The Ming dynasty’s survival depended on locating and employing men with the ability to direct military forces, and contemporary observers were deeply concerned with the nexus of command, troop morale, and dynastic fighting capacity. This essay focuses on the years following the Tumu Crisis of 1449, a time when dynastic authorities were particularly alive to issues of military ability, and it draws on the perspectives of two men, the Minister of War, Yu Qian 于謙 (1398–1457), and another more junior official, Ye Sheng 葉盛 (1420–72). The essay offers a snapshot of how military ability was defined, cultivated, assessed, and rewarded. Further, it suggests that, read carefully, the writings of Ye Sheng and Yu Qian not only offer insight into the views of elite civil officials but also shed light, however faint and wavering, on military labor and working conditions for those who fought and commanded for a living.

The paper examines BBC television programmes that feature museum spaces of science and technology, contextualizing the development of this programme type in the 1950s and 1960s with science (and history-of-science) broadcasting. In 1971, the BBC televised a ten-part series devoted to UK science and technology museums. Within These Four Walls, the central case study, featured episodes filmed at the Natural History Museum, the National Maritime Museum, the Royal Institution and the Science Museum, among others; its televisual tour guides included prominent science broadcasters – Patrick Moore, George Porter and Eric Laithwaite – as well as curators and scholars of the history of science, such as Joseph Needham. The paper explores, using intermediality as an analytical category, how the museological conventions of curated gallery displays and tours have been adapted and transposed to television. In doing so, it reflects on the historiographies that emerge from this intermedial product (a series of televised museum tours), arguing that they should be interpreted in the cultural context of the early 1970s. It concludes that the presentation of historical authenticity through intermedial constructions of place, objects and performances conferred what Thomas Gieryn has dubbed ‘truth spots’ on history-of-science narratives for audiences.

This article examines the role of cooperatives and mutual aid societies in shaping the political agency of skilled workers in Second Empire France, with a particular focus on the reports drafted by Parisian trade delegates at the 1867 Universal Exposition. Moving beyond the historiographical dichotomy between respectability and resistance, the study posits that workers articulated a distinctive politics of dignity, an assertion of self-worth rooted in collective moral and social values rather than mere assimilation into the norms promoted by the dominant classes. The trade delegates placed strong emphasis on morality in their reports. However, this language was not just a strategy for social acceptance. Rather, it served as a means through which workers asserted an alternative hierarchy of values and challenged dominant power structures. In a context where the Second Empire sought to promote industrial capitalism and threatened customary trade regulations, workers’ associationism became a crucial vehicle for identity formation and collective action. As the economic and social landscape rapidly evolved, cooperatives and mutual aid societies, alongside civil rights advocacy and trade unionism, developed as interconnected strategies to secure spaces of autonomy and envision an alternative order where workers could lead dignified lives.

This article continues a long-term investigation into the nature of legislation, regulation, and administration across United States history. In contrast to persistent myths about an original American legal and political inheritance dedicated primarily to private rights, limited government, and laissez-faire economics, this article explores the earliest roots of American public rights, popular lawmaking, and regulatory policymaking. In the very first activities of revolutionary Provincial Congresses and Committees of Safety, this article locates a surprisingly robust template for the future development of American state police power, public provisioning, general-welfare legislation, and socio-economic regulation.

In the years immediately following World War II, California’s Santa Clara Valley was an agricultural breadbasket to the world. A mere 30 years later, the Santa Clara Valley would be known as ‘Silicon Valley’, and would be the most technologically productive region on the planet. This transition from an agricultural economy to an urbanized, technological economy came to be seen as curious, or even quaint. But in fact, this period of rapid suburban development out of an agricultural landscape laid the foundation for the housing and labour markets that came to characterize the contemporary Silicon Valley. This article reveals how the years following World War II set the stage for what Silicon Valley would become today. It argues that the roots of Silicon Valley’s current housing and labour system were based in the agricultural regime of the immediate post-World War II period and the subsequent Cold War economy.

In numerous climate litigation cases before national courts, plaintiffs have referred to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Kyoto Protocol, and/or the Paris Agreement to support their claims. So far, no systematic appraisal has been conducted on how national courts have responded to such references to international climate law and the extent to which they have engaged with it. This article examines 148 cases in which plaintiffs refer to international climate law, mapping and analyzing judgments of national courts that either avoid, align with, or contest this legal framework. The findings indicate that invoking international climate law is not an easy path to success, as courts often have opted to avoid engagement with claims based on international climate law. Yet, in several landmark cases, courts have aligned with international climate law, contributing to the advancement of the objectives of the Paris Agreement.

Kenya's first post-colonial government, under Prime Minister Jomo Kenyatta, came to power in December 1963 having adopted emergency powers and security legislation that had been used in the colonial suppression of the Mau Mau rebellion. Kenyan nationalists opposed this authoritarian and often draconian legislation in the 1950s for its abuses of human rights and excesses of state powers. This article explains how Kenya's nationalists came to accept and adopt this legislation, illiberal emergency powers becoming a key element in the protection of the fragile bureaucratic-executive state after 1963. An account is given of how colonial security officers used emergency powers in the counterinsurgency against the Mau Mau. In the decolonization process, the continuing activities of Mau Mau's Kenya Land and Freedom Army, the shifta secessionist movement in the Northern Frontier District, and political opposition from within the Kenya African National Union (KANU) party threatened Kenyan stability. To combat these challenges, colonial officers and nationalists alike agreed to retain colonial security laws, especially the Preservation of Public Security Ordinance. The legacies of colonial law therefore remain prominent in Kenya's security legislation and have been used as recently as 2023 to deal with perceived threats to the bureaucratic-executive state.

The International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL), founded in Paris in 1946 by a group of antifascist lawyers, has long been dismissed as a Soviet front organization. Yet, this characterization overlooks its complex and multifaceted history. This paper reassesses IADL’s first thirty years, exploring its origins, internal debates, and cross-border engagement. Drawing on archival records, this article argues that—despite a period of Communist influence—the IADL contributed to international legal and political discourse by advancing an original approach defined here as radical legal internationalism. Through this framework, IADL lawyers questioned Cold War ideological boundaries and brought into dialogue Communist, progressive, New Left, decolonial, and liberal rights traditions. The article also uncovers the IADL’s significant role in promoting international law and human rights through trial observation, UN advocacy, and missions of inquiry. In challenging the dominant account of the Left’s delayed and uneasy embrace of human rights, this article calls for a broader understanding of Cold War-era legal internationalism and highlights an alternative tradition of legal activism.

In total, 75,000 to 250,000 Asian civilians died building the Thailand-Burma Death Railway under Japanese military orders during the Second World War. Among these were women whose experiences remain overlooked or marginalized in histories about the Death Railway. This microhistory of the Kudo Butai war crimes trial draws on recent scholarship on the relational and structural aspects of victimization and agency to study the sexual abuse and broader experiences of women on the railway. It focuses on the experiences, strategic acts, and survival choices of the following women who appear in trial records: the nineteen-year-old orphan sexually tortured to death, “Siamese lady friends” of some defendants, and the Chinese dresser’s wife who helped POWs. By identifying the relational and structural conditions contributing to sexual violence on the railway, this study demonstrates that the overwhelming experience of women under Japanese military occupation was one of the widespread vulnerability to sexual violence.