Academic historians often complain that their work is not appreciated by the public and that the impact of their books is limited to a few other scholars. There are, however, situations where historians face the opposite challenge, namely a great deal of interest from both the public and from politicians who want to exploit or interfere with their work to further their political agendas. This arises most often in countries that are undergoing deep political and social changes. At these times, the legacies of the past that emerge after a fundamental regime transformation, like the collapse of dictatorship, have a profound impact on historical research and discourse.

Today, the Beer Purity Law (Reinheitsgebot) is presented as a timeless touchstone of German commercial sentiments, but that was not always the case. Until the mid-twentieth century, the law was relatively unknown and unevenly applied across Germany. This began to change thanks to the market protectionism of Bavarian brewers in two conflicts of integration between the 1950s and 1970s. The first was sparked by West German market integration and pitted capital interest Old Bavaria (Altbayern) against consumer practices in Franconia. The second followed a parallel development but was initiated by Western European market integration and set Bavarian and West German brewers and regulators in opposition to Brussels. In both, brewers, fearful that integration threatened their market share, rallied around the Reinheitsgebot to win political allies, cudgel industry outliers and generate popular support through claims to culture and tradition. Analysing the transformation of the Reinheitsgebot, this article theorises the causal ‘entanglements of scale’ by which a little-known provincial law transformed into a German icon.

Using visual-historical methods, this article seeks to offer insights into the experiences of two historiographically underrepresented – but in this specific case overlapping – groups during the National Socialist era: elderly and provincial Jews. The article centres on a fascinating set of images: namely, a selection of portraits of individuals and photos of the Jewish community inside and outside of the local synagogue on a Saturday morning. The photographer, a young man by the name of Heinz Bähr, was preparing for his imminent immigration to the United States when he returned to his hometown of Breisach am Rhein in 1937 and photographed his extended family and members of the small rural Jewish community. As the article shows, photography was not simply a means to represent the elderly through the eyes of younger Jews but was an intergenerational practice of constituting communal memory. The photos reveal the self-perceptions of those who stood in front of and behind the camera and how these actors chose to represent historical processes on film.

This article discusses the aesthetics of flexible specialisation, a form of labour marked by micro-enterprises, skilled artisans, flexible machinery, municipal welfare and strong kinship and subcultural networks. Focusing on the writing and projects of Nanni Strada and Andrea Branzi, the article describes the fate of this labour configuration within so-called ‘Radical’ design in the central and northeastern sections of Italy (‘The Third Italy’) during the 1970s. I look at how these practices were exported abroad and deteriorated in the face of increasing global competition. The article pays particular attention to the Soviet reception of Third Italy design and the reciprocal interest by Radical designers in Soviet Productivism in order to consider the persistent ideologies of third way production.

This article evaluates intellectual debates on antisemitism in Germany in 1932, the last year before the establishment of Nazi dictatorship. The focus is on understudied cases of journals and books, in which both Jewish and National Socialist authors published right next to each other and on the same pages. In this context, the article makes three arguments: first, it analyses apologetic themes by right-wing authors and shows that a significant number of National Socialists still pretended that they were not actually antisemitic in 1932. Second, it reflects on the problem that Jewish intellectuals often disagreed on how to respond to the rise of antisemitism and thus entered into very different forms of debate with the German right. Finally, and perhaps paradoxically, the article also demonstrates that Weimar media had simultaneously developed an acute awareness of future threats and the possibility of large-scale atrocities on German territory.

Between 1969 and 1993, a genuine ‘European welfare state’ was forged at the level of the European Economic Community (EEC), even though this expression was not used per se. After a definition of the welfare state as a three-pronged set of policies, the article develops first the flourishing period in the 1970s, when many ambitious ideas such as a common reduction of working hours, or the control of multinationals, emerged. In a second step, it explains the failure of this project due to the neoliberal backlash of the early 1980s and the division of the welfarist coalition. Ultimately, the whole project was rekindled as a flanking wing of the internal market programme when the latter was launched in 1985. Hence, when the internal market opened up in 1993, a very unique kind of European welfare existed at the international level. It was less redistributive than that of national welfare states and more geared towards the management of common norms.

