This article focuses on passages in which Confucius is portrayed in dialogue with Lord Ai of Lu (r. 494–468 bce), found scattered throughout a range of early texts, most centrally in the Li ji, the Da Dai Li ji, and the Xunzi. Examining intertextual connections among these dialogues and related texts, both received and excavated, it seeks to adduce evidence to determine whether their particular shared narrative frame might be original and integral to the content of these texts, as well as to reveal their close links with other early Confucian texts that hold important implications for the dating of all these interrelated texts.

As an industrial science, vaccinology is susceptible to changing social, economic and political frameworks. This article reconstructs the history of the birth of the Sabin strains-derived inactivated polio vaccine (sIPV) in China. The development of this nascent vaccine can be attributed first and foremost to the circulation of knowledge and technology in the global polio research network of the 1980s, before the privatization of vaccine manufacturing and the escalation of intellectual-property protections. Tracing correspondence between Jonas Salk and a Chinese scientist, Jiang Shude, and his colleagues, we chart how institutional efforts in search of a profitable product and scientists’ motives in pursuing personal careers in the post-socialist reform era led to collaboration on many levels, centered around polio vaccines. In response to recent polio history research, we also emphasize the impact of multiple temporalities of polio dramaturgy on the vaccine manufacturer, as this article demonstrates how the confluence of shifting global polio eradication agendas and contingencies in complex vaccinology undertakings ironically helped to materialize the idea of the sIPV. Finally, stories of vaccines and scientists in China add compelling subplots to the global polio history, which reveals the need to reconsider the politicization of imported technology in broader socialist contexts.

A letter dated ‘3 June 1986’ was mailed from Jonas Salk to Jiang Shude (姜述德). Jiang had been an unknown vaccinologist working at the Institute of Medical Biology (IMB) in Flower Red Cave in the Western Hills of Kunming, in south-western China. Salk had visited two years earlier to discuss the feasibility of the IMB's proposal to manufacture inactivated polio vaccine (IPV). The initial collaborative plan had come to a halt by the time Salk wrote the letter to Jiang; still, he kindly offered Jiang an opportunity to travel to Bilthoven and then Lyon to learn IPV-related technology with a generous $10,000 grant for his one-year stay in Europe.1

One of the most fruitful concepts of recent social analysis has been that of intersectionality, the idea that the nature of oppression is multiplicative rather than additive, and that no one identity – race, class, gender, religion, ability, sexual orientation, and so on – should be considered apart from other identities, but is always materialized in terms of and by means of them. Although it was developed out of the US experience, intersectional epistemology has been dynamic and mobile, as scholars have not simply used social groupings drawn from the Western past and present but have elaborated social categories taken from local understandings as well. This article analyses some recent examples of gendered world history that also take other social hierarchies into account, and assesses how these help us better understand global processes that transformed societies. It begins with a place and time where global entanglements led quite clearly to the emergence of new social groups, the Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the Americas, and then more briefly examines this process in other parts of the early modern colonial world.

This article deals with a fiscal reform implemented in Chile during the late 1870s, when the country was suffering a severe economic and fiscal crisis, on the eve of the War of the Pacific. In 1879, the Chilean government introduced a new set of direct levies, taxing inheritance, income and wealth, despite the historic resistance of most of the economic elites to direct taxation in a highly unequal society. The process also shows that not all the economic elite avoided direct taxation. Despite other challenges faced by any developing country in extracting taxes from its population (e.g. lack of both proper information and human capital), during c.1879-1884 collection of these new direct taxes was successful, mainly on account of the improved extractive capacity built up during the preceding decades. Yet, by the mid-1890s all direct taxes (new and old) had been either derogated or transferred to local government (in some cases after being modified). Once again, Chilean central government depended entirely on indirect taxes, with export duties on nitrate being the most important. Nitrate provides a good example of an export boom shaping taxation for the worse; rather than increasing and diversifying the sources of revenue, a dominant sector of the Chilean economic elite decided to stop paying direct taxes and to make the state entirely dependent on the cycles of the international economy. However, some members of the economic elite, although defeated in their purpose, were aware of the wide range of benefits of keeping direct taxation: social justice, financial health and less vulnerability to trade cycles. Unfortunately, the balance of power favoured elite groups with enough power to hinder direct taxation.

