Power at Work: A Global Perspective on Control and Resistance, edited by Marcel van der Linden and Nicole Mayer-Ahuja, marks an important moment in the trajectory of labour history over the last half century. Writings on labour have seen a shift from a focus on institutional history to social history in the 1960s, to the cultural and linguistic turn of the 1980s, and, over the last decade or so, a move to reclaim the material in new ways.1 In the 1970s, the labour process and shopfloor politics was an important theme in writings on labour – Marxist and non-Marxist – but these were often framed in reductive and teleological narratives derived from the experience of the Global North.2 Recent writings demonstrate a renewed interest in workplace politics from fresh perspectives that look at the relationship between the production process and cultural transformation in complex ways.

Given the varying degrees of importance that a holy place holds for different parties and the variety of laws used to regulate them, laws pertaining to holy places integrate a broad array of legal, political, social, religious, and economic interests. Acknowledging the difficulty of capturing a singular standard of protection merits examining different existing modalities to discern the means of protection for holy places.

A 2022 Israeli District Court case concerning ownership rights over a Russian Orthodox church in the Old City of Jerusalem shall provide the platform for scrutinizing the relevant laws and variety of interests at play for holy places in Israel, providing insights into the importance of accounting for divergent interests in the cultural heritage protection milieu. This article shall highlight the approaches used towards holy place protection in a difficult and complex context, Israel, to better understand heritage protection methods for unique or significant cultural sites in other regions.

In 1927 Lejaren à Hiller (1880–1969) produced a series of black and white art photographs entitled Sutures in Ancient Surgery evoking scenes from the distant past of surgery and medicine. Commissioned and distributed in North America by Davis & Geck, Inc. to promote sales of its surgical sutures (stitches), several depictions were erotic owing to the centrality and poses of nude female models. The first series appeared as ads in professional technical journals, then as packets assembled in paper portfolios distributed to doctors who were primarily men. The creation of Hiller's oeuvre in different forms over almost a century – journal advertisement, portfolio, book, exhibit, magazine features and textbook illustration – highlights his enduring broad appeal, although his work has since been subject to criticism because of its perceived sexism. At its root, Sutures was an advertising medium that connected a seller to a potential buyer. The content and presentation of the project also connected medicine present with medicine past, which also may have helped physicians to connect with the then blossoming field of medical history. The appeal Sutures may have had for a past male medical culture would not resonate with the more gender-inclusive and less overtly sexist medical profession of today, which also prompts discussion of the associations across art, obscenity, medicine and society. My reassessment of Hiller's work based on analysis of his artwork, contemporary interviews, published critiques, Hiller's own writings and DG company records extends previous analyses as it is more comprehensive in scope and also considers more fully works by Hiller antecedent to Sutures that probably greatly influenced it, such as photopoetry books, other advertising projects and his silent movie films.

This article maps the memories of Gĩkũyũ women and girls who were forcibly concentrated during the 1950s emergency period in Kenya. Using Britain’s strategy of ‘villagization’, it considers the unique forms of surveillance and violence deployed against women understood as the ‘backbone’ of the anti-colonial Mau Mau movement. By analysing colonial records and women’s oral testimonies, the article examines civilian relationships to coercively designed counterinsurgency environments. It situates these ‘villages’ into a longer tradition of Britain’s carceral landscape across colonial states, offering fresh insights to established histories of violence, gender, and colonialism.

Motivated by the insights of Karen Horney into submissive and compliant personalities, this study delves into the perpetual vulnerability, fear of helplessness, and isolation portrayed in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man through the lens of psychoneurosis theory. Individuals with obsessive appeasement tendencies experience excessive dependency and restlessness, reinforcing their feelings of helplessness and often resulting in manipulative attachments to powerful figures and self-defeating behaviours. Neurosis amplifies these maladaptive responses, intensifying anxiety stemming from individual, familial, social, or religious fears, thereby significantly impacting social functioning. This study aims to analyse the submissive personality of Mary Dedalus in Joyce’s novel from the three distinct perspectives of need for approval, sense of unsupportedness, and fear of the church. An in-depth exploration of these aspects not only enriches our comprehension of Joyce’s work but also offers valuable insights into the portrayal of neurosis and its impact on human behaviour within a competitive societal framework.

Scholars have debated how the themes discussed by Pomerius in his De vita contemplativa found ample resonance across Gregory the Great's work, and reflect similar concerns. While it is impossible to determine whether the Roman bishop read the treatise authored by the North African rhetor, their parallel authority on the matter was recognised by Carolingian copyists, who often reported their works alongside each other. The discovery of a glossa sourced from Gregory's literary production in Pomerius’ manuscript tradition might both substantiate this claim and shed some light on the networks of medieval scriptoria.