This article will focus on the prominent role played by the British Conservative government, guided since 1979 by Margaret Thatcher, in re-launching globally an energy model based on cheap fossil fuels by leveraging the newly available petroleum extracted in the North Sea. Between 1980 and 2010 global oil consumption increased by 50 per cent, while both coal and natural gas consumption nearly doubled. North Sea oil represented a crucial, if never openly acknowledged, ally for Thatcher, serving the purpose of bringing down oil prices, while at the same time achieving other crucial policy goals.The advent of the British North Sea oil weakened OPEC control of the global oil market, helped crush the resistance of the British coal miners, fed the ‘de-nationalisation’ of British energy sector, and then contributed to promote the ‘neoliberal governance’ of the EU energy sector.

This article analyses the political impact of the 1918 influenza pandemic in Spain, a hitherto scarcely explored subject. It first discusses the evolution and impact of the pandemic, focusing on political and social responses. It then shows how these responses were related to debates about the crisis of Restoration Spain's political system. Lastly, it analyses the long-term political impact of the influenza pandemic, showing how the demands of this period can be linked to policies and discourses during the Primo de Rivera dictatorship, particularly regarding the links between the call for a ‘health dictatorship’ developed during the pandemic and the rhetorical use of medical language linked to authoritarian regenerationism between 1923 and 1930.

In December 2021 a famous Greek TV and radio journalist and well-known anti-vaxxer, Yiorgos Tragkas, passed away due to Covid-19 complications. In the previous two decades, Tragkas had become a controversial figure, employing an anti-elite, pro-Russian and anti-Western narrative that fed into the country's underdog culture. His ethnocentric, populist, toxic tabloid journalism had been a popular genre in Greek political culture since the early 1980s. However, the debt and migration crises that shook Greece fuelled populist politics and a wave of misinformation.1 Tragkas jumped on the bandwagon of this new era by whitewashing the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn Party on national TV and by live appearances dressed up as a Second World War Nazi officer, with photos of Adolf Hitler and Angela Merkel on his desk.

Taking as a case study the commemorations and the monuments erected in the colony of Cabo Verde to memorialise the Portuguese ‘discoverers’ of the fifteenth century, this article scrutinises how those mnemonic schemes acted in the construction of the public memory of the ‘discovery’ of the Cabo Verde islands. It analyses the management of those schemes in the fixation of the narrative established as official history of ‘discovery’, in a context featured by controversies, uncertainties, omissions and historical lack about that very ‘discovery’. It also critically examines the contradictions, the concoction of facts and the distortions created by the promoters of the commemorations and monuments, as well as the role they played in that process. This article proves how, through the commemorations held and the monuments erected, the promoters of colonial memory distorted the protocols of interpretation of the information on the ‘discovery’ of Cabo Verde present in the Portuguese official documents and how they shaped the global understanding of that fact.

Policy, voluntary, psychological and educational interest in gifted children emerged across Europe in the early twentieth century but surged dramatically in the 1970s and 1980s. This article explores the transnational voluntary circles hoping that gifted youth would bring peace and liberal democracy across Europe in these years. It analyses, also, how such work came into conflict with the expectations of conservative press in Britain: that gifted children would in fact bolster national economic progress. Critically, the article demonstrates that parents and children, drawing on professional and cultural capital, resisted ideas of gifted youth as global assets. Interest in giftedness revealed the growing ‘agency’ of articulate, affluent, middle-class families within the contexts of individualism and neoliberalism, but also its limits. Further, we can and must centre the experiences of young people in our scholarship, to truly understand how ‘agency’ operates within families and beyond.

Writing in the mid-1940s, the British civil servant Sir Stephen Tallents would reflect that the interwar period saw a shift in terms of how ‘thoughtful Britons’ viewed their empire: less in terms of ‘machinery and organisation’ and more in terms of ‘growth and nurture’. This essay interprets Tallents’ remarkable observation in light of the history of an organisation with which his career was closely associated: the Empire Marketing Board (1926–33). By examining together the diverse activities of this organisation, which ranged from funding agricultural, ecological, and economic research to producing documentary films, this essay contextualises the emergence of Tallents’ view of imperial growth and development.

