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.

Over the last two decades, since scholarly writing on India witnessed an “urban turn,” numerous historians have analyzed the role of the improvement trust in the redevelopment of Indian cities in the twentieth century, most specifically those of Bombay, Calcutta, and Delhi. This paper revisits and reassesses some of their key arguments to suggest that rather than studying the “failures” of the individual trusts to foster sanitary built environments, we should pay attention to the contingent workings of the city trusts that were constitutively designed for such failures. Using a comparative analysis of the Bombay and Calcutta improvement trusts, this paper offers a retelling of the history of twentieth-century Indian urbanism through the inauguration of an “improvement regime.” It posits that a structural analysis of the trust’s legal and financial framework opens innovative ways of reading “improvement” as a new, twentieth-century language, technology, and rationality of urban governance. The improvement trust devised the art of spatiotemporal management to secure the city’s built environment—rather than its residents—against future uncertainties. The paper takes us through various episodes in the career of the improvement trust—its introduction of technocratic rule, partnership with private investors, speculation in the urban land market, and finally emergence as the city’s leading rentier—in short, the “new developments” that we associate with neoliberal urbanism today. Rather than mapping these developments as neoliberal inventions, this paper invites readers to view them as the slow and (dis)continuous unraveling of a century-old improvement regime.

Scores of young men and women were killed by regime forces during the Arab Spring in Egypt (2011–2013). Their photographs assumed iconic proportions, meandering online and off through countless acts of creative remediation. This essay examines the different kinds of social and political work that these photographs came to play during this period, including as indexes of the revolutionary cause and as mediators of revolutionary subjectivities at a distance. This essay departs from extant studies of visual cultures of secular martyrdom or funerary portraiture framed by notions of commemoration, and instead stresses contingent presence grounded in the specific liminal temporality of the revolutionary process. In this temporal limbo, photographs of martyrs often blurred conventional boundaries between representations and their referents. Established visual conventions of funerary portraiture were turned upside down, and portraits of martyrs were understood not as representations of the dead, but as alive and present, sometimes more alive than the dwindling group of dedicated revolutionaries.

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.

Stories of fallen Kurdish revolutionaries who return to the living in dreams, and of Druze souls who circulate across securitized borders gesture at forms of vitality and animation that persist beyond biological death. In this article, we have put forward the concept of “insurgent immortality” to make sense of the political potency of revolutionary martyrs and past lives among Kurdish communities from Turkey and Syrian Druze communities in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. By insisting on the immortality of their dead, we argue, these stateless communities articulate a claim to counter-sovereignty. What makes these communities’ practices aimed at mastering and transcending death different from the sovereignty claimed by nation-states is that apparitions of dead martyrs and past lives work as expansive, boundary-crossing mechanisms, rather than the territorializing logics of enclosure and containment that mark state sovereignty. The immortality we describe in this article is insurgent because it relies on the recognition and cultivation of long-term exchange relations between the living and the dead, through which debt becomes a modality of generative expansion across both this and otherworldly times and spaces. The resulting sense of generalized indebtedness opens up spaces of liminality in which the dead come alive as both inspiring and unsettling figures. We develop insurgent immortality as a comparative concept that emerges from the specific ethnography of each case yet reaches across their contextual boundedness. In this way, we hope to inspire renewed conversation about shared trajectories of resistance, including its ambivalences, that arise in contexts of statelessness, occupation, and disenfranchisement.

Left-populist narratives of hydrocarbon extraction in the postcolonial world, including the twentieth-century Middle East, often construe it as a process whereby multinational fossil capital encloses and commodifies land held in common. Although such narratives may capture the experience of communities along certain oil and gas frontiers, they do not account for the social terrains and political trajectories of extractive land grabs in areas where private property in land already underpins commercial agriculture. How do energy companies engage with an existing market in land, and reorient a commodity frontier around extractive rather than agrarian capitalism? This article explores that question by examining property struggles in southern Iraq in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when the multinational Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) sought to acquire land still devoted to cash crop agriculture. Drawing on business records and material from Iraqi archives entirely new to Anglophone scholarship, I show how land conflicts on the Basra oil frontier came to revolve less around the IPC as such than the Iraqi state. The latter’s expanding remit entailed both the revival of older powers of sovereign landlordism and the deployment of novel capacities, as the state sought to mediate conflicting legal claims on land and its value and manage the social consequences of territorial dispossession. Ultimately, this article historicizes the political-legal status of postcolonial landlord states like Iraq in an era of hydrocarbon extraction, locating the origin of their powers as much in the material assemblage of oil infrastructures as in the monopoly over oil rents.