My driftin’ memory goes back to the spring of ‘23.

Within the turmoil of the Norman Conquest, did religious institutions affect the economic outcomes of their land? Exploiting historical data about the changes in holdings’ lordship that occurred after the Conquest, we compare the economic performance of estates controlled by different types of lords. Holdings controlled by Benedictine monasteries (vis-à-vis secular lords) experienced a better performance, although, once accounting for the unchanging upper level of the feudal structure, we cannot fully disentangle this effect from the persistence of Benedictine Overlordship. A comparison with Celtic monasteries, with a different organizational structure, suggests a role for the governance structure of Benedictine monasteries.

In order to explore the ways knowledge travels across spatial and cultural boundaries, this article focuses on the intriguing case of the Edinburgh-trained Scottish surgeon James Esdaile (1808–59), who, after practising conventional surgery for almost fifteen years in British colonial India, quite unexpectedly turned to mesmeric anaesthesia in the last five years of his service. By following his career and his mesmeric turn, the article describes Esdaile's subsequent public experiments in mesmeric anaesthesia in collaboration with indigenous practices and practitioners of trance induction in the 1840s which led to the creation of a special mesmeric hospital in Calcutta. Although very successful, it eventually ceased to function, apparently victim to new and cheaper chemical anaesthetics. Mobilizing the insights of science studies scholarship into the processes of scientific experimentation, this article seeks to shed new light on the necessary professional, social and political investments for the making and mobility of scientific knowledge across social and cultural boundaries in a colonial setting.

L’évaluation de deux ouvrages récents sur l’histoire des Indiens d’Amérique du Nord, Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America de Pekka Hämäläinen (2022) et The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History de Ned Blackhawk (2023), qui se veulent rénovateurs, offre l’occasion d’un état des lieux. Les deux auteurs soulèvent deux des grandes questions qui animent le champ, celle de la capacité d’agir des Amérindiens, reconnue et acceptée de façon consensuelle par les historiens, et celle de leur raison d’agir, pour laquelle des visions contrastées se font jour. Dans cette note critique, nous nous demandons dans quelle mesure l’importance accordée par N. Blackhawk et P. Hämäläinen à la capacité d’agir des Autochtones n’a pas précisément pour effet d’enfouir la réflexion sur leur raison d’agir. Si P. Hämäläinen, à la différence de N. Blackhawk, insiste sur l’écueil de la téléologie et s’efforce de valoriser la variété des modes d’intrusion coloniale, les deux historiens se retrouvent dans leur renoncement à une forme d’anthropologie qui, par le passé, a été soucieuse de restituer l’intégrité culturelle des Autochtones. Le lexique analytique choisi, à l’exemple du terme « empire », conduit parfois à un effacement de la différence culturelle et à une torsion de l’histoire. Cette note plaide ainsi pour une complémentarité retrouvée entre histoire et anthropologie.

The repeated proliferation of restraints to competition should not overshadow the agency of downstream firms when confronted with the ability of cartels to challenge the established innovation strategies of their consumers. This article explores the relations between Renault and the aluminium cartels during the first half of the twentieth century, in peace and war. Strategies were similar on both sides: the creation and maintenance of a balance of power, compromise, and the reopening of competition. Yet, when the cartel set up an automotive department and then rallied to the idea of a people’s car, it attracted the interest of broader stakeholders—engineers, other suppliers, the government, and even trade unions—but failed to persuade carmakers. Large industrial consumers can limit the impact of cartels, and destabilize them, by resorting to vertical integration. However, their underlying aim is not necessarily to destroy the cartel but rather to obtain better terms for their own business. Ultimately, their market power enables them to achieve relative stability. Who derives the main benefits from these compromises, both vertically and horizontally, as they sometimes limit or extend the scope of action of both parties?