The episcopal mission of Englishman John Bale to Ireland in 1553 provides historians with a unique window into the interconnected British and Irish histories of the early English Reformation. Scholarship on Bale has long explored his life and theology in all European theatres of the Reformation in which he was involved. Yet, key features of his mission and theology remain underappreciated. Building on recent work that has contextualized Bale’s Irish mission and ecclesiology within the imperial outlook of the Edwardian regime and Reformation, the article examines Bale’s mission against the worlds of English evangelical and continental Protestant political theology he inhabited, and the mingling of Henrician and Edwardian ‘reformist’ energies in Ireland with which it intersected and clashed. It argues that, under conditions of English colonial rule and empire in Ireland, Bale expressed a political theology that, imperial by circumstance and implication, turned his spiritual vocation modelled on Christ into a receptacle for divine and princely sovereignty that set rival conceptions of royal authority, idolatry, and Anglo-Irish constitutional relations against each other. Evangelical political theology thus acquired different hues on either side of the Irish Sea, with important implications for how we understand the early English Reformation across England and Ireland.

Much of today’s academic scholarship of international cultural heritage law circles around cultural heritage’s protection for the benefit of future generations. Despite this, the efforts to systematically examine the concept in more detail are scarcer. This paper seeks to fill this gap by taking a closer look at the ways in which the notion of future generations features in the body of international cultural heritage law. This contribution firstly illustrates how central the idea of protecting cultural heritage for the benefit of future generations is in international cultural heritage law. Despite this centrality, evidenced by an extensive analysis of international and regional hard and soft law, national law, case law, and policy options, its precisely contours the second argument of this paper, is that they remain elusive. Finally, skepticism is voiced over the concept’s potential ambivalent use with respect to the protection of cultural heritage.

Narratives about indigenous labour in the pearl fisheries of the Caribbean, widely disseminated across the Atlantic world since the sixteenth century by Castilian chroniclers, have significantly shaped historiography. These accounts have reinforced a singular narrative about labour within pearl fisheries that overlooks this work's spatial and temporal changes in sea depths. This article examines and reconstructs the labour practices of workers in the pearl fisheries on the islands of Cubagua, Margarita, and Coche, as well as the coast of Cabo de la Vela and Riohacha, highlighting their temporal and spatial transformations. Additionally, it analyses the coexistence of various forms of coerced labour within this context.

During the 1930s and 1940s, a group of right-wing intellectuals, sparked by the New Deal, mounted a sustained critique of American democracy and inherited democratic principles. Believing that the progressive democratization of the state had resulted in a decadent, inefficient and morally coarse society, they attacked democracy as the root cause of the nation's problems. Examining the reactionary conservative, libertarian and fascist critiques of democracy, this article suggests that each borrowed ideas from the other, and that their beliefs in autocratic rule or a broadly countermajoritarian politics have not been adequately studied by scholars.

This article examines the rhizomatic approach to political organizing developed by the Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA). AAPA, founded in 1968 in Berkeley, CA, is an organization of historical significance, having introduced the term “Asian American” to signify a new political identity and developed the first pan-Asian nationwide social movement. Yet the scholarly treatment of AAPA has been rather cursory. This article is one of the the most extensively researched studies of AAPA. In three parts, it examines AAPA’s (a) rhizomatic approach to political organizing, (b) model of collective leadership, and (c) community-centered pedagogy. First, the article conceptualizes AAPA’s rhizomatic mode, which fostered the decentralized, interconnected participation of many people. AAPA prioritized a participatory model that also created space for women to have influence. Second, examining AAPA’s activities shows an approach to community-based organizing that affirmed the knowledge produced by ordinary people gained through their lived experiences. Third, the article explores the importance of relationship building and rhizomatic networks in AAPA’s growth across the nation. While not exclusive of vertical structures, AAPA’s focus on egalitarian, collaborative organizing infused the national movement and helped to make collective leadership a hallmark of the broader Asian American movement.

During the nineteenth century in Ireland, agents of the colonial state like the police, along with the administrators that they served, forged an association between political motivations and Irish agrarian violence. They did so not only through the policing of Irish violence, but through the methods used by the colonial state to categorize, process, record, and archive it. Central to this endeavor was the category of “outrage.” Using this category, the Irish Constabulary created a record that impressed an association between Irish violence or criminality and political resistance. Because the British colonial state had control over the production of the archive, it also dictated the metanarratives present in this “archive of outrages” that gave form and function to the colonial state's fears that Irish violence represented a budding insurrection or a desire to fracture the Union. By perpetuating this logic in document and archival form, Dublin Castle (the seat of the British government's administration of Ireland) helped create the very demon that it sought to exorcise—that of Irish nationalist action and sentiment.