This article examines how the labor and community structures of female skin-divers, the Japanese ama and Korean haenyeo, believed to exemplify the primitive ability to adapt to extreme climates, became staple research subjects for global adaptation-resilience science. In the context of development studies, adaptation-resilience discourse has been seen as reflecting the emergence of neoliberal governmentality. In contrast, this article frames adaptation-resilience as a reactionary technological response that emerges in times of scarcity and crisis. This article demonstrates how the discourse can be traced back to interwar Japanese physiologists, who saw themselves as rescuing Japan from the ills of modernity through a socio-biological development program that drew on the diver’s adaptability as a means to create subjects not only capable of surviving extreme deprivation but willing to do so in the service of the community and the state. These scientists and their research were taken up uncritically in the postwar by international science and development organizations, who found in them a shared vision of a labor-intensive and low ecological impact model of community-rooted development that offered a sustainable and healthier alternative to capitalism, one that could help humanity overcome crises of modern excess such as climate change. However, sustainability meant the valorization of absolute austerity as a development goal, ruling out relief for suffering marginalized populations. This article therefore suggests that resiliency-based development entraps its subjects in a regime of self-exploitation that forces them into a constant state of emergency, paradoxically deepening their vulnerability in the process.

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.

The Mexican Cristero experience constituted a political laboratory and a school of resistance providing blueprints of action later exercised in Spain. With barely ten years between their own countries’ conflicts, the ladies of Catholic Action—in Mexico and then in Spain—organized themselves, first, as a passive resistance, and then both used the same justifications to support the use of political violence. News of the Mexican Catholic women’s experience had arrived across the Atlantic in the chronicles of Spanish newspapers beginning in the late 1920s and in the edifying, right-leaning novels that were spread, above all, in Spanish Catholic schools during the 1930s. This helps us understand the parallels between the actions, liaisons, informants, and weapons suppliers of the Brigades and other Catholic organizations in Mexico and the members of the women’s fifth column in Spain. Perhaps the contemporary presence in the public sphere of European fascists resonated more among young urban Madrid or Barcelona women during the Spanish Civil War, but, without a doubt, the social origin, experience, and cultural heritage of Mexican women was more in line with the efforts of conservative Spanish women all over the country during the conflict. In both cases, the defence of religion and their Catholic identity was at the forefront of their efforts and gave coherence to what might, at times, appear to be diverse political projects.

Between the late Middle Ages and the early modern period, large quantities of wax were exported from the Maghrib to Europe. In the Maghrib, both raw wax and wax candles were involved in various social interactions that transcended mere environmental and economic considerations. For some Muslims, wax came to index Christianity, and its significance during the celebration of the Prophet’s birthday was critiqued as a corrupt innovation. At the same time, to prevent the facilitation of Catholic devotion—and because wax was deemed war material—the sale of wax to Christians was forbidden. Nevertheless, wax remained a profitable product sold to Christians in significant quantities. The anxiety surrounding the movement of wax and the attempts to regulate it indicate that for Muslims, wax served as a religious boundary marker. Christians too utilized the substance to reinforce communal boundaries. Catholics in the Maghrib—captives, clergy, and merchants—used wax to establish and express confessional divides, aiming to deter Catholic captives from converting to Islam. Priests distributed blessed candles to captives, who in turn donated wax to the clergy. Moreover, priests gifted candles to Algerian dignitaries, a practice opposed by the papacy. Wax formed invisible, often unintended connections between Muslim theologians and rulers, Catholic and Muslim captives, slaves, wax makers, merchants, and redeemers. These entanglements sparked anxiety, a sense of impurity, and a drive to reinforce religious boundaries. This article explores a fragmented history of these connections and relationships and argues that the failed attempts to regulate this circulation fostered new entanglements.

