Megaliths, burial mounds, and other remnants of ancient human civilization littered the region. No textual sources about them survived. Competing with ancient Greece and Rome, local scholars composed rival visions of antiquity that supported Swedish, Danish, or German imperial ambitions. By contrast, Major developed a distinctive approach to prehistory that served no political interests. Assuming a prehistoric state of human desperation, Major reasoned about prehistory by using the intellectual approaches of the history of learning and experimental philosophy. He developed a multiyear research project that deployed extensive excavations, purposeful travel, distinctive visual techniques, and novel note-taking methods. He identified so-called thunderstones as ancient artifacts as well as the varying deployment of stone, bronze, and iron in different time periods through the use of stratigraphy and the ordering of finds by the materials used. In 1688, he opened a public museum and conference hall where members of opposing sides in the war could discuss the history of their shared region. Although this institution did not long survive Major’s death, his archaeological approach did.

This chapter examines the history of Marie-Yvonne Vellard, an Aché girl from Paraguay who was captured in the 1930s at the age of two and raised by a French scientist named Jehan Albert Vellard. By examining the various retellings of Marie-Yvonne’s story and the many stories of captured children that populate ethnographic studies of the Aché, this essay tracks how colonial violence against Indigenous peoples was repackaged within a ostensibly antiracist framework. While the redemptive accounts of her story did important work by challenging biological determinism, they also concealed how the practices of mid-century human scientists sometimes encouraged the forced removal of children from their families and the dispossession of Indigenous territory. In fact, as this chapter demonstrates, until the 1960s ethnographic studies of the Aché were based primarily on captured children and attest to an established practice and economy of buying and trading Aché children as servants. Although researchers who studied captured Aché children positioned themselves as civilized men of science, they did not condemn the trafficking of Aché children that they benefitted from and instead presented it as a fait accompli that they could only observe as modest witnesses.

Chapter 6 focusses on the different forms of cross-ideological alliances between Islamist and leftist movements that were made to oppose the authoritarian regime. Far from romanticising those experiences into the clichéd concept of good opponents all coming together to fight the authoritarian regime, the chapter demonstrates instead how building cross-ideological alliances provoked ruptures and crystallised dissension within the constellations of actors themselves. It also shows how specific organisations and actors, mobilised on several scenes, came to play different roles in those alliances. The chapter goes on to demonstrate how each constellation of actors also maintained its own spaces of sociability and its own networks. Long-distance activism entailed other forms of activities that were turned towards group members in order to maintain activist groups despite their members’ new political lives in exile. Both Islamists and leftists worked to preserve their communities and to ensure the continuity of activism, albeit in different ways.

Chapter 4 explores the nature of anti-Ben Ali politics from afar. It focusses on the field of homeland politics by investigating the modalities, frames and repertoires of action used by activists who fought the authoritarian regime. The chapter highlights the ambivalent logic underlying the use of human rights, which became the main frame of contention for the various actors. For pro-regime actors, the human rights frame was paradoxically a way of legitimising the regime abroad; for Islamists, the activation of a discourse on human rights appeared as a way of circumventing the distrust to which they were habitually subjected in France; and for leftists, human rights stood as a rallying point, because fighting the Ben Ali regime during this period meant embracing the Islamists as a matter of necessity, as they were main victims of repression. The chapter goes on to investigate two further lines of cleavage that are crucial to the full understanding of long-distance Tunisian opposition politics. These lines offer a framework that determined means of action in terms of relationships with the Islamists and the degree of rupture with the Tunisian authoritarian regime.