In contemporary Italy, media and public actors frame the exploitation of migrant agricultural labourers as the outcome of caporalato. This concept – translated as labour brokerage or gang mastery – connotes the violent treatment of workers and their exploitation by powerful individuals, who are today increasingly racialised and understood as being Black and immigrants. However, our fieldwork in Apulia and Sicily uncovered a more complicated picture. This article considers a variety of sources to explore how caporalato is constructed and to what effect. Our argument is that, though rooted in real dynamics, caporalato is also a reductive, sensationalised, and racialising framing device that transposes historic tenets of Italy's ‘Southern Question’ onto ‘othered’ migrant workers. It affects policy by creating categories of people who are made ‘illegal’ and ‘deportable’. In also reinforcing derogatory stereotypes about the Italian South, it makes visible further South(s) of the Italian South(s) – offering insight into how and where borders are created and what their effects are.

This article presents a business history of the Barranquilla Railway and Pier Company (BRPC) and its impact on Colombia’s Caribbean region. It explores the company’s operations, profitability, shareholders, infrastructure development, and competition with other coastal railways for insights into the role of foreign capital in regional growth. The BRPC’s railway and port infrastructure connected the coastal city of Barranquilla with the Colombian interior, allowing the city to supplant Cartagena as the country’s principal international port. Statistical analysis reveals the railway’s remarkable profitability, which attracted transnational investors, who consolidated majority control. The company’s ability to leverage engineering expertise and capital underscored its strategic significance, yet its interests centered on protecting its transport monopoly. The railway’s lack of visibility in London and information asymmetries shaped investor perceptions. Extending the pier demonstrated BRPC’s role in accommodating rising export volumes during Colombia’s “despegue cafetero.” However, the railway faced obsolescence, as the government opened the obstructing Bocas de Ceniza sandbank and pursued railway nationalization. The railway’s redundancy, demographic shifts, and rise of Buenaventura underscore its eventual decline. This paper reveals the complex dynamics between foreign capital, infrastructure, and trade monopolies in shaping uneven development. It highlights the BRPC’s overlooked yet fundamental role in Colombia’s export economy and Barranquilla’s ascendancy.

The cry of “Get married women out of the factories!” echoed across the Spanish industrial landscape at the turn of the twentieth century, driven by two intertwined factors. From a societal perspective, women's place was at home, not in factories. On an economic note, concerns arose over women's lower wages displacing men from jobs. This research delves into a case study of a workers’ claim aimed against women. It aims to illuminate the interplay of social demands and gender dynamics in labour history and business operations. Using as a case study a strike among male workers at the Amatller chocolate factory in May 1890, it seeks insights into gender complexities and women's challenges when joining the workforce. Male factory workers sought better conditions but directed their frustrations at women, influenced by prevailing social discourse. Women joined the factory, but portraying them as victors would be an oversimplification. Their presence was restricted, confined to manual tasks, with few opportunities for advancement.

Fire is a material and social process that is different in different periods and places. This article examines the fires set during the largest, and last, uprising of the enslaved in Jamaica, which occurred in the island's western parishes after Christmas 1831. It argues that different sorts of fire were central to processes of production and everyday life under plantation slavery, and examines what the burnings of 1831–32 reveal about the fight against enslavement in the early nineteenth century. A close reading of the records of the trials that followed the uprising details the methods used to burn plantations; the decisions over what to burn and what to save; and the contested social and political relations involved in encouraging or extinguishing the flames. This demonstrates that fire was a material means of creative destruction for the rebels that turned the everyday practices of commodity production and coerced social reproduction against the plantation infrastructure; that destroying buildings by fire both denied and made claims on the land, and sought to remake the Jamaican landscape for other forms of inhabitation; and that the collectivities forged through fire were inevitably shaped by both shared endeavors and tensions within and between groups of plantation inhabitants facing an uncertain future. Overall, it seeks to understand the use of fire in the 1831–32 uprising to fight for freedom as part of a “politics of habitation.”

Although the Lower Kasai was identified by Jan Vansina as a likely center for highly complex societies, he failed to recognize that sixteenth-century sources had mentioned the Empire of Mwene Muji as a large polity in that region. Studying the well known and recently discovered literature on West Central Africa, as well as a critical study of oral tradition, shows considerable evidence for the antiquity and existence of Mwene Muji.