This article seeks to trace the evolution of North Vietnam's strategy in Laos from 1945 to 1975. I have three points to argue. First, the Vietnamese dealt with Laos on the basis of the Indochinese idea, not only during the immediate anticolonial period as scholars have argued, but also in the decades of struggle against the United States. Second, while the Indochinese idea treated North and South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia as an interconnected entity, different priorities were attached to each component; revolutionary efforts differed from country to country. Third, the Vietnamese communists were flexible in translating this idea to adapt to the changing realities over three decades, from armed to political struggles, or a combination of both at different times.

This article asks why the victims of the 1944–45 famine in Indonesia’s main island of Java are largely missing from Indonesia’s public memory and historiography. It surveys relevant studies, to conclude that there is no consensus on the human toll of the famine. The article then traces the origins of an initial estimate of four million mentioned by Indonesia’s authorities to data on mortality and births uncovered in late 1945. It discusses the outcomes of a recent study that analysed these data to re-estimate excess deaths of, respectively, 0.7 and 1.2 million during 1944 and 1945. The difference with the initial estimate is that it also included unborn children and an unsubstantiated approximation of victims in 1946. The article analyses the likely reasons why the millions of victims of the famine went missing from Indonesia’s public memory and historiography during the 1950s and 1960s.

‘Going Green: The BIALL Sustainability Working Group’ was a parallel session presented by Christine Baird during the BIALL Annual Conference ‘Gaining the edge: investing in our skillset’, held in Belfast in June 2023. The session aimed to provide an introduction to the newly formed BIALL Sustainability Working Group. The session, and this subsequent article, outlines the group's aims, projects and structure, as well as the wider contexts which motivated the group's establishment. It discusses the ways in which information professionals can develop more sustainable working practices, both individually and by leveraging the power of our professional networks. This paper explores the opportunities for legal librarians to engage in community activism, and the importance of both this concept and of ‘cathedral thinking’ in responding to the climate crisis.

This article uses techniques of microhistory to explore how Janbai, the third wife of Sir Tharia Topan, exerted economic, religious, and social influence in Indian Ocean networks. An Ismaili woman from a Gujarati trading family who lived in East Africa, Janbai lies outside of the social worlds that have dominated studies of Muslim modernity in South Asia, which centre on Sunni male professionals from North India. Janbai was illiterate and largely disconnected from textual debates about modernity. In fact, she was just the sort of woman that reformers castigated for their supposed attachment to religious superstitions and customary practices. In contrast, studying Janbai through an alternative frame of ‘material modernity’ reveals the complex biography of a women who neither conformed to the idealized ‘new’ woman, nor simply reproduced inherited practices. Instead, she navigated rapid social mobility, shifting geographies, and new technologies and institutions, particularly colonial law courts, in ways that echoed and departed from how women had long exercised agency. The article argues that scholars, by foregrounding textual archives and discursive analysis, have tended to reproduce the marginalization of women like Janbai. In contrast, looking to sources such as jewellery and photographs, and reading textual archives with greater attention to gendered patterns of consumption and investment, brings Janbai from the margins to the centre of our understanding of modernity. In addition to enriching our understanding of the lives of women, increased attention to materiality and visuality opens up critical new avenues for writing a more variegated history of Muslim modernity.

This paper introduces an innovative conceptual design of a 400 kW solid-state power amplifier (SSPA) station and presents preliminary measurements for the key components. Recent advancements and benefits of solid-state technology have made the prospect of replacing vacuum tubes increasingly appealing. Historically, a significant challenge was the limited output power capacity of individual solid-state transistors, necessitating the integration of numerous units to generate high-power microwave signals in the range of hundreds of kilowatts. However, modern transistors capable of producing over 2 kW of output power have emerged, facilitating this transition. Another weak point was low power efficiency in high-power operating mode. The advanced rugged technology (ART) of solid-state devices enables the utilization of these transistors in nonlinear and switching operating classes, thereby enabling the creation of high-efficiency high-power amplifiers. In this conceptual design, 264 SSPA modules based on ART, each with a power output of 1.6 kW, are combined. The measurements revealed a single SSPA capable of delivering up to 2 kW output power with a power efficiency of 73% at frequency of 352 MHz. Due to the minimal losses during module combination and working SSPA in Class-C operation mode, the power efficiency of the station is expected to closely mirror that of a single module.

This article, grounded in archival research from Chinese border prefectures, delves into the complexities of migration dynamics, specifically the phenomena of exodus from and return to China following the Communist takeover in 1949. It reveals how various reforms, enforced collectivisation and religious restrictions disrupted local lives, causing social panic and identity crises, which led to the disintegration of everyday life among borderland communities. Local residents’ responses predominantly involved crossing the border to seek refuge in Burma. The article critically scrutinises local authorities’ efforts to alleviate resultant instability, with the aim of retaining the borderland populace and attracting back those who had left, while also imposing the ideologies of the new communist state. Rather than viewing these ‘illicit’ cross-border movements as mere acts of resistance to governance, this study argues that they involved active negotiations for a stable daily life amid socio-political upheaval. The research contributes new insights into the micro-level mechanisms of state-building, and the integration of borderland peoples into the new Communist regime. Amid mass emigration and repatriation, state engagement permeated daily life in borderland communities, facilitating national identity formation and nation-state construction.