Since the sex of the speaker is normally as obvious as can be, there is no point in coding first-person singular gender – or so it may seem. This typological study examines the extent of sex-based gender marking in personal pronouns, possessive determiners, predicative adjectives, and verbs across first-, second-, and third-person singular. A worldwide perusal of grammars in addition to data elicitation yields a total of 115 languages with first-person gender. The paradigms of pronouns and possessives are found to be highly inconsistent, whereas those of verbs show a tendency towards consistency. Gender marking on adjectives is fully consistent. The likelihood of first-person gender is increased by a general sensitivity to gender and a dedicated gender morpheme. A distinction is made between pronouns and possessives as referential units and gender markers on verbs and adjectives as grammatical units. By their very nature, referential markers are sensitive to the contingencies of the extralinguistic world and subject to communicative constraints such as redundancy and economy. They therefore end up being organized in inconsistent paradigms. By contrast, grammatical units are largely untouched by these extraneous influences and may therefore develop consistent paradigms.

Why did British politicians on both sides of the Atlantic propose a confederal rather than incorporating union in 1754? This question has been difficult to answer because most scholars have focused on the Albany Plan of Union outside of its imperial context, seeing in the plan either evidence of nascent American nationalism, a point of divergence between American and British conceptions of empire, or a missed moment to establish parliamentary supremacy over America. I show instead that the British and American plans for confederal union in 1754 formed part of an intensely partisan and pan-imperial debate about the nature of the British imperial constitution. The failure to adopt a confederal imperial constitution in 1754 had more to do with the contingency of the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War than with diverging British and American visions of empire or nascent American nationalism.

Focusing on South Korean biologists and their efforts to establish national parks in the 1960s and 1970s, I illuminate the ways in which they negotiated their relationship with the ecological diplomacy of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the anti-communist and developmentalist diplomacy of the South Korean government. To justify their activities, these South Korean biologists emphasized the importance of nature conservation activities in the competition for international recognition and economic development with their northern counterparts. The national-park initiative was thus subsumed into the politics of this legitimacy competition between the two Koreas, or what I call ‘victory-over-communism’ diplomacy. The IUCN's influence over South Korea was limited to the extent that both the government and scientists recognized the diplomatic merit they could gain in the context of their Cold War competition and developmentalism. It is also shown how, during the short detente period of the two Koreas, South Korean biologists used victory-over-communism diplomacy to renew their government's attention to their activities. This Korean episode contributes to the wider perspective of decentralizing the Cold War history of environmental diplomacy in the free-world bloc by illustrating the importance of its entanglement with the Cold War politics surrounding Asian developmentalism.

Imagery is an overarching feature of Maximus of Tyre’s Orations which has never been the subject of systematic investigation. This paper provides a starting point by focusing exclusively on medical imagery, one of the most pervasive and instrumental types of imagery in Maximus’ work that has gone entirely unnoticed in the literature to date. This paper shows that Maximus uses medicine (especially its scientific basis and historical development), the physician (e.g. his skill, provision and sensitivity towards the patient), the body (its physiology and workings) and notions of health and disease with considerable diversity and creativity, in ways that make his examples stand out in relation to earlier (Platonic) or contemporary applications of the medical parallel. It argues that the use of the medical imagery in the pedagogical context in which Maximus’ Orations were performed facilitated not just clarity but also concept formation and the shaping of a moral outlook as well as the familiarisation with the proper literary references and verbal and conceptual topoi for admission into the group of the educated elite. Another main thesis is that medical imagery valorises Maximus’ philosophical status and his claims to Imperial-period acculturation, thus functioning as a trademark for the rhetorical philosophy he wished to promote.

John A. Ryle was Britain’s first professor of Social Medicine. In the 1930s and 1940s, at the peak of his influence, he was a vigorous proponent of social medicine, then a relatively new, if contested, field. This article examines Ryle’s views and activities under three broad headings: What was social medicine? What were Ryle’s politics? Why prioritise medical education? We conclude with the apparent failure of the social medicine project, at least as envisioned by Ryle.

The Chanyuan Covenant of 1005 that ended decades of war between Song and Liao precipitated a new political model that, from the Song perspective, exchanged wealth, territory, and dynastic pride in return for peace along the northern frontier, civilian sovereignty over a long-dominant military class, and the replacement of a culture of arms with the love of books. That “Chanyuan Paradigm” survived the Qingli war of 1040–1044 with the Tangut Xi Xia, but was steadily overturned in the expansionist wars promoted by Shenzong and his sons from 1068 through the fall of the Northern Song in 1127. This article argues that the fragility of the Chanyuan-style peace did not stem from the aspirations of a revanchist emperor and his confidantes, but was rather the consequence of the intrinsic difficulties of maintaining peace in a world of new players, internecine political contests, and shifting geopolitical alliances that characterized the mid-eleventh century.

David Lewis is widely regarded as the philosopher who introduced the concept of common knowledge. His account of common knowledge differs greatly from most later accounts in philosophy and economy, with the central notion of his theory being ‘having reason to believe’ rather than ‘knowledge’. Unfortunately, Lewis’s account is rather informal, and the argument has a few gaps. This paper assesses two major attempts to formalise Lewis’s account and argues that these formalisations are missing a crucial aspect of this account. Therefore, a new reconstruction is proposed, which explicitly discusses ‘reasons’ and uses a logic inspired by justification logic.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, geologists created the International Geological Congress (IGC) to achieve the methodological and terminological uniformity that they thought their science lacked. Their desire to standardize their practice and their use of the conference to do so was neither new nor unique. Although late nineteenth-century international conferences have been recognized as important arenas of standardization, relatively little is known of the ways in which conferences organized standardization negotiations. This article aims to fill this gap by exploring how the IGC practically and socially organized standardization work. It appears that the session hall was not the sole and not even the main stage of geological standard-setting. The standardization process was also enacted through comparative study and informal exchanges that regular visits to purpose-built comparative geological exhibitions made possible. Relying on a sophisticated apparatus of commissions and subcommittees, the IGC also socially organized standards negotiation beyond the space and time of the triennial sessions. By tracing the material, spatial and social practices engineered through the IGC to serve geological standardization, this article unboxes the conference process and in so doing enriches our understanding of the period's wave of standardization.

In contrast to the well-known stories of the embryotoxic drug, thalidomide, in countries where it was responsible for large numbers of birth defects, there is limited information on its history in India. Its presence before 2002, when the country issued the first marketing licence for a thalidomide-containing preparation, is assumed to be negligible. This article challenges this view by showing that the drug entered the Indian subcontinent through the former Portuguese territory of Goa around 1960. We examine the subsequent development of its distribution, use and regulation in India from the mid-1960s up to the present situation. Colonial legacies are a crucial explanation for the early appearance of thalidomide on the Indian subcontinent. They also influenced its re-emergence as drug for treating leprosy reactions in India after 1965. We identify key actors in this process: the original German producer that delivered thalidomide free of charge, European doctors who worked for international non-governmental organizations, the World Health Organization (WHO), which supported clinical trials and later discouraged the use of the drug, and finally the Indian state institutions that limited its distribution and later quickly opened the way for the private sector to produce and market thalidomide and its analogues. Finally, we discuss the risk of thalidomide-induced birth defects by casting a critical look on the present state of regulatory provisions and the monitoring of birth defects in India.