This article examines the development of colonial public culture in Batavia, the capital of the Dutch East Indies, over the second half of the nineteenth century, focusing on two moments of extended colonial ceremony: the city’s 250th anniversary in 1869 and the inauguration of Queen Wilhelmina in 1898. The analysis shows that over the course of the century, colonial ceremonial increasingly sought to assimilate facets of local cultural practices, while also expanding spatially into a more diverse set of neighbourhoods. Nevertheless, this new and superficially more representative order still maintained a strict internal hierarchy embedded in spatial and socio-cultural boundaries.

This article explores the social history of Sandakan and Jesselton (Kota Kinabalu) by studying how their urban environments were organized and navigated. Although the neighbourhood was not officially recognized as a category of space, it argues that analogous quarters existed within the towns during the early twentieth century. As the commercial capitals of British North Borneo, the towns contained migrant people of various ethnicities that formed separate communities. The socio-spatial boundaries of these quarters were nevertheless permeable, enabling cross-communal interactions. Life in Sandakan and Jesselton was characterized by a contingency and complexity suitable for comparison with larger colonial cities.

This essay takes as its point of departure the so-called ‘Verdi A’, 432Hz. From the late 1860s through to the 1880s, the opera composer was intensely preoccupied with the question of tuning, weighing in several times on the matter of where A should sit. Verdi was concerned for the strain that high tunings should place on singers’ voices. He advocated on multiple occasions for global acceptance of an A well below 440, and sent Arrigo Boito to argue in favour of A=432 at the Congresso dei Musicisti Italiani, held in Milan on 16–21 June 1881. In the 1880s, Italy remained one of the only nations in Europe that had not adopted equal temperament wholesale for fixed-tone instruments; as in the case of its spoken languages during this same period, and the locations of its A, temperament varied by region, with the southern part of the peninsula clinging to meantones. This article argues that ‘Verdi tuning’ represents the end point of a number of longer shifts in the conceptualization of musical sound, particularly in the Italian context: from temperament to tuning (accordatura); from relative conceptions of musical pitch to an absolute one; from local and regional variations towards a standardized system; from an older notion of all-encompassing nature to a presumed separation between nature and culture. Tracing this history through the Italian long nineteenth century will involve concentrating on what this article calls music-adjacent sound: that is, interrogative play with musical pitch; sound experiments from musical materials and operatic voices; instrument tuning by ear; listening for overtones; legislating preferred ratios and (eventually) frequencies for musical use; and constructing a theory of music that draws together these means of sounding. Music-adjacent sound is where the conditions for music-making were and still are established. This article argues that an attention to these sonic and nearly musical moments can demonstrate how listening and the musical imagination were cultivated outside the boundaries of any work or performance.

In this article, I argue that the musical landscape in Panama during the nineteenth century was much more active, diverse and globally connected than previously observed by authors of traditionally accepted music historiography of the country. Particularly, I discuss the heightened activity in the second half of the century through primary sources concerning violinist Miguel Iturrado (d. 1879). I further argue that the violin culture fostered by Iturrado and his contemporaries became a solid platform for cultural exchange which allowed for the development of early-twentieth-century music production in Panama. I conclude that the flourishing of numerous fin-de-siècle concert violinists, as well as the advent of the violinist-composers of dance music now known as the Azuero School in the first third of twentieth-century Panama, are directly related to Iturrado’s –and his colleagues’– musical and cultural achievements.

This article reappraises the early intellectual formation of the medieval “lex mercatoria” thesis: the idea that the international merchants of medieval Europe (or perhaps beyond) enjoyed a universal, autonomous, and customary body of commercial law created and administered by themselves. The debate over its existence, raging for at least 120 years, shows no signs of slowing, in part because the idea is of undoubted usefulness to both proponents (so-called “mercatorists”) and critics. The article offers a new account of the origins of this idea and looks to disaggregate different mercatorist conceptions. Revising the conventional genealogy that traces the theory through the work of Berthold Goldman to the nineteenth-century German scholar Levin Goldschmidt, who is much misunderstood in Anglophone scholarship, it argues that the idea’s powerful re-emergence in the second half of the twentieth century was mediated through two distinct channels, one centred around the British-German jurist Clive Schmitthoff and the other around the British historian William Mitchell. The latter yoked Goldschmidt’s emphasis on the medieval merchant class as a source of legal innovation to a thoroughly Anglophone concept: the “law merchant”. Critics, however, have engaged primarily with Schmitthoff’s conception, whose “strong” mercatorist argument was not only unusually forthright but reoriented the debate to focus on commercial law’s supposed autonomy from the law of territorial states, an even less plausible proposition in historical terms.

Arnaldo Tamayo Méndez, the first Cuban, Latin American, and person of African descent to travel to space, has experienced a significant evolution in his persona since his historic flight aboard Soyuz 38 in 1980. This article explores three pivotal phases in this transformation: first, his portrayal in the media as a pioneering Cuban cosmonaut, which positioned him among the socialist elite of the Space Age; second, the controversy regarding the identity of the first Black person in space, which brought renewed attention to Tamayo’s achievements; and third, the ongoing reconfiguration of his image through social-media platforms, allowing for broader engagement with diverse audiences. By applying the principles of persona analysis to a multilinguistic set of historical documents and images related to Tamayo, this study illustrates the malleability of his self-fashioning for different audiences and how it has adapted to reflect changing sociopolitical contexts and the evolving landscape of public representation in the digital age.