This chapter looks at the history of three institutions operated by the Territory of Hawaiʻi: the Waialeʻe Industrial School for Boys (opened in 1902), the Kawailoa Training School for Girls (opened in 1929), and the Waimano Home for the Feeble-Minded (opened in 1921). The combined rhetorics of correction and care for Hawaiʻi’s children at play in these carceral institutions echoed the broader, paternalistic justifications for annexing Hawaiʻi as saving the islands both from other colonial empires and a Hawaiian Kingdom that white settlers characterized as uncivilized and childish. The Territorial government repeatedly used the scientific imprimatur of work by those like psychologist Stanley Porteus as well as models of training schools and homes for the “feebleminded” in the continental United States as justifications for institutionalizing Native Hawaiians and immigrants of color. This chapter focuses on two main themes. The first tracks the settler colonial process of pathologizing Native Hawaiian and other non-white forms of kinship and care, and attempts to replace it with institutionalized care. The second theme examines how a critical history of these institutions offers a different picture of the Territorial period in Hawaiʻi.

In the twentieth century, settler states have operated through science. At the same time, the field of American bioethics has safeguarded the moral authority of science. It has done so by upholding the settler logics of the sciences that it claimed to hold to account. This chapter explores how the imperial logic of American bioethics works – through its concepts, practices, and imperceptions. To do so, the chapter follows Carolyn Matthews, an everyday American with a rich “vernacular archive” and apt work experiences, across three medical sites and over three postwar decades. It tells Carolyn’s story in two registers – setting Carolyn’s work experience prior to 1974, when the US Congress passed laws for the treatment of human subjects, alongside Carolyn’s moral recounting of those work experiences in the late 1970s. Carolyn’s case offers insight into how the vocabulary and framework of modern American bioethics embeds a moral ontology organized around civic individualism and its safeguarding, as opposed to anticolonialism and its dismantling. The aim of this critique of bioethics through the Americas is to strengthen existing alliances for justice-based science and to inform anticolonial practices – in science, history, and transformative bioethics.

This concluding chapter looks back at the main findings that emerged from this research and shows how they explain the transformation of long-distance Tunisian politics in the aftermath of the 2011 Revolution. It asks how the anti- and pro-regime struggles evolved following the demise of the central purpose of these struggles and the movements they inspired, and looks at the ways in which boundaries were redefined through different fields of action and the growth of new divisions. The emergence of new actors, the political reconversion of those who had shifted to Tunisian-centred politics, new rules of the game and the various possibilities of return to Tunisia each played a role in redefining the modalities of long-distance Tunisian politics. However, decades of activism had regulated the practice of activists from afar and reinforced the informal rules of the trans-state space of mobilisation. The 2011 Revolution simultaneously represented a decisive rupture and a continuity, reshaping and continuing to reshape the dynamics of the trans-state space of mobilisation.

Chapter 5 describes the planning, design, and construction of the Sanmenxia Hydropower Project in the 1950s and the early 1960s. Building on David Pietz’s analysis of the Soviet influence on the general plan for the Yellow River, this chapter examines the negotiations that took place between Soviet experts, their Chinese counterparts, and local stakeholders during the process of designing the Sanmenxia Dam. While the Communist Party proclaimed in 1957 that the primary purpose of the project was flood control, it is clear from the sources examined in this chapter that the generation of hydroelectricity was the principal element of the dam’s design.

Chapter 1 focuses on the narratological strategies that turned a set of mathematical equations into an economic model in Robert Solow’s “Contribution to the Theory of Economic Growth,” the article behind the classic reference “Solow 1956.” In the first place, the paper was all about the setup of a smoothly working neoclassical growing economy, which consisted in the interplay of algebraic equations, diagrammatic visualizations, and verbal accounts. The article revolved around this artifact, made (up) by the narrator figure and, at the same time, to be used and experimented with by others, independently of its construction history. While denoting the artifact “a model” throughout, references to a world beyond its narrow boundaries were vague. Straightforward was its function as an exemplar for how proper economic reasoning should look. The text presented its model as improving a so-called precursor, the “Harrod–Domar model.” In this way, it contributed to canonizing earlier dynamic theory with its focus on instability and crisis and set the course for an angled historiography of growth theory that downplays the differences in approaches and objects until the present day.