Adam Smith was against mercantilism and against monopolies in a time when mercantilism and monopolies prevailed. He was against slavery in a time when slavery was the norm. He was against the British Empire in a time when the empire he was a subject of was at its peak. He was against colonialism in a time when colonialism was the backbone of power. He was against taxation without representation in a time when democracy did not exist. He was against the established Church in a time when the Church had the power of life and death over people. He was against endowed universities in a time when education and its prestige were in their hands. When taken all together, one appreciates the extent to which Smith was a dissenter.

Book covers of the Wealth of Nations are among the paratexts that shape readers’ understanding of the text and their experience of reading it. Covers often appeal to readers’ thirst for knowledge or aesthetic sensibility, and many offer interpretations of the texts, sometimes in opposition to each other. Through surveying covers, this essay uncovers these visual interpretations of the Wealth of Nations so that readers might more deliberately form their own judgments of Adam Smith’s most famous book.

Through its arrangement of projections, figures, light, colors, sound, and spoken text, Sudden Rise (2019) by Wu Tsang and the collective Moved by the Motion creates a posthuman world, transgressing the boundaries of representation and presence to rethink our civilization in relation to the rest of nature.

In China’s resource-based cities, work and everyday life have historically been shaped by extractive industries. Amid the ongoing restructuring of the coal industry, examining social dynamics beyond labour – particularly those linked to housing, displacement and resettlement – reveals critical mechanisms of power. Based on fieldwork conducted in Datong, Shanxi province, this article introduces the concept of “extractive governmentality at home” to analyse territorialization as a governing technique that shapes miners’ practices and subjectivities. The relocation of miners from unsafe, self-built dwellings to a new urban neighbourhood, built and managed by their coal state-owned enterprise (SOE), reveals a form of corporate power. While resettlement has improved living conditions for most insiders, it has reinforced SOE dependency and highlighted the social marginality of less- or unaffiliated local residents. More recently, the gradual separation of SOEs from their social responsibilities has increased the administrative burdens on local governments, while resettled populations continue to face territorial stigmatization. This article contributes to scholarly debates on China’s “just transition” by underlining the socio-political complexities of housing provision and management in extractive contexts. Beyond the workplace, housing represents an overlooked yet important domain of power in China’s “independent industrial mining areas,” emphasizing inhabiting practices and territorial subjectivities as key elements for understanding the broader transformations induced by coal industry restructuring.

The postsubjective theatre of Sudden Rise (2019) by Wu Tsang and the collective Moved by the Motion denies human agency, suggesting instead a posthuman world, and brings the theatrical paradox of action and subjectivity to light. Sudden Rise’s hyperaffective timelessness heralds a posthuman world, both in reality and in theatre. Characterized by collectivity, entanglement, and synesthesia, the working mode of Tsang’s team of artists frames and codetermines the theatrical experience.

We report a new relative sea level curve from Inglefield Land, northwest Greenland, to investigate the transition from maximum to minimum loading across Nares Strait. We sampled marine bivalves and terrestrial macrofossils for radiocarbon dating from raised marine terraces in Rensselaer Valley, Inglefield Land (78.58°N, 70.71°W) to constrain relative sea level through the Holocene. The oldest terrestrial macrofossil of 9010–8650 cal yr BP provides a minimum-limiting constraint for the deglaciation. Sea level fell rapidly from the marine limit at 85 ± 4 m to 37.5 ± 4 m above sea level (m asl) between 9010–8650 and 7970–7790 cal yr BP at a rate of 49 m/ka. The rate of sea -level fall decreased to 11 m/ka between 7970–7790 and 5320–5060 cal yr BP, when it fell from 37.5 ± 4 to 9 ± 4 m asl. After 5,320–5,060 cal yr BP, we estimate sea level fell at a lower rate of 2 m/ka to modern sea level. The period of fastest emergence in Inglefield Land is earlier in time than in Hall Land, reflecting earlier deglaciation, and is steeper than in Hall Land and Washington Land. This sea-level history captures the transition from the style of emergence from Pituffik to Hall Land.

We investigated radiocarbon dates of human bone samples from several medieval sites in Trondheim, central Norway. Stable isotope data was used to estimate marine correction for the radiocarbon dates, which is necessary to correct the radiocarbon ages and establish age models for the archaeological layers. We observed that a marine correction without ΔR does not lead to a well-defined model for all sites. Allowing a variable ΔR improves the model, which indicates that food sources and trade routes have changed over time, influencing the mobility of food resources as well as of people. However, this does not work for all sites, indicating that variation of reservoir ages could also be the result of individual preferences for the food and that fish with different ΔR, and thus different geographical origin, was consumed during the same periods. Many radiocarbon and stable isotope (δ13C, δ15N) measurements have been carried out for the project. We calculated %marine consumption from the isotope values and found that it varies greatly, between 7% and 51%, and apparently independent of period, social status, churchyard location or other factors. Based on these data, we determined average reservoir ages for the marine food consumed in Trondheim during different phases, varying between ΔR = –150 and 280 years.

Radiocarbon (14C) dating is a powerful tool for establishing reliable chronologies for proxy records recovered from environmental archives, including lacustrine sediments. However, lacustrine sediments are often limited with respect to availability of material such as terrestrial macrofossils that are traditionally targeted for 14C dating. Flow cytometry, in combination with physicochemical preprocessing, is an emerging technique for the isolation of pollen from terrestrial sediments, holding the promise of pollen recovery of sufficient purity and efficiency for routine 14C analysis. Here, we examine the performance of this approach by undertaking a comprehensive blank assessment for a new pollen isolation protocol and comparing pollen-14C data against established chronologies for two lake records. Our procedure yields consistent values for constant contamination with extraneous carbon of 1.34±0.40 µg C and an F14C of 0.85±0.04, rendering our method suitable for microscale 14C analysis. The pollen-14C data are largely in agreement with age estimates for the same layers of the lake sediment cores based on macrofossil-14C analysis and tephrochronology. However, we also observe that our pollen samples appear to be, on average, slightly older than their macrofossil counterparts. We hypothesize this to be the result of sedimentary and translocation processes that retard pollen transport and lacustrine deposition.