This paper, building on new archival research and the social table method, presents comprehensive estimates of income inequality in Mexico in 1895, 1910, 1930 and 1940. Inequality grew from 1895 to 1910, driven by economic expansion within the context of an oligarchic economy. While real income increased for the lower classes during this period, the main beneficiaries were large landowners and entrepreneurs. In the revolutionary period from 1910 to 1930 inequality decreased especially as a result of land reforms, benefitting peasants at the expense of the large landowners. However, the economic structure of the country was not fundamentally changed, and in the 1930s inequality raised as incomes of peasants and those in the informal sector fell behind manufacturing and other high-earning sectors. The Mexican case shows the complex interaction of economics, demography and politics in determining economic inequality.

The impact of neoliberalism on the world university system has been widely debated. Trends in the global North today show not only the tighter managerialism that comes with cuts to university funding and commercialization, but also competition for fee-paying ‘student customers’ and casualization of academic staff in an era of increased international student mobility. There are louder calls for quality enhancement and more inclusive learning environments regulated and indexed by global rankings. In the global South and in Africa in particular, the same factors also drive institutional and infrastructural decadence amidst other postcolonial factors that have brought wider confrontation between the state and university staff and student bodies, which constitute the subject of this discussion.

In his article ‘African universities and the challenge of postcolonial development’, Jeremiah Arowosegbe discusses the trajectory of universities in postcolonial Africa, drawing particularly on the experiences of public universities in Nigeria. Arowosegbe accounts for the state of the institutions against the backdrop of ‘hostile material conditions and uncongenial political control’, which continue to ‘undermine institutional autonomy and the integrity of scholarship’. This think piece reflects on the particular case of the state of humanities scholarship in Nigeria in the face of persistent onslaught on academia.

Arguing about the stars has rarely been more controversial and dangerous than in the early modern period in Europe, especially in Catholic countries, in a time when old and novel conceptions of the heavens, planetary models and theories of celestial motions and influences were intensely debated, revised and scrutinized for philosophical soundness and religious conformity.1 In the hundred years or so that witnessed the birth and censorship of the Copernican theory; the execution in Rome of the most passionate defender of post-Copernican cosmology, Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), and the rise and fall of Galileo Galilei's (1564–1642) fame linked to his novel interpretation of the book of nature, the Catholic Church created some of the most powerful instruments of cultural control and educational conformity ever seen: the Inquisition, the Index of Forbidden Books and the vast network of Jesuit schools that spread from Rome and the Iberian peninsula across the globe.2

This article examines how consumer preferences towards silk fabrics changed in Catalonia over the course of the first sixty years of the 15th century. It argues that during the first half of the 15th century silk became a luxury fabric for the wealthiest households of Catalan urban society. This change was triggered by the crisis of Europe's most prestigious manufacturing centres of high-quality woollens. Moreover, this article also claims that the adoption of silk as Catalonia's newest luxury fabric entailed a transition from lighter and plain silks to more expensive and elaborate silk fabrics. Finally, it connects this sumptuary shift to the technological development of the Italian silk industry and its later diffusion in Europe.