This article examines small and medium-sized scrap and wastepaper enterprises in Finland. They operated in the margins of the nation’s industrial economy during the twentieth century but pioneered many of the business models and practices that, in the last few decades, have become crucial elements of the circular economy. We study why and how they tried to develop profitable business models, and why some succeeded while others failed. We give particular attention to the business environment where they operated and argue that legislation, values, purchasing cartels, and other outside factors had a crucial impact on their profitability. We base our analysis partly on published company histories and other earlier research and partly on interviews and the extensive and usually open collections of business archives. Those sources provide us with the often-lacking inside view of small and medium-sized enterprises in the circular economy business and show how determined these companies were to defend their interests.

The concept of ‘science’ occupies a distinctive place within our rhetorical inheritance. Tangential to science's actual practices and institutions, this rhetoric holds that science comprises an arsenal of techniques, or a pervasive mentality, that have broadly shaped and even defined modern society. Such notions have been the subject of more or less constant discussion for two or three centuries, with early critics of scientific thought targeting its links to the religious and political radicalism of the Enlightenment and the troubles of industrialization.

Over the past few decades, the historiography of international trade in late medieval Europe has been greatly influenced by the New Institutional Economics. Central in this perspective is the claim that economic outcomes were primarily determined by so-called institutions, or the rules of the economic game. The present article contributes to this debate by exploring the explanatory factors that impacted upon the choice of the main commercial markets in the Low Countries between 1384 and 1433. More specifically, it assesses the role of institutional frameworks in the decisions made by three important trading groups, the Hanse, the Genoese and the Portuguese, to base most of their trade either in the county of Flanders or in the competing counties of Holland and Zeeland. The article first compares the commercial privileges in which governments set out many of the rules that shaped the activities of foreign traders in these two areas and then considers the mechanisms that allowed merchants to resolve commercial conflicts. The overall conclusion is that institutions alone cannot explain the choice of markets by foreign merchants in the Low Countries during this period.

This paper examines the ways the Colonies in the American streaming service Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale utilize western myth to reimagine the American West as an entirely female space. Relying on popular understandings of the significance of the mythic West, traditional conceptions of the West as masculine, and the narrative function of the western, it argues that the Colonies offer regeneration and renewal for the women whose agency has been stripped in the hypergendered oppressive nation of Gilead. By reinstilling a sense of power and freedom in the women sent there, the Colonies operate much like the West of the imagination, allowing these women to escape the confines of Gilead and the chance to both return to their authentic selves and foresee a better world.

Cette réponse au forum des Annales consacré à mon livre Southern Europe in the Age of Revolutions est centrée sur le point de vue méridional de mon analyse, sur le cas de la Grèce dans ce contexte et sur la chronologie de l’âge des révolutions. Je souligne que la notion de « Sud » a été revendiquée par les révolutionnaires eux-mêmes au Portugal, en Espagne, au Piémont et à Naples, mais pas en Grèce. J’avance l’idée qu’une approche comparatiste permet d’envisager la révolution grecque non pas seulement comme une guerre d’indépendance, mais aussi comme un moment d’apprentissage politique. Enfin, je suggère que cette optique méridionale nous invite à intégrer ce que Franco Venturi a qualifié de « première crise » de l’Ancien Régime (1760-1770) dans la chronologie de l’âge des révolutions.

Howard Thurman, the great 20th-century African American thinker and pastor, has often been characterized as holding an antagonistic view of the Apostle Paul, based primarily on several passages in his most important work, Jesus and the Disinherited (1949). One of those passages describes the anti-Pauline position of his grandmother, a former slave, Nancy Ambrose. In this article we argue that Thurman was, in contrast to his grandmother, oftentimes an admirer of Paul. Our thorough consideration of Thurman’s published and unpublished work, as well as the work of his various intellectual and religious mentors, uncovers that he had a much more nuanced position on Paul than is normally described. He saw Paul as a profoundly radical and original thinker, who was nonetheless compromised by his Roman citizenship, distancing himself from his fellow Jews. For Thurman, a mentor to many in the civil rights movement, the question of citizenship was crucial, and he used Paul to help explore the complex intellectual, religious, and social situations of African Americans, caught between two worlds, ambivalent about trying to fit into a world that was ambivalent about them. In this way, for Thurman, Paul was a model of personal struggle and religious complexity.

Selenography was both a practice and a tool which developed through optical instrumentation in the seventeenth century. As a practice, it was the process of creating composite graphical depictions of the Moon through skill and sustained telescopic study. As a paper-based tool, the focus of this article, a selenography was a stabilized visualization and codified template for making, organizing and communicating lunar-based astronomical observations. The template's key observation and notation device was its system of named Moon spots, or lunar nomenclatures. Such systems varied significantly in different sites of knowledge making. Through the close study of two naming schemes produced and exchanged in Counter-Reformation contexts by Michael van Langren (1645) and Giovanni Battista Riccioli in collaboration with Maria Francesco Grimaldi (1651), this essay argues that selenographies were conceived with an eye to ideals of universal standardization for collective and even global observation. In practice, however, different forms of universality, revealing distinct local agendas tied to political and religious priorities, were materialized in each competing scheme.

In this paper, we present the foundations and results for a new rent database on mining land in Chile (1940–2017), which takes into account not only the surplus profits of the sector, but also the different mechanisms in which this land is appropriated by other social actors. The results are weighted in relation to the whole national economy, which is why an original time series of the general rate of profits and its components, surplus-value and total advance capital, is also provided. In this paper, we posit a methodological foundation based on Marx's developments and a critical review of the existing statistics and previous measures. The results are original as they are the first long-run time series of mining land rent which considers the main appropriation mechanisms by different social actors. In turn, it shows that previous studies underestimate the weight of mining land rent in the Chilean economy, particularly when the prices of copper are rising. In addition, the results make it possible to pose new questions regarding the development of the national specificity considered. As a result of this new evidence, we indicate specific determinations of the different political cycles in Chilean national life, showing the historical persistency of mining land rent beyond changes in its appropriation forms and, therefore, stepping outside of the import substitution industrialization and neoliberalism dichotomy, which dominates the long-run economic historiography in this country.