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 article examines multi-vector pro-life exchanges between Poland and two American countries: the United States and Chile. We make the case that the 1970s through 1990s represent a significant historical moment that yielded both transplantable templates and direct longitudinal consequences for transnational social activism in the twenty-first century. We argue that during this time Poland acted as an incubation site for pro-life transnationalism, where “right to life” became the rallying cry of new generations of Catholic Far Right thinkers and activists like the politician Marek Jurek and journalists and social activists Ewa Kowalewska and Lech Kowalewski. The transnational entanglements that empowered Jurek, Kowalewska, and Kowalewski assumed intellectual and political forms, while also producing direct contact and active exchange of tactics, ideas, and know-how with the leaders of the U.S. pro-life movement such as John Willke or Father Paul Marx. Our study, situated at the intersection of intellectual history and social movement studies, highlights the importance of examining transnationalism with full attention to its local rootedness, and makes a case for incorporating non-progressive social activism into the post-1989 story of civic and social mobilization.

This article examines the interrelations between the political economies of the Ottoman Empire and the administration of justice for European merchants in Ottoman cities during the seventeenth century. By focusing on the sultan’s court of justice, the Imperial Council (divan-ı hümayun), and the Venetian merchants who appealed to it, this piece illustrates how Ottoman commercial interests and political concerns influenced the production and application of Islamic law (Sharia) in Ottoman courts for European merchants. To promote international trade, Ottoman political and legal authorities introduced new norms and procedures in matters of legal evidence and court jurisdiction in commercial cases between Venetian and Ottoman subjects, and they encouraged settlements in favor of foreign merchants and Ottoman-Venetian trade. These politics of justice, I argue, demonstrate the dynamism of the Ottoman legal system in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a period characterized by global commercial development and Ottoman military and political ascendancy in the Mediterranean.

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.

This article considers the history of Egypt’s mid-twentieth-century Spiritualist movement through an examination of its periodical, a monthly Arabic magazine called ʿAlam al-Ruh (The World of the Spirit) (1947–1960). As it shows, Egyptian Spiritualists defended and promoted their project by crafting an experimental cosmology, one that blended claims about empirical verification with elements of Islamic and Spiritualist cosmologies. It further shows how this combination of scientism and cosmology reflects a core dynamic within the history of scientific exploration in the Islamic world. Like spiritual seekers and occult practitioners in Muslim societies elsewhere, Egyptian Spiritualists positioned their project as one of eradicating superstition from religion, modernizing the nation, and advancing science. By attending to the Egyptian Spiritualist effort to scientize religion and spiritualize science, this article foregrounds the Islamic tradition’s entanglements with scientific discourses and navigates beyond claims about epistemological rupture that often characterize the study of Islam’s relationship to modern science.

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.

Public rituals of buffalo sacrifice have a prominent place in the political history of eastern India. They were productive activities in agrarian livelihoods, stages for intercommunal politics, unifying spectacles for regional kings, and justifications for colonial military interventions. While their historical scale is much reduced today, in parts of southern Odisha, they remain important political events. Drawing on historical research and long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Odisha’s Kandhamal Hills, this article examines how public rituals of sacrifice form a site of commensuration: a space where interlocal relations of mutuality and difference are temporarily made visible, and where value is defined in the presence of diverse audiences. By focusing on one specific ritual event, I show how these “sacrificial publics” are structured around the tensions of sovereignty (togetherness and transgression) and have long been spaces where different kinds of sovereign power have become legible. Historicizing an enduring sacrificial politics at India’s upland margins, I outline a distinctly anthropological concept of sovereignty—one that reflects the ways human relationships are made commensurable in lasting political formations, sustained through interlocal and intercommunal patterns of recognition.