This article explores the dynamics of urban peripheries in Mandate Palestine, focusing on the Jewish neighbourhoods of Bat Galim in Haifa and HaTikvah near Tel Aviv and Jaffa. It argues that the social and geographical isolation of these peripheries created a dual dynamic: strengthening bonds within the neighbourhood communities while also giving rise to significant conflicts, both within the Jewish society and in Jewish–Arab relations. Drawing on archival sources, letters and interviews, the research examines resident agency, social tensions and inter-communal interactions, demonstrating how these peripheries shaped urban society and culture under British colonial rule through processes of separation and connection.

This article focuses on the poster child of grammaticalization, be going to V. First expressing ‘motion with intention’, in Early Modern English the construction came to signify ‘motionless intention’. The grammaticalization process continued in Late Modern English with subjectification, so that ‘intention’ was gradually replaced by ‘prediction’. We study the process from Late Modern to Present-Day English in the 200-million-word fiction section of the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA), 1810–2009, for which we have gender metadata on the authors. We focus on the productivity of the construction by comparing type frequencies, i.e., the number of different verbs following be going to. Our research questions are how the grammaticalization is reflected in the productivity of the construction, and whether the social factor of gender played a role in the process. We study the internal factors of mental verbs, inanimate subjects and passive voice; to this end, we use robust statistical methods to compare type frequencies and proportions of types over time. We also investigate the semantics of the verb types by drawing on techniques from distributional semantics. Our wider aim is to enrich the cognitively oriented theory of Construction Grammar with insights from historical sociolinguistics.

The Saami Council, founded in 1956, is one of the oldest Indigenous-led international organisations in the world. Despite this, its role and place on the world stage have been seldom examined, as has the place of internationally facing Indigenous Peoples’ Organisations more broadly. Using the organisation’s historical documents, among other sources, this article constructs a historic case study of the Saami Council from its founding in 1956 until the year 2000 to examine how it has evolved during this period and to better understand its standing within the greater international community. As the study discusses, since its inception, the organisation has evolved into an example of an Indigenous-led diplomatic organisation – one that came about through the changing political climate of the 1970s and solidified in the late 1990s. This evolution has implications for how we understand Indigenous-led advocacy and the role of non-state actors in international relations.

The article is concerned with contemporary changes in the spatialization of the Russian-Finnish borderland as an example of re-bordering politics. The main material is a long-term ethnographic study in the territory of former Finnish Karelia, ceded by Finland to the Soviet Union following World War II. By extending the historical context of bilateral relations between the USSR (later Russia) and Finland, the article questions the implications of changing international relations regimes for situational forms of borderwork. The article contributes to the debate on contemporary border practices and the contradictory effects of foreign diplomacy by combining institutional and situational approaches to border territoriality and by focusing on border memory and heritage as resources of local identity and instruments of soft power. Examining the successive shifts of de- and re-bordering regimes in the Russian-Finnish borderlands from the late Soviet period to the present, the article demonstrates the unforeseen impact of foreign relations on local life and memory.

This article explores a unique case of Jewish–Muslim cohabitation in colonial Algeria: the harat in the town of Sétif. Families from different religious communities shared communal facilities, private spaces and everyday activities in these housing complexes. At the same time, these neighbours arrived in the city under different historical conditions, possessed different legal statuses and occupied different positions in colonial society. Through a study of the setting, architecture and oral traditions of the harat, this article shows that being neighbours in colonial Algeria fostered a locally grounded sense of cohesion in an age when abstract forms of belonging gained ground.

This article explores the relationship between ethnic diversity and intermarriage in Vojvodina, Serbia, a highly diverse region with a history of shifting political landscapes. Unlike many studies focusing on migration, this research examines autochthonous settings from a quantitative perspective, offering insights into how diversity and intermarriage intersect locally. Findings indicate that greater ethnic diversity is generally associated with higher interethnic marriage rates within sub-regions. However, these rates have not always paralleled changes in diversity, especially during disruptions like the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. The study reveals that declining diversity tends to reduce intermarriage by creating more homogeneous marriage markets, while intermarriages may also―albeit intermittently, under specific political circumstances, and indirectly―influence diversity trends. Results highlight small social distances and permeable ethnic boundaries among Vojvodina’s ethnic groups, though significant ethnic asymmetries remain. This study contributes to understanding the dynamics of diversity and interethnic relations, specifically through marriage, within national minority contexts.

This article provides a Construction Grammar (CxG) analysis of the Complex Modifier Construction (CMC) in English and an investigation of its productivity in World Englishes with a particular focus on African and South-East Asian Englishes. By examining data from the Corpus of Global Web-based English (GloWbE), we seek to establish whether the productivity of the construction correlates with the developmental phase of the variety of English in Schneider’s Dynamic Model of Postcolonial Englishes, or whether language contact, and particularly the typological profiles of the local substrate languages (head-initial versus head-final syntax), affects productivity. We find that evolutionary progress is indeed a relevant factor insofar as the most advanced ‘Inner Circle’ varieties are concerned, but we also observe substantially lower productivity in the African varieties of English when compared to the South-East Asian Englishes represented in the corpus. As the main substrate languages in the African countries under study have head-initial syntax and those in the South-East Asian countries head-final syntax, we conclude that the productivity of complex premodifiers is affected by the multilingual situation in these regions and propose that language contact should be considered more closely as an explanatory factor in future studies of constructional productivity in World Englishes.