The Taiwan Incident of 1874 – a prolonged Sino-Japanese confrontation over the killing of Ryukyu castaways, whom Japan claimed as its subjects – marked the full maturation of a new mode of Qing war preparation. This mode was characterized by global coordination, domestic and international competition, and the swift mobilization of personal connections to secure foreign weapons and loans – resources that were often interconnected. Facilitated by the efforts of various actors, this internationalized approach became a standard practice during the empire’s final decades. As the empire could no longer rely on domestic self-sufficiency in arms and funding, Qing military operations came to reflect the broader influence of global military and financial resources. The Qing empire’s capacity to mobilize global resources in pursuit of national objectives helps explain its resilience in an era dominated by imperial powers.

The first international expositions appeal to the imagination and have an almost mythical status, but for most participating countries, they were just a form of good marketing. The prevailing idea in literature is that the expositions were platforms for nation-building undertaken by national governments. What is still lacking, however, is research into the intersection of urban, regional and national identities at these events, and the role of the city in this process. This article, which is part of the special issue Urban Tourism Promotion in Belgium and the Netherlands, addresses this gap by examining the presence of Belgian city pavilions at the expositions in Belgium between 1885 and 1958 through the lens of urban tourism promotion. By analysing the different groups involved in tourism promotion at these events, the article reveals that cities were not merely venues for large events, but also served as platforms for identity promotion through urban tourism promotion.

The American War for Independence scrambled the concept of political allegiance and belonging. In James H. Kettner’s apt phrase, “subjects became citizens.” Where British law denied the possibility that a subject could renounce the obedience owed to their sovereign, Americans asserted through force of arms “the right to choose their allegiance.”1 Influenced by a contractual notion of political compact and by the mayhem of a violent civil war, people shuffled and sometimes reshuffled into camps of revolutionaries, loyalists, and neutrals.2

This article examines media discourse about commuting travel time in Australia’s two largest metropolitan areas – Sydney and Melbourne – between 1970 and 2000. In major newspapers from each of the cities, reportage and commentary conveyed expanding commuting geographies oriented towards the mass pursuit of home ownership enabled by public policy and reflective of pluralism around households’ time use preferences. In a period when time use was widely understood as increasingly pressured, the choices available to households were frequently portrayed as responding to a wide range of opportunities but co-existed with discourses of market-driven compromise and consequences.

In this article, I examine the history of the concept of herd immunity, beginning with British epidemiologists in the 1920s and ending with the controversy surrounding it during the COVID-19 pandemic. I argue that competing historical and contemporary understandings of herd immunity reveal an underlying tension between observing the effects of infection-acquired herd immunity on the population dynamics of infectious diseases and actively cultivating it through immunisation. Originally offering an explanatory mechanism for the rise and fall of epidemics, the concept soon became entangled with strategies of disease control and technologies for producing immunity, particularly as mass vaccination became more common in the postwar era. This tension between observing herd immunity and cultivating it has produced diverse interpretations ranging from the temporary abatement of an outbreak due to the accumulation of infection-acquired immunity to the principle undergirding disease elimination through mass vaccination. I close by suggesting that the scientific debates and uncertainties regarding the relevance of herd immunity to public health strategies during the COVID-19 pandemic reflect this long-running tension between observing and cultivating immunity in populations.

In January 1852, as searches continued for Sir John Franklin’s missing Arctic expedition, large quantities of preserved (that is, canned) meats supplied to the Royal Navy were found putrid and caused concern that the expedition had received similar meats with fatal consequences. Whilst a Parliamentary enquiry concluded correctly that the expedition had received good-quality meats, it neglected the fact that some 5% of all canned meats were condemned on ships due to damage and corrosion. As the Franklin expedition would be no exception, the study applies recent evidence of the expedition’s victualling schedule to estimate the number of cans condemned by the time at Beechey Island when a decision would be made whether enough remained to sustain the mission. It also estimates the vitamin B1 (thiamine) content of the meat because high temperatures during canning would have degraded or destroyed that vitamin, and vitamin C, both being essential to health. Any reduction in general rations would add to the decline in the quality of the diet. The expedition’s unique circumstances of long entrapment without recourse to hunting to supplement such deficiencies, or to escape, would prove fatal regardless of the good quality of the canned provisions.

This article uses a legal dispute between two families over a small building in semi-rural Jiangsu, and the political scandal it led to during the Socialist Education Movement (1963–1966), as a lens through which to explore the Mao era legacies of two prominent themes in the historiography of late imperial China: concepts and practices of property and contract, and the use of false accusations to enlist the coercive power of the state in economic disputes. It argues that over the course of the 1950s, norms of ownership in rural China were gradually undermined. This went beyond what was intended by the Party leadership, and was followed, in 1961–1962, by an effort to stabilize the conventions of who could own what in socialist China. The article then goes on to consider how the pursuit of property claims through accusations of political crime in the Mao era compares to such practices in the late imperial period.

In this paper, I investigate how parents should talk to their children about injustice. In doing so, I use the non-ideal theory debate in political philosophy to show how the questions traditionally asked there can give substantive guidance to parents. I also contribute to that debate by showing how attention to injustice conversations (a) leads us to ask new questions and develop new modelling tools; (b) can help us to resolve the questions traditionally asked in the debate in a more direct way; and (c) can serve as a model for bringing together substantive and methodological questions in non-ideal theory.

In July 1939, Wang I-lü, a recent high school graduate, was reported to have fallen down a staircase while wearing high heels. The accident triggered heated public debates in Shanghai. Some condemned high heels as dangerous and decadent; others defended them, while Wang’s classmates denied Wang had ever worn them. Amid these conflicting voices, this article treats the death of Wang I-lü not as a question of forensic fact but as a historically situated event, one that maps the cultural trajectory of the high heel in modern China. Wang I-lü’s accident is indeed not an isolated incident: high-heeled women were frequently depicted falling down. The falling-down girl phenomenon encapsulates, as argued, a mixture of male affects, including fears of modernity, voyeuristic fascination, nationalist concerns, and the urge to control the female body. Meanwhile, women also held ambivalent attitudes toward high heels, though in different ways. They either regarded the high heel as a sign of vanity or employed it to negotiate visibility and identity. The high heel thus constitutes not only an object of foot fetishism, one that fuses Freudian male desire with Foucauldian biopolitical control, but also a thing utilized by women for imagining and enacting varied forms of womanhood, forms that were not necessarily resistant to men nor entirely emancipatory or conservative but rather responded to women’s own diverse circumstances.

This article discusses the changing tourist gaze on Amsterdam between the end of the nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth century. Based on travel guidebooks, the article analyses the increasing appreciation of buildings through time as a result of the growth and spread of architectural knowledge. Two different types of architecture are analysed: historic buildings, such as seventeenth-century canal houses and former harbour districts (in this period framed as ‘heritage’), as well as new architecture: the social housing projects and public buildings that were built between the 1920s and 1940s. By examining how architectural narratives were conveyed by guidebook writers, as well as following the path of knowledge transfer from the architectural profession towards the guidebook industry, this article offers an overview of the mechanisms behind architectural storytelling which enriches the understanding of sightseeing processes.