This essay explores how Iceland, a newly independent state on the northern European periphery, responded to the international agenda for post-war stabilisation set out by economic experts after the turmoil of the First World War. It shows that the government of the so-called Austerity Alliance, led by Jón Þorláksson, adopted austerity policies devised at the international financial conferences in Brussels (1920) and Genoa (1922). To please external experts and creditors, it implemented a comprehensive fiscal and monetary policy of austerity and created a new central bank that was independent of politics. The aim, however, was not to divorce markets from government in a return to a pre-war era of laissez-faire as the scholarly literature suggests. Offering the first analysis of ‘the Icelandic business cycle’, the Þorláksson government enforced austerity by carving out ‘the economy’ – a measurable entity legible to expert management – that greatly expanded the role of the state.

One of the most persistent challenges in the study of regional politics in Italy is the lack of systematized data and information about the composition of regional legislatures and governments and the profiles of elected officials. In this paper, we describe the ITREGPARL dataset, a new comprehensive dataset of Italian regional politics comprising 6077 regional politicians from 1993 to 2020. It includes information about regional councillors, regional ministers, presidents and vice-presidents of the regional council, regional presidents and vice-presidents. Along with socio-demographic characteristics – gender, age, previous profession, education – it includes data such as experience and incumbency, number of mandates, length of service and partisanship. It also includes region-level variables, such as geographical area, type of gender quotas and the regional authority index.

By analysing new archival evidence, this article reveals how in the late 1980s, the legal principle of subsidiarity came to be seen as a tool for demobilising opposition to further European integration. At the same time, it also became a projection screen for competing visions for Europe's future: while the European Commission saw subsidiarity as an important foundation for a future European federation and the German government as an essential part of a ‘Europe of the regions’, the British government hoped to use it to achieve a renationalisation of the European Community. The French government was much more sceptical towards subsidiarity, pointing to the paradox that subsidiarity actually required a strong central authority to achieve its decentralising ends. The article concludes by arguing that the debate on subsidiarity reveals how ambitious and yet contested European integration had become by the early 1990s.

Many people today are concerned about the implications of climate change for their personal reproductive decisions. Some have transformed such concerns into activism by engaging in a “birth strike” and publicly announcing their decision not to procreate because of climate change. This article draws on Hannah Arendt to examine the political meaning and significance of birth strikes. It makes three basic points. First, by highlighting the human condition of being born, what Arendt called natality, birth strikes have illuminated a distinctive set of threats and possibilities for climate politics. Second, due to modern consumerism and instrumentalism, which Arendt saw as the dominance of labor and work over action, birth strikes have been misperceived as advocating a reduction in personal carbon footprints and global population growth. Third, birth strikes have clarified some of the challenges for efforts to link the individual and collective dimensions of climate responsibility.

This paper theorizes and defends a process I term “hermeneutical bastardization.” This concept tracks the way in which some hermeneutical injustices arise not from a gap in a shared pool of hermeneutical resources, but from the decontextualization of an advantageous hermeneutical resource into another (typically dominant) hermeneutical domain. This decontextualization bastardizes hermeneutical resources by severing the concept from its original meaning and significance. I focus on the term “trans woman” and examine the way in which dominant epistemic agents rewrite and redefine the concept according to prominent and prevalent pernicious representations. Specifically, once decontextualized, the term “trans woman” denotes an individual who is thoroughly erotic and sexual in nature. Hermeneutical bastardization can illuminate how hermeneutically marginalized groups are reconstructed by other dominant epistemic agents according to these pernicious representations and can be silenced whilst their concepts, or rather their terms, are being utilized in sets of dominant hermeneutical resources in ways that severely diverge from their original intra-communal conceptualization. This type of hermeneutical injustice does not arise from a lacuna in our set of resources, but instead depends on the uptake of a concept's term and its subsequent decontextualization.

‘Anxious scrutiny’ has become one of the most used terms within the lexicon of judicial review throughout the common law world, including Hong Kong, yet surprisingly remains understudied in the scholarly literature. In contrast to the considerable body of literature on substantive review of discretion in relation to proportionality and Wednesbury unreasonableness as rival standards of review, there is still much to explore in relation to the foundation, purpose, and techniques of anxious scrutiny review, including how the concept may have come to depart from its English roots in other common law jurisdictions. Using Hong Kong as a case study, this article examines how anxious scrutiny has been received in an Asian common law jurisdiction, considering both the scope of application and the techniques used by judges under this standard. Through a detailed examination of the case law, it traces the origins and evolution of the standard and its future role within the sliding scale of substantive review within Hong Kong's system of public law.

My first acquaintance with the History of Economics Society (HES) occurred in the summer of 1990 when I attended its seventeenth annual meeting. Organized by the then HES president and now recently deceased Stanley “Todd” Lowry at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, it marked the beginning of my experience with US higher education. Later that summer, I began a two-year post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard University. The economics department still hosted a history of economics seminar—the Kress seminar—though its actual connection with the seminar was tenuous.1 Following the Lexington meeting, the paper I presented was accepted for publication in volume 7 of Perspectives on the History of Economic Thought—a book series that published selected papers from the HES conference. It was my first publication in English. From then on, I kept attending the HES annual meeting regularly and with enthusiasm. I met a number of stimulating people and made some good friends there. It was always refreshing to find myself in the United States following nine months of teaching and research in France.

The North East Hill Region (NEHR) of India is home to diverse maize landraces including pigmented accessions rich in antioxidants and nutritional properties. The present study attempted to characterize a representative collection of this mostly unexplored diversity. Altogether eighty-three local maize landraces from the seven hill states of the NEHR were studied with special emphasis on pigmentation diversity. For the morphological traits, a significant ANOVA indicated the presence of substantial genetic variability for which selection would be fruitful. A number of these accessions were found to have traits that help cope with moisture stress, improve stalk strength and optimize photosynthesis. Principal component analysis studies for the yield attributing traits indicated that ear weight was most variable. The bleaching/histological studies confirmed that anthocyanin pigment when present was always restricted to the aleurone layer of the kernels, typical of blue maize. Quantitative analysis for kernel anthocyanin/phlobaphene content also revealed genetic differences among the accessions. Genetic analysis using the model-based STRUCTURE indicated significant population structuring among the accessions. Specifically, for the pigmentation diversity studies both principal coordinate analysis and neighbour joining methods revealed near concurrent population structuring due in part to the high differentiation of seven of the twenty-one pigmentation specific loci studied. The results obtained provide comprehensive evidence of a significant amount of genetic differentiation among the landraces under study. Landraces are valuable reservoirs of favourable alleles for which selection can be made and, as in this study, identify accessions for breeding maize with enhanced levels of beneficial secondary metabolites.