Arowosegbe’s (2023) treatise on the crisis of higher education across the African continent raises many issues about the failures of Africa’s postcolonial states and the situations of the continent’s public universities. His courage in bringing to the fore the predicaments of Africa’s public universities is commendable. Two issues in particular attract my attention. First, while he underscores the strained relations between the state and the academy and recognizes the existence of some divergent ideological underpinnings therein, his account neglects the impacts of ideological contradictions on society’s political stability and socio-economic development. Second, his account omits the quandaries of private universities in Africa, an aspect of higher education across the continent that should not be overlooked if one is to holistically appreciate the predicaments of Africa’s universities within the context of the role of the postcolonial state.

Much of the history of Indian businesses and merchants outside the subcontinent has emphasized the role of specific trading groups that created and utilized ties with India. The rise of Trinidad’s Indian shopkeepers tells an alternative story: former labor migrants turned to commerce. Indentured labor formed the connection between India and Trinidad, an area outside traditional Indian merchant activity. Trinidad’s organic Indian business community arose owing to the absence of traditional trading groups in the immigrant population, the large distance from India, and the growth of the Indian population that in turn demanded services. Shopkeepers came disproportionately from upper castes, who possibly relied on their greater social status and new network ties in Trinidad. However, shopkeepers did not rise into the upper echelons of commerce. This break shows the limits of traditional Indian traders in establishing ties in the farthest reaches of the British Empire.

In his latest article, ‘African universities and the challenge of postcolonial development’, Jeremiah O. Arowosegbe argues convincingly that public universities in Africa are in crisis, and that this crisis reflects the failure of postcolonial states to build the societies promised by anti-colonial liberation. He is certainly correct that the political economy of higher education (HE) in postcolonial Africa is a much-neglected topic, and his article is even more welcome for that reason. As a scholar with an extensive career in Nigerian public universities, Arowosegbe has also undertaken research fellowships in Germany, Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, South Africa and the USA. Now he finds himself at the University of Leeds in the UK. He has experienced much from within and reflected deeply from afar on the state of universities in Nigeria and across the continent. His article is a serious work of reflection and scholarship, crafted and refined over years of engagement. Therefore, his serious charges on the state of the universities in Africa cannot be dismissed lightly.

In the mid-twentieth century, a contest played out between evangelicals and mainline Protestant denominations over which organizations would have access to the radio airwaves and whose message, including whose theology, would receive the widest hearing. While networks favored the mainline denominations, a host of independent evangelical stations and the National Association of Evangelicals’ broadcast arm countered the impression that network religion represented American religion more generally. Against this backdrop, the Atlanta-based Protestant Hour radio show, which began as one station in 1945 but boasted 600 participating stations by 1963, sounded a liberal theology that promoted the liberalization of Protestantism throughout its largely southern listening area. Building on Gary Dorrien’s characterization of liberal theology, this essay shows how the theology of three preachers who frequently appeared on the show—Methodist Robert E. Goodrich, Jr., Presbyterian John A. Redhead, and Lutheran Edmund Steimle—presented this liberalism and echoed such evangelical elements as a heightened Christocentricity, repeated reference to the Bible, and personal appeal. Despite the later decline of mainline Protestantism, a type of evangelical liberalism in the 1950s and early 1960s attracted numerous radio listeners in the south contrary to the stereotype of southerners as fundamentalists who embraced a conservative theology.

When the American political scientist James C. Scott passed away in July 2024, tributes praised him as one of the most influential thinkers of his generation.1 Building on years of ethnographic research in Southeast Asia, his numerous books offered new ways of thinking about subaltern resistance, as well as the mechanisms of state oppression and control. A self-professed anarchist, he organized against the Vietnam War as a junior faculty at the University of Wisconsin in the latter part of the 1960s, and he maintained a forty-six-acre farm for decades while teaching at Yale. While obituaries widely remembered Scott as a figure of integrity, some dissonant voices on social media commented more negatively on his involvement with the CIA as a young man and as a leader in the United States National Student Association (USNSA). The political scientist Karen Puget first brought this episode in Scott’s life to light in a book that carefully exposed the ties of the USNSA with US intelligence (Puget 2015). Puget showed how, in the 1950s and 1960s, what was then the most important student organization in the USA allowed itself to be fully infiltrated by the government. The young liberal-minded students at the helm of the organization worked hand in hand with CIA handlers to curb Soviet influence among their peer organizations in Europe, Asia and Africa. For a few years, after graduating from Williams College and before embarking on his doctoral studies at Yale, Scott occupied a prominent role among these young shadow Cold Warriors, first as the USNSA’s representative in Paris and later as its vice president in charge of international affairs.

This is the second of two articles examining a distinctive but overlooked system for organizing child and youth labour in rural England. It reveals how parishes used their powers under the 1601 Poor Law to allocate children as unpaid indentured farm servants (for up to 17 years) to local landholders occupying properties of a certain value. As both apprentice and master could be compelled by law, parish authorities were able to implement centralized rotation schemes. This article (Part II) examines the political and economic aspects of these compulsory apprenticeship schemes in the South-West. First, it reviews their scale and the policies for regulating the distribution of children to landholders, including calculations for the optimum apprentice-to-acreage ratio. Second, it presents a case study of Awliscombe in Devon, which bound one-quarter of local children, offering a new model of governance whereby the leading farmers were able to control both poor relief and the labour supply through their multiple roles as policymakers, administrators and masters themselves. It concludes by reflecting on the distinctiveness of farm apprenticeship schemes as a system of labour that combined elements of life-cycle service with a serfdom-like bond between land and labour.

Since the 1990s, the Pro-Life Alliance of Gays and Lesbians (PLAGAL) has positioned sexual minorities and fetuses as alike in struggle. The lesbian, gay, and bisexual members of this relatively small organization argued that tolerance and inclusivity of their positionality were strategically beneficial to both the gay rights and antiabortion movements. Ultimately, PLAGAL failed to convince many of the “legitimacy” of their campaigns, and was repeatedly expelled from both right-to-life rallies and Pride marches. This notwithstanding, PLAGAL organizing reveals much about (the limits of) identity politics and the relationship of different social and political movements in this turbulent decade.