciales para los procesos de transición agroecológica en estas comunidades, explorando los datos históricos y constitutivos de las prácticas sociales agrícolas que allí se implementan. Identificando la importancia de los procesos de formación política y técnica, como base para las acciones emprendidas por el MST en el campo de la sostenibilidad, este trabajo analiza la experiencia de los campamentos del Movimiento como loci que forman los sujetos sin tierra, capaces de emprender acciones agro-sostenibles. El presente artículo concluye con reflexiones sobre la relevancia de las teorías del decrecimiento para analizar los procesos de transición agroecológica, así como sobre las medidas educativas ambientales como elementos fundamentales de las políticas públicas destinadas a la construcción de sociedades más igualitarias, autónomas, inclusivas y sostenibles.

Regular remarks of early modern Pashtun authors about the language of their literary works and their ethnicity may be read as an attempt to confirm a distinct place for Pashto writings in the Persophone cultural space and also as an echo of the then-ongoing discourse on Pashtun identity. This article examines the verses of Ashraf Khān Khaṫak (d. 1694) and Kāẓim Khān Khaṫak (d. 1780), who sporadically pondered on artistry and ethnicity as intertwined issues within the framework of the classical genre of self-praise (fakhriyya) and left critical essays on Pashto poetry in the forms of qaṣīda and masnawī. By drawing on Persian poetic traditions, these authors contributed much to the emerging literary criticism in Pashto by sophisticating the discussion of poetic art in their native language. While Ashraf elaborated on the idea of poetry as ‘licit magic’, Kāẓim tried to explain the advantages of the ‘new manner’, which is now commonly known as the ‘Indian style’, for the intellectual progress of both Pashtun litterateurs and their readers. The available details from the poets’ biographies and their occasional statements also indicate that the declarative ethnic self-identification of Pashtun men of letters was intrinsically linked to tribalist ideologies.

Arnold J. Toynbee is considered one of the most crucial figures in the historiography of twentieth-century world history. Although Toynbee’s reputation has significantly waned since the 1950s among many professional historians in the English-speaking world, especially in Britain, some renowned world historians, such as William H. McNeill and Jürgen Osterhammel, have reassessed Toynbee as a pioneering European historian who envisaged world history beyond Eurocentrism since the emergence of the field of global and world history in the 1980s. This article reconsiders the global meaning of Toynbee’s world history beyond this historiographical narrative on Toynbee in the anglophone context by revealing that influential Japanese historians had already found significant potential in his world history in the mid-twentieth century, almost three decades before his reassessment in English-speaking academia. In particular, the article demonstrates how Japanese historians, such as Suzuki Shigetaka, Eguchi Bokurō, and Uehara Senroku, received Toynbee’s idea of world history with various motivations and historical contexts. The research also argues that, despite the differences in their receptive intentions and backgrounds, they interpreted Toynbee as a significant European intellectual who made a self-critique of conventional historical studies in Europe and demonstrated the possibility of rewriting world history beyond Eurocentric assumptions.