Since merchants typically traded between towns, they had to cross legal boundaries on a regular basis. This article discusses one of the instruments they used in order to deal with the challenges of legal pluralism, namely the instalment of proxies. The proxy had to be recognized as a legitimate representative of another merchant and, for that purpose, he carried with him a procuration letter. These letters look remarkably similar considering that they were drafted in different towns across Europe. An analysis of the procurations shows that common rules and norms developed through the constant exchange between merchants and urban authorities.

This article explores peasant women’s labour activism in 1890s Hungary, in the southeastern part of the Habsburg Empire, where repeated harvesters’ strikes and peasant uprisings took place during the second half of the nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth centuries, making it the first centre of agrarian workers’ socialist organizing in Hungary. Informed by a more inclusive approach to women’s activist histories and subaltern studies, this article develops a new perspective on the periodization and geography of the international and Hungarian history of women’s social movements, to contribute to the historiographies of peasant women’s labour activism in the Eastern European countryside.

Using GDR dissident singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann's ‘Chile – Ballade vom Kameramann’ as a point of departure, this article explores the role that ‘revolutionary’ South America and its musical corollary, the Nueva Canción, played in expressions of inner-communist critique in 1970s East Germany. Biermann's critique was Janus-faced. Lyrically, the ‘Chilean’ allegory of his ballad, in which a cameraman is murdered by a soldier, expressed support for the Allende administration while simultaneously destabilizing Soviet Bloc rhetoric. Musically, references to Nueva Canción music such as that of singer-songwriter Daniel Viglietti represented the anti-imperialist Other while simultaneously rejecting GDR-style socialist realism. On the one hand, Biermann's inspiration in South America can be heard as a colonizing gesture; on the other, it can be understood to reflect a provincialized East German society looking to the Third World for alternative sociopolitical – and musical – models.

Lynchets, often the defining component of historic agricultural landscapes in northern Europe, are generally associated with soft-limestone geologies and are particularly well developed on loess-mantled landscapes. To understand their formation and chronology, the authors present their geoarchaeological analyses of lynchet soils and loess deposits at Blick Mead and Charlton Forest in southern England, and Sint Martens-Voeren in Belgium. The lynchets date from the late prehistoric to the medieval periods and were constructed by plough action at the English sites, and by both cut-and-fill and ploughing in Belgium. This has resulted in the preservation of highly fertile loessic soils across chalk slopes, lost elsewhere. Although each example is associated with local/regional agricultural histories, the lynchets’ effective soil-retention capacities allowed them to survive as important heritage features with environmental benefits over millennia.

This article begins by examining the historiography of Shanxi piaohao and asking how modernist financial discourse gradually took shape over the past century. It then counters the persistent modernist discourse and its anachronistic application to the history of piaohao and the north Chinese interior from two aspects. First, how piaohao managed to build an empire-wide financial network and facilitated flows of capital and goods during the nineteenth century. Second, how family-centered capitalist and non-capitalist histories countered piaohao's unrealized path to modern Western-style banking. This article challenges the perceived universalism of the Western European economy and adopts a Braudelian emphasis on an essential feature of the history of capitalism in a global context—that is, capitalism's unlimited flexibility and capacity for change and adaptation, as seen throughout the history of the Shanxi merchants and piaohao firms, not confined to the singular future of transformation into modern Western-style banks.

The main question of this special issue is how international traders were able to manage their activities and conflicts successfully when they regularly had to cross legal boundaries and were operating in different and overlapping jurisdictions in northern Europe in the period c. 1350–1600. The contributions in this issue approach this central question from a range of perspectives. This introduction identifies these perspectives, as well as common themes and findings, and indicates why it is particularly pertinent to discuss the topic of crossing legal boundaries in the context of urban history. It also discusses relevant historiographical debates and key concepts of urban jurisdiction and jurisdictional boundaries in late medieval northern European towns.

The article analyses the legal position of foreign visitors in late medieval Stockholm through the prism of the concept of legal certainty, which requires public, explicit and clear regulations, an institutionalized jurisdiction and equal, just and impartial judgments in court. The article concludes that the authorities in Stockholm strove to create legal certainty for foreign guests and that the regulated relationship between local hosts and visiting guests both provided a control mechanism for the authorities and security for the guests.

This article seeks to rethink the nature and significance of the fortnightly magazine Private Eye during its first two decades. Existing accounts have interpreted it almost exclusively through the lens of the “satire boom” (1961–63), and suggest that, in the final analysis, the magazine neither desired nor advanced any substantial critique of the political status quo. Besides neglecting its investigative facets, among other elements, these readings make the mistake of seeking to frame the significance of the magazine in conventional ideological terms. This article puts these neglected elements back into the picture and argues that the magazine is best understood as enacting a militant form of the kind of cynicism—at once outrageous and morally outraged—analyzed by Peter Sloterdijk and Michel Foucault, and other scholars in their wake. This provides a much more satisfying account of the many facets of Private Eye as these evolved during the 1960s and 1970s, including its affinities with various currents in postwar journalism and countercultural expression. Above all, it allows us to recast the politics of Private Eye as a form of moral protest that was expressed in the assumption of an intrinsically antagonistic relation toward “politics” and authority per se.

This article investigates the dealings of the Aberdeen courts with foreign merchants and mariners to determine whether special policies, laws or procedures were introduced by magistrates administering justice to parties from different international backgrounds, and whether the merchants themselves developed specific strategies to negotiate crossing legal boundaries in the Scottish context. It concludes that there were few restrictions on the ability of foreigners to receive a fair process before the Aberdeen courts, a conclusion which must be considered in the context of the importance of trade for the men making the decisions at the urban courts, and for Scottish society more generally.