African historiography is most persuasive when it refuses to let the state’s archive dictate the story of the nation. Across the last two decades, historians and historical anthropologists have widened the evidentiary field beyond bureaucratic texts—toward oral histories, ritual grammars, sacred ecologies, newspapers, vernacular maps, and the grainy everyday of rumor and reputation. This scholarly review exemplifies that methodological turn while voicing a shared theoretical wager: African political and social life is not best explained by models of institutional consolidation but by moral economies, spatial counter-imaginaries, and religious idioms through which communities fashion accountability and meaning.

Adam Smith treated the American colonial crisis as a case study that illustrates and further illuminates several of his core arguments in favor of commercial society. This essay examines his use of this case study, focusing on three elements. The first concerns economic policy and institutions, and specifically Smith’s treatment of the colonial crisis as an illustration of the pernicious effects of mercantilism and the beneficial effects of free trade. A second concerns moral theory, and specifically Smith’s treatment of the psychology of the colonial leaders as an illustration of the practical significance of the desire for respect and recognition of their “importance.” A third concerns political theory, and specifically Smith’s treatment of the efforts of the colonists to claim their place among the world’s nations as a key moment in the long transformative process that he believed would in time fundamentally reshape the global order.

In the business ethics and management literature, it is widely recognized that corporate sustainability is a complex concept that remains strongly contested. While some scholars highlight the current utility of the concept when used contextually, others claim that new conceptual foundations must be sought in order to improve the concept. In this article, I demonstrate that these contextualist and foundationalist strategies for conceptualizing corporate sustainability both must confront the ongoing, dynamic interplay between empirical and normative theorizing. Using the requirements of practical usefulness and theoretical robustness, I consequently argue that adopting the “pure” strategy of either contextualism or foundationalism is problematic. Instead, I defend the position of conceptual pluralism by claiming that it can partially reconcile contextualist and foundationalist commitments and thereby enable a flexible, multilevel corporate sustainability framework. I conclude by highlighting the key implications of this approach to concept formation for business ethics.

Few social scientists expected another major inter-state war in Europe. The dominant positions either confine warfare to the dustbin of European history or downplay its significance in late modernity. Sociologists of war have been less surprised by recent developments, however. In a wider socio-historical context warfare remains a crucial catalyst of social change. No other social phenomenon has continuously influenced the social world to such an extent and this has been particularly the case in European history. In this article, I critically review recent developments in the sociology of war. I also look at the ways in which existing analytical tools can be deployed to explain the return of inter-state warfare in Europe. I argue that the integration of longue durée comparative historical sociology with micro-sociological scholarship on everyday behaviour in war is the best way forward to understanding the long-term dynamics of war and society.

Medicaid has been called the “workhorse” of the American health care system, but one would hardly see that in the tenor of political debates. The Program perennially faces political headwinds that at times build to hurricane force with proposals for dramatic structural changes and spending cuts, most recently the draconian cuts enacted by Congress in 2025. In 2024, Medicaid covered more than seventy million Americans, and another ten million were covered by its companion program, the Children’s Health Insurance Program. As formidable as these numbers are, the Program’s impact runs much deeper, affecting the lives of almost everyone in the United States. It serves as an essential support for the entire health care system and, in doing so, helps to sustain almost every hospital, nursing home, and a range of other providers. This support, in turn, generates population-wide benefits that can be seen as public goods on which everyone relies, whether they realize it or not, that the private sector could not provide. These include peace of mind from knowing there is access to inpatient hospital care, emergency rooms, and long-term care when needed, protection from public health threats, improved health care based on continual innovation, greater social stability, enhanced economic productivity, and reduced health inequities. As devastating as proposals to shrink Medicaid would be for millions of low-income Americans who rely on it for access to health care, these repercussions would cause hardship for almost everyone.

This article explains Medicaid’s role in sustaining the overall health care system, the nature of the public goods it produces in doing so, and the widespread harm that would be caused were these public goods to be diminished. By characterizing public debates in this way, the Program’s supporters could reframe political discourse as a matter of universal self-interest.

This article discusses how seigneurial milling and baking monopolies in the southern Low Countries were shaped by negotiations over a period of 400 years. Local legislation from the county of Hainaut reveals how seigneurial monopolies were a topic of interplay between peasants and lords, both before and after the demographic and social-economic turmoil caused by the Black Death from 1349 onwards. Historical literature usually focusses on the oppressive nature of seigneurial ovens and mills, which peasants were forced to use in exchange for payment of part of their produce. However, seigneurial subjects (or at least the most prosperous part of the population) were also active stakeholders, demanding and often obtaining favourable conditions for the use of resources which were necessary for the production of their daily bread. While levels of detail increased significantly, topics of negotiation remained remarkably constant throughout the period. After the mid-fourteenth century, neither the issues causing friction nor the nature of solutions shifted dramatically. Rather than centring on levels of seigneurial surplus extraction, conflicts focussed on day-to-day problems in the operation of ovens and mills, often resulting in mutual concessions. In the long run, seigneurial monopolies survived only as long as they benefitted both subjects and lords.

The article argues that medical responses to plague were a cause of the ‘psychoactive revolution’ during the long seventeenth century. Focusing on four metropoles in the Baltic and North Sea region, it shows that the commodification of sugar, opiates and tobacco during the last century of the Second Great Pandemic correlates both with outbreaks of plague in Amsterdam, Hamburg, London and Stockholm and with the intra-regional prescription of these intoxicants in popular and authorized plague physic. In so doing, it argues for the importance of household consumption practices in driving the psychoactive revolution and points to the importance of women as well as men in the popularization of intoxicants. By tracing the popularization of sugar, tobacco and opium from c.1600 rather than c.1800 and considering their dietary uptake in relation to material changes in plague physic, it identifies an under-appreciated set of consumer motives informing household consumption practices: not least the need to allay fear, pain and bodily and mental disorder. The article concludes by introducing the concept of ‘accustomization’ as the way in which contemporary observers explained how reactive consumption in the face of epidemics could become habitual, recreational and forms of dependency over time.

Commerce is not zero-sum. There are gains from trade. This insight grounded Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. This issue heralds the 250th anniversary of its publication. We consider its context, including influences such as David Hume and especially Smith’s own The Theory of Moral Sentiments.