For twenty years, during which time he started to promote Intermediate Technology abroad and began writing Small is Beautiful (1973), E. F. Schumacher was an economist with the National Coal Board. As such, he led what he called a ‘double-life’. On the one hand, his work at the coal board involved colossal plant, pollution and brute human labour, the difficulty of which could be alleviated only by the adoption of heavy coal-extracting machinery. As time went on, Schumacher became deeply involved in managing and defending the declining coal sector, through the rationalisation and further mechanisation of its production activities. On the other hand, through his personal involvement in the Soil Association, his reading of the Gandhian literature and his exploration of Buddhism and other esoteric interests, he increasingly sought to promote a non-violent approach to economics, based on appropriate technology and gentle, labour-intensive methods, especially in the so-called developing countries. This paper tells the story of Schumacher's growing struggle to reconcile these contrasting spheres of his life, until such time as he could finally leave the coal board, give himself completely to Intermediate Technology and begin writing his influential book.

The role of business and multinational corporations (MNCs) in early international environmental governance is not well understood. Typically, historians accord business growing influence after the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, coincident with the rise of a market-oriented sustainable development paradigm. In this article, we highlight the considerable involvement of self-styled business actors in the formative 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment and subsequent establishment of the UN Environment Programme. Tracing the interconnected networks of British economist Barbara Ward, Italian industrialist Aurelio Peccei and Canadian oilman-turned-UNEP boss Maurice Strong, we identify business actors as key in the passage from ‘planetary’ to ‘global’ environmental rationales characteristic of environmental politics between the 1970s and 1990s. However, we also show that business was a sought-after (even if often ambiguous) partner in the 1970s’ moment of innovative ‘planetary’ environmental thinking and institution making. The contested status of MNCs in 1970s internationalism shaped this early business involvement in the history of environmental governance.

Five decades after the United Nation's first conference on the environment in 1972, the IPCC warned that ‘any further delay in concerted anticipatory global action on adaptation and mitigation will miss a brief and rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all’. Faced with steeply rising greenhouse gas emissions, accelerating biodiversity loss and continued degradation of oceans, forests and soil, the situation appears increasingly baffling. Why do we not see effective measures to turn these developments around? As the situation grows dire, it becomes more mysterious: what exactly is this crisis and why has it proven so difficult to solve? If the problem persists, is it because it is not properly understood? Yet, the environmental question has been studied for decades and diagnoses are legion: capitalism, colonialism, overpopulation, economic growth, humanity's inherent short-sightedness, patriarchy, the private property system – or the tragedy of the commons, the disconnect from nature in Western culture, corporate anti-environmental campaigns, the Neolithic adoption of agriculture – or its more recent industrialisation, the miscommunication of environmentalists and scientists, Christianity and neoliberalism have all been proposed as fundamental causes of the crisis. Despite this long and rich history of debate, it may be, as Pierre Charbonnier argues, that we need a more precise understanding of the ‘ecological question’ to find a way out of the present impasse. In line with Katrina Forrester and Sophie Smith's argument, we are convinced that such rethinking of the environmental must be historical, but also that it must pay special attention to economic aspects. Since the end of the Second World War, economics has risen to prominence as a form of expertise in governance at the expense of other kinds of knowledge, and the environment has become closely intertwined with the economic in the ways it has been governed. In that light, it is not surprising that current discussions among scholars, climate scientists, politicians and social movements hold that the environmental crisis calls for a reevaluation of the economic. History is central to this endeavour and can be ‘usable’ in the current crisis, as it, in Deborah Coen's words, can ‘reveal the contingent and often contradictory traces of the past in the present – and to provide clarity for the future’. In this introduction we discuss three partially overlapping ways in which historical perspectives can be helpful to the effort of constructing an ecologically stable society. In contrast to the general tendency in the twenty-first century academy to divide into ever more specialised fields, we call for a broader conversation among historians of the economic and of the environmental to reveal the paths that brought us here – and the ones not taken. We need new histories of thought, institutions, movements and governance that combine the economic and the environmental to reach a better understanding of the present crisis, decode the specific mechanisms of inaction in the face of looming catastrophe, and strive towards more apt formulations of the environmental. We wish to contribute to an emerging conversation located at the intersection of history of economic thought, intellectual history and political history more generally by pointing to strands of research that could be drawn together and that this special issue is meant to engage in dialogue.

