A long tradition of comparative scholarship has succeeded to establish the impact of Roman legal environment on rabbinic law making during the first two centuries CE, particularly in the field of family and status. Yet, the specific channels for acquiring this knowledge have hitherto remained a matter of conjecture. This paper argues that the rabbis were exposed to the contents of the current legal handbooks. Tractate Qiddushin (on betrothal) of the Mishnah includes two peculiar units: the first (1.1–5) regarding forms of acquisition and the second (3.12) on the status of newborns. Both units appear in key points in the tractate and exhibit striking structural and conceptual similarities to extended portions of the Roman school tradition regarding the laws of status, as handed down in Gaius’ Institutes and Pseudo-Ulpian's liber singularis regularum. It is therefore suggested that these units provide the earliest literary attestation already around the turn of the third century CE for the dissemination of Roman legal education among non-Roman provincials in the East, who sought to adjust their local practices into Roman-like legal structures.

This article revisits the roots of anti-statism in the United States by analyzing opposition to the introduction of compulsory school vaccination and medical examinations at the local and state levels in the Progressive Era. It shows that the widespread use of compulsory schooling laws to promote vaccination in the late nineteenth century, which led to establishing compulsory school medical exams and school nurse programs in the early twentieth, precipitated intense conflicts over states’ police powers. Exploring the controversy over school vaccine requirements in Utah between 1899 and 1901, the article reveals that resistance to public health interventions in schools fused skepticism of science with a gendered defense of individual and parental rights to challenge states’ power over children. The article then traces how these conflicts filtered up to the federal level, framing arguments against a proposed federal department of health in the 1910s. Led by the National League for Medical Freedom, opponents directly linked the reach of the police powers via compulsory school health initiatives with the expansion of federal power, arguing they were connected in a plot to establish “state medicine” that imperiled the gendered freedom of the “individual”—i.e., the white male citizen—over the home.

Decorated en barbotine with arena scenes and with an inscription cut pre-firing, the Colchester Vase is a late-second-century product of the local pottery industry. Of exceptional quality, it may have come from the workshop to which the named potter Acceptus iii belonged. It appears to record a performance in the town, and was used as the cremation urn for a non-local male of 40+ years.

Why do governments that redistribute property on a massive scale so frequently fail to grant property rights to land beneficiaries? A recent contribution answers this important question by suggesting that countries involved in major land reforms suffer from ‘property gaps’, while those that did not, like Colombia, are in a much better situation. Based on the Colombian case, we challenge this conclusion. We show that, far from having clear property rights over rural land, the country suffers from very serious gaps, both in a broad and narrow sense. This substantially weakens the purported negative association between redistribution and well-established property rights, and also reveals the glaring limitations of the liberal conceptualisations of such rights when applied to democratic states with gaping inequality in land distribution and violent conflicts over rural land.

Until today, not only the general public but also scholars of colonialism and imperialism debate about the extent to which Europeans were aware of the centrality of racial discrimination for colonialism and empires. Those who stress that racism was the foundation of European colonialism appear to be anachronistic. However, as this essay demonstrates, at least the British of the late nineteenth century were well-aware of the constitutive character of racial discrimination for their Empire. During the “constitutional panic” which the proposal of the Ilbert Bill in 1883 caused, the arguments exchanged in newspapers, town hall meetings and parliamentary debates revealed the racist foundation of British India. One contemporary observed “the unhappy tendency of this controversy to bring into broad daylight everything which a wise and prudent administrator should seek to hide.” This essay seeks to bring into broad daylight once again what has been widely forgotten or ignored. Statements in Parliament expressing that it was “perfectly impossible and ridiculous, so long as we retained our hold on India, to give Native races full equality” testify for explicitness of the debate. Analyzing the arguments against the Ilbert Bill, which sought to introduce full racial equality in the judiciary, serves for better understanding the foundation of British India.

The independence of Brazil (1822) resulted in its separation from Portugal and its birth as an independent empire. It is important to understand the role of people of colour in this movement for independence. Focusing on Ceará, the main argument of this article is that people of colour, both free and enslaved, played an active and significant role in Brazilian independence, as they fought for freedom, for established rights, and for greater involvement in public affairs. They accomplished this amidst social upheaval, political instability and the rise of local authoritarian leadership resulting from the collapse of the old colonial order. As a study in subaltern agency, the contributions of this article go even further, as the consulted primary source material depicts the vital role of Ceará in the absorption of Brazil's northern regions into the new empire – an understudied topic in its own right.

This article examines the significance of a highly unusual stone statue discovered at Teynham, Kent, depicting a triton and a ketos. It discusses the context of the find in what appears to be a mausoleum complex adjacent to Watling Street. It provides a detailed description of the statue itself, alongside a petrological study, and places this in the context of other depictions of marine deities, particularly of tritons, in Britain and beyond. The article considers how the sculpture might have been placed on the exterior or interior of the tomb. It also discusses the possible occupant of the mausoleum (perhaps a villa owner or sailor), taking into account the possible symbolic value of the triton, either as signifier of afterlife beliefs or biographical achievement, as well as the ritual treatment of the statue after the tomb was dismantled. The wider context of the Teynham mausoleum is then analysed in terms of its location and form in relation to comparable monuments found in south-east England and better preserved tombs on the continent.

‘Nations,’ political geographer Jim MacLaughlin tells us, ‘literally have to be built from the ground up.’ During the Irish Revolution, republicans engaged in the construction of a counter-state which included the sporadic application of alternative policing arrangements and a judiciary in the form of Dáil courts, as well as a representative assembly that was driven underground for much of the War of Independence. However, several recent and highly original works of scholarship underline once again that the revolutionary period was as much about destroying British state apparatus and perceived symbols of colonialism as it was about creating a new nation-state. This thread of destruction has been explored from a micro-level (the burning of a village) to a national level (the burning of roughly 300 country houses). Justin Dolan Stover's highly anticipated Enduring ruin examines environmental destruction between 1916 and 1923 utilising a broad definition of environment that incorporates man-made structures, and their destruction, alongside rural landscapes. Stover's palpable rendering of the Easter Rising, for example, contends that ‘artillery bombardment, machine-gun fire, ensuing fires, looting, the collapse of asbestos-lined tenements, human and animal casualties, and odours indicative of unattended death grounded the rebellion's ruinous scope’ (p. 8). Enduring ruin innovatively elucidates the impact of this unique ‘sensory stamp’ on combatants and civilians while chronicling how propagandists utilised the imagery and language of the Great War to cultivate a sense of victimhood and elicit international sympathy (pp 12–13, 112–18). Other chapters examine the impact of less overtly political environmental damage and the impact of reprisals by crown forces. Like Donlon and Dooley's monographs, Stover tactfully considers the interaction between landscape and people throughout, drawing attention to the important area of the revolutionary period's impact on the mental health of combatants and civilians (pp 74, 92–7). This work adds a highly original perspective by presenting the impact of tree felling, road trenching and incendiarism, contrasting the ‘romanticism’ of sawing trees ‘by hand under the cover of darkness’ with ‘the disillusionment of the mechanised evisceration of nature experienced along the Western Front’ (p. 61). Alongside using weather reports to illustrate how ‘extreme weather did not stymy guerrilla activity’, the author also employs a sample of 2,183 incidents of ‘landscape manipulation and ensuing damage to the built and natural environment’ which, like the burning of big houses, correlates to the more violent areas of the country (pp 70–73).