This article examines two Spanish museum exhibitions on the frigate Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes to show how these exhibitions convert recovered colonial treasure into national patrimony and thereby stage imperial nostalgia. Using museum, media, and scholarly archives, I analyze how the displays recode coins and artifacts as inalienable heritage while bracketing the colonial relations—Andean extraction, coerced Indigenous labor, and slavery—that produced them. Set against Spain’s court victory over Odyssey Marine Inc. and the post-2008 crisis, the exhibitions cast the state as cultural guardian against corporate plunder. Curatorial regimes aestheticize bullion, dematerialize monetary value, and reattach silver and gold to a redemptive national narrative. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s critique of cultural treasures, Marcel Mauss and Annette Weiner on inalienable possessions, and scholarship on the afterlives of empire, I theorize a navigational state that replaces conquest with heritage protection to secure continuity between imperial past and post-imperial present. The case clarifies the structural limits of decolonizing gestures within national museum forms.

This article examines how Iranian intellectuals negotiated Western science and technology under semi-colonial sovereignty: a formally independent state constrained by unequal power. I argue that these negotiations operated through translation not only as linguistic transfer but as a recursive set of practices—adoption, reworking, and refusal—through which intellectuals repositioned science within Iranian political life as its authority shifted from universal reason to militarized power to developmental urgency. Using Frantz Fanon as a comparative framework, I identify four overlapping modes: (1) nineteenth-century epistemic translation, when science was framed as a route to reform; (2) early twentieth-century regulation of the “performative translator,” when translation became a site of linguistic, epistemic, and gendered policing; (3) mid-century emancipatory translation, shaped by the global militarization of science; and (4) iterative remembrance in the 1970s, when translation became a practice of insurgent authorship through cycles of forgetting and reactivation. The paper’s central paradox is that later thinkers strategically inhabited the position long maligned as the “performative translator”—the Europhile dandy or fokoli, later refigured and pathologized as the gharbzadeh (West-struck)—to claim new forms of insurgent authorship, even as such projects risked forging new orthodoxies. Tracing the genealogy of the fokoli, I show how debates over performative translation organized conflicts over method, authority, and epistemic nationalism. Ultimately, I argue that the reappropriation of the fokoli’s maligned position reveals decolonization not as a clean rupture but as an ongoing metabolization of inherited materials. The article contributes to decolonial thought, translation studies, and the global intellectual history of science by reframing semi-colonial modernity as a struggle over epistemic authority conducted through the labor of translation.

This article argues that nostalgia forms a crucial part of the imaginary that drives frontier economies—not in contradiction but alongside the future-oriented imaginaries of speculation, anticipation, and appearances. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted across three key locales—Pianma, Mong La, and the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone—this study introduces the concept of “frontier nostalgia” to analyze how these spaces function as sites of both economic opportunity and memory. While aspirations for prosperity drive individuals to engage with these dynamic zones, their lived experiences are marked by significant historical residue, creating a poignant longing for past vibrancy—and particularly for a form of hypersociality that characterize(d) frontier spaces. By examining the lived realities of Chinese migrants, the paper argues that nostalgia is not merely a counterpoint to forward-looking anticipation. Instead, it complements future-making practices and imaginaries by highlighting the complex emotional landscapes that characterize frontier encounters, hence constituting particular frontier subjectivities. In Pianma, remnants of a timber boom evoke a sense of melancholic yearning for lost sociality; in Mong La, vibrant social interactions coexist with developmentalist dynamics; and in the burgeoning Golden Triangle SEZ, rapid transformation echoes and actively resemble past experiences. Ultimately, this comparative analysis emphasizes how nostalgia shapes both individual identities and collective memories within these transient spaces, shedding further light on the experience of life on the frontier.

