David Benatar's asymmetry argument in defense of anti-natalism is unconvincing, but not, as most of his critics would have it, because the alleged asymmetry on which it is based does not exist. Rather, the problem is that the existence of that asymmetry does not warrant the conclusion that it is better never to have been. This paper explains Benatar's mistake and identifies the correct conclusions to draw from the axiological asymmetry he identifies. It also sheds light on certain puzzles in population ethics.

Research has found that affirming national identity can encourage the public’s trust toward a foreign adversary. On the other hand, aggressor states have attempted to recategorize identity by promoting a superordinate identity that includes both aggressor and defender states. In comparison with national identity affirmation, we test how effective emphasis of a common identity might be in the context of Russia-Ukraine and evaluate the scope conditions under which such a strategy may backfire. We propose that the effectiveness of the two identity affirmation approaches should differ across people with varying levels of national chauvinism. We expect that high-in-chauvinism individuals will experience more worldview-conflict when exposed to promotion of superordinate identity. Experimental findings on Ukrainians’ trust toward Russia in 2020 suggest a policy that emphasizes a common identity can backfire among highly chauvinistic Ukrainians in the Western region. This indicates that recategorizing one’s nation as a member of a larger group may fuel resistance among individuals with a sense of nationalistic superiority. By contrast, highlighting Ukrainian national identity boosted trust toward Russia even among the more chauvinistic respondents in the Southeastern region. This study helps identify the scope conditions of identity affirmation as a way to increase trust in international relations.

In this article, I defend the view that the Northern Ireland Troubles can usefully be described as an ethnic conflict. I critically examine two manifestos on this subject, those by Richard Bourke and Simon Prince respectively, which rest on misrepresentations of the scholarship on Northern Ireland. The issues raised by these historians are relevant to the historiography of nationalism and the study of civil war. I focus on the coincidence of religious affiliation and political allegiance in Ulster and the mechanisms by which patterns of conflict have been reproduced over time, suggesting several reasons why historians and political scientists have turned to the notion of ethnicity to describe the persistence of antagonism in the North of Ireland. In the final section, focusing on the loyalist agitator John McKeague, I argue that the literature on ethnicity helps historians to understand the outbreak of the Northern Ireland conflict better than does the singular concentration on democratic ideas recommended by Bourke and Prince.

Almamy Maliki Yattara, en sa double qualité de traditionniste et d’arabisant, fut chargé par l’Institut des Sciences Humaines de Bamako d’accompagner W. A. Brown pendant ses recherches. Dans ses Mémoires, Yattara a laissé sur leurs enquêtes un témoignage saisissant, où transparaissent l’estime et la complicité existant entre deux personnes venues d’horizons si différents. On y voit également comment les curiosités et les approches du chercheur ont pu être influencées par les positionnements de son guide. Yattara décrit longuement leur quête des manuscrits arabes locaux qu’ils photographiaient inlassablement, dans un domaine de recherche où Brown joua un rôle de pionnier.

This article argues that South Koreans' anti-