In 1968, the British/Swedish architect Ralph Erskine published an article ‘Architecture and town planning in the north’ in this journal, in which he called for a particular Arctic approach to the design of buildings and cities that is distinct from mainstream architecture due to conditions such as harsh climate, resident indigenous or sparse population and remoteness. One hundred years after his birth (in 1914), Erskine is still considered the authoritative ‘Arctic architect’, and his approach is paradigmatic among many architects dealing with the built environment in the Arctic, sub-Arctic and northern regions.

However, a study of the literature on architectural practice and the built environment in the north reveals a number of varying conceptions of Arctic architecture. These different perspectives are social in nature and construct the architectural technologies, the natural environment and society in different configurations. This article finds that architectural discourses and readings of the Arctic change under the influence of social, cultural, political and architectural paradigms. The perspectives identified in the article are seen to be critical supplements to Erskine's utopian approach to developing new sustainable forms of urbanism and architecture in the Arctic. They also reveal that new conceptions do not necessarily replace previous ones but often overlap and place earlier ideas into fresh concepts and that certain conceptions appear to perpetuate over the decades, such as the Arctic as an ‘empty space’. The thinking on Arctic futures is, in many ways, trapped in certain modernist and utopian modes, and this article contributes to widening the range of possible relationships between people and the Arctic environment, using architecture as an aperture.

In 1664, in a letter to a friend, Spinoza shares a dream he had of a “black, scabby Brazilian.” At the historical moment of a fierce race among Europe’s colonial powers, when the Amsterdam Jewish community’s vested interests in the Dutch colonial enterprise have reached a formidable status, Spinoza’s dream reflects an early awareness of the postcolonial predicament. The dream figures this awareness as the moment of the awakening—inseparable from the imagining—of the modern subject. Although the dream has been discussed with regard to its significance for understanding the role of the imagination for Spinoza as well as the issues of freedom, slavery, and question of race, the paper addresses the specifically postcolonial juncture that Spinoza’s dream and the letter marks. Spinoza’s dream figures the philosopher’s awakening to the precarious status of the postcolonial subject position as recognition of the constitutive significance of the postcolonial constellation for the formation of modern awareness.

This article focuses on recent revisionist scholarship demonstrating that China's maritime history in the period 1500 to 1630 is no longer a case of ‘missed opportunity’, a viewpoint fostered by earlier writing dominated by state-centric and land-focused models. To challenge this perspective, this study first reviews analyses demonstrating the far-reaching commercial networks between Ming China and localities in Southeast and Northeast Asia, and then considers the impact of the metaphor of Fernand Braudel's ‘Asian Mediterranean’ and his ideas about ‘world economy’ on the study of East Asian seafaring history. Secondly, this investigation reveals the dimensions of Chinese trade networks which the mid-Ming government officially sanctioned, as well as the extent to which literati from the southern provinces challenged the state's involvement in overseas commerce of trade and exchange. Finally, the article assesses how modern historians have studied late Ming maritime defense policies as security along the littoral lapsed.