This essay examines a scene of late Ottoman parliamentary politics characterized by verbal disruption, raucous applause, and strident indignation: in short, clamor. Centered on the brief period in late 1918 following the empire’s exit from World War I but prior to the rise of the Turkish nationalist movement, the essay focuses on a moment shaped by remarkable uncertainty about how to narrate the political present—what aspects of the historical past remained relevant to defining a possible political future? It looks at the efforts of a Greek Orthodox deputy of parliament, Emmanouil Emmanouilidis, to rebuke the promise of the nearly century-long process of reform (ıslahat). As part of this effort, he also historicized the interruption of his own speech, identifying the traces of his own frailty of voice in the stenographic records from prior parliamentary sessions. Attention to noise requires a careful unpacking of seemingly contingent moments of communicative misfire, places where denotational discourse is disrupted and therefore unheard, or what speech act theorists have referred to as infelicities. I offer a critical reimagining of the concept of infelicity, attentive to Emmanouilidis’ own preoccupation with the historical weight assumed by the fact of being persistently drowned out by his colleagues. I contend that Emmanouilidis was challenging regnant assumptions about the historical unfolding of freedom in Ottoman political life. The essay argues for the importance of interrogating the labile and contested character of historical temporality at the end of empire.

This article reveals late Ottoman (1876–1908) debates over agrarian policy in the empire’s Arab provinces that set the parameters for a fully articulated discourse of national economy emerging after the constitutional revolution of 1908. Debates between imperial officials, regional capitalists and foreign consular agents produced protectionist restrictions on the newly constructed agrarian land market, especially in an extended geography encompassing Palestine and the Hijaz Railway. Ottoman officials viewed the Arab provinces both as an untapped resource and as a possible alternative base in the event of Anatolia’s occupation. Restrictions on the land market constructed Muslim cultivators as ideal landholders and non-Muslim subjects, both Christian and Jewish, as potentially suspect and unfit for landholding. Protectionist and exclusionary agrarian policies responded to a wider context of imperial capitalism in which Ottoman officials occupied a subordinate, but still sovereign, position. These policies had an unrecognized legacy in the colonial and postcolonial Middle East, creating a durable state domain that aimed to shield large swaths of land as territory from foreign investment and occupation. The much-discussed work of Frederick List on national economy focused on practices of import substitution and tariffs with empirical examples culled mainly from the United States and Germany. In the Ottoman Empire, in contrast, agrarian policy played a crucial role in practices of national economy because of the urgent prerogative to maintain territorial sovereignty in the face of imminent colonial expansion. The article suggests a reappraisal of the contributions of Ottoman policy debates to the broader history of capitalism.

This essay explores the formation of the Syria-Turkey border by examining the mobility of contraband merchants and couriers. Contraband commerce can be viewed as not only a technique of mobility but a technology of sovereignty. I parse out these linkages from within the semantic domain of kaçak (contraband; literally “fugitive”) repurposed in the hands of contraband merchants, investigative journalists, and state officials. At important historical junctures, contraband commerce between modern Turkey and Syria came to link regimes of value and territorialization, border delineation and land dispossession, and economic informality and political treason. Analyzing the paradoxically uneven distribution of physical mobility and transborder transactions among the inhabitants of the border as a central tenet of territorialization, I suggest conceptualizing the border as a palimpsest of sovereignty. This essay contends that such an approach recuperates the historicity and dynamism of arrested mobilities and their role in the spatial production of borders, and of other contingent forms they give to sovereignty over geography and history.

Following the proclamation of constitutionalism on 23 July 1908, villagers throughout the Ottoman Empire occupied and reclaimed çiftlik (plantation) lands from which they had previously been dispossessed. This article approaches the Ottoman 1908 Revolution as part of the “global wave of constitutional revolutions” by shifting the historiographical focus of the 1908 revolution from urban to agrarian spaces. It investigates a series of land occupations that emerged across the Ottoman çiftlik geography, conceptualizing them as the “constitutionalism of the dispossessed.” I argue that this constitutionalism of the dispossessed was a response to what I call the “order of dispossession” that emerged in the late nineteenth century: a class project of çiftlik owners reacting to global economic, imperial fiscal, and local ecological crises that aimed to subordinate labor to the circuits of global capital. Furthermore, this article discusses the failure of the constitutionalism of the dispossessed in the face of a social counter-revolution by çiftlik owners, which culminated in the codification of imperial property law. It demonstrates that the post-revolutionary government—having been concerned with the credibility of the empire in European credit markets for new loans to sustain the empire in fiscal crisis—desired the restoration of the order that the çiftlik owners insisted upon, and which the circuits of global capital required. This article ultimately offers a fresh and radical history of the Ottoman 1908 revolution and counter-revolution, suggesting a novel perspective to understand the modes of protest of the dispossessed in response to the imperatives of global capital.