This article reveals how, in the interwar period, British colonial authorities in Cyprus borrowed from the combination of political authoritarianism and economic development characterising Italian rule in the neighbouring Dodecanese, as both a solution to Greek irredentism and an administration suitable to ‘Mediterranean populations’. British authorities shunned, nonetheless, the chronopolitics and biopolitics buttressing fascist governance, which aimed at the political and cultural assimilation of Dodecanesians into the Italian national community. In conversation with the literature on imperial formations, the article therefore highlights the forms and limitations of the circulation of administrative practices and ideas across European colonial boundaries.

From the World2 and World3 models to contemporary Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) that model carbon neutral emission pathways, global computer models have served as virtual laboratories for addressing economic, environmental and technological concerns together. Representing technological change has been a controversial element of global modelling efforts because, to a great extent, it sets the parameters on conceivable futures. To retrace this history, this article analyses four moments when modellers debated technological change: the controversy spurred by The Limits to Growth in the 1970s; subsequent global future studies during that decade; the IIASA Energy in a Finite World study in the 1980s; and the shift to endogenous technological change in IAMs in the 2000s. It shows that the notion of technological change as a predictable parameter affecting the future of society was not a given. Technological change progressively became a parameter in models as more elaborate methodologies were developed to simulate it. When modellers began to focus on climate action in the 1990s and 2000s, their interest in the relationship between technological change and social change dwindled. The increasing skill with which modellers formally represented technological dynamics was commensurate to the decline of heated discussions over how conflicting worldviews shaped simulations.

This article traces one aspect of Britain's approach to the political economy of energy conservation. It focuses on the forecasting work of Royal Dutch Shell and the deliberations of the Heath government. In the late 1960s, the oil major Shell predicted that oil-producing states would impose an embargo on oil-consuming states. Energy conservation policies would be necessary. In tracing the reception of Shell's ‘crisis’ scenario and its proposed resolution, this article details how these ideas were received by Edward Heath's Conservative government, particularly its ‘think-tank’, the Central Policy Review Staff. In the short term, interventionist policies were proposed so as to demonstrate Britain's ability to operate without ever-increasing oil consumption, while in the long term the idea was that the energy-saving capacities of a freely-operating market could address the problem. The article recounts the confusion these proposed conservation policies provoked, and how the second idea gradually coalesced and ultimately outlasted the Heath government, providing one justification for the eventual privatisation of Britain's formerly nationalised energy industries.

In the late Habsburg period, Fiume's municipal flag became the representative symbol of local patriotism. This article argues that local patriotism in Fiume was a form of identification that combined features of modern nationalism with loyalties to the Habsburg Empire. With the disappearance of the dual monarchy and the subsequent transition period (1918–24), the Fiumian flag was redefined and contested both as a symbol of Italian irredentism realised through annexation and of Fiume's independence by local autonomists. Thus, the article demonstrates how local patriotism survived the empire's dissolution and how attachment to a locality was a significant feature of European political life in general during that period.

Neoliberal and conservative actors, financed by the fossil fuel industry, have been identified as crucial parts of a climate change denialist counter movement since at least the 1980s. We claim that this intersection stems from more than just vested interest fuelling advocacy groups. By focusing on the intellectual developments and social networks of core actors in the environmental debate in Sweden, we trace the history of opposition to environmental regulation in a country proclaiming to be an environmental pioneer. Our analysis shows that while the framing of climate change in terms of complexity initially provided actors with arguments for neoliberal policies, the obstruction of climate and environmental action was steeped in a neoliberal thought style. Our findings demonstrate the importance of scrutinising economic paradigms and thought styles that has enabled the delay of climate policy as well as the continued need for historical and geographically specific studies of obstruction.