Working closely with a detailed 1582 register of the free Afro-Peruvian population of Cusco, Peru, this article explores how the strategic representations of individual registrants reflect the intersectional impact of unfree labor practices and increasing racial marginalization in the early colonial Andes. The growing population of free Afro-Peruvian men and women navigated practices and policies that promoted racial inequalities and coerced labor based on race, class, and gender. The 1582 registry reflects municipal attempts to subject Cusco’s free Afro-Peruvians to ordinances that acknowledged the relative independence of skilled workers (oficiales), while requiring others to reside and serve in the homes of Spanish masters (amos). Analyzing entries for the nearly 150 people registered reveals ways that intersectional status and identity affected the experience of registration and the strategies for providing personal information to the Spanish notary. The declarations and omissions contained in the document highlight personal choices that people made to preserve their independence and that of their families. The social and economic independence displayed by many oficiales contrasts with the silence of individuals who lived and worked in the households of wealthy and powerful Spaniards, navigating unequal and enmeshed relationships. The range of individual experiences and statuses evident in the 1582 registry helps explain why the restrictive goal of the proceeding failed in the following years, as well as why a free Afro-Peruvian community did not flourish in Cusco during the later colonial period.

This essay considers how the rural and tribal have been obscured from prevailing scholarly accounts of unrest and protest in the years since the Arab Uprisings of 2010–2012, and what this might mean for wider scholarly theorizations of protest and revolution. It draws on fieldwork in central Jordan, especially with Hirak Dhiban, where historical circumstances render visible dynamics also significant elsewhere. It takes as a heuristic binary two broad discursive modalities of seemingly dissimilar collective action that in fact reference and relate to each other in various revealing ways: on the one hand the politically populist and self-consciously leftist Hirak protest movements, prominent in the waves of protest since 2011, and on the other hosha—"tribal clashes.” It considers how contestations over the legitimacy, revolutionary potential, and moral valence of protests often hinge on discursive claims that, in a sense, Hirak is hosha, or hosha, Hirak. It engages with anthropological theories to interpret protest as a generative and affective process, rooted in local histories and imaginaries, even while responding to wider events. It calls for a broader reappraisal of where revolutionary potential is located and how it is recognized in anthropological and historical scholarship.

Foreign archaeologists working in the Maya region collaborated with the United Fruit Company during the first half of the twentieth century. In Guatemala, the Company funded research projects in Quiriguá (1910–1915) and Zaculeu (1946–1949). These collaborations supported the broad objectives of U.S. imperialism in the region, but comparing the projects suggests the fact of collaboration did not determine how they operated in the field. Drawing on theories of racialization, I suggest that the Company functioned as a conduit through which broader political economies of race and labor conditioned the practice of archaeology. In Quiriguá, archaeologists’ reliance on United Fruit’s administrative mechanisms led to the reproduction of the Company’s notorious labor practices and the exploitation of Afrodescendant labor in the context of a field site. In Zaculeu, a comparable dependence resulted in scientific methods being used to demonstrate Indigenous deficiency and racial continuity in the service of Company public relations and tourism development objectives. Despite wide-ranging changes in archaeological practice and governmental policy, comparing the cases illustrates how the operations of a corporate firm tied a field science into broader political economies of racialized labor. In so doing, I seek to shift analytical attention from the circulation of ideas about the past to the context of archaeological fieldwork, in which relationships of exploitation were renewed—and in which they might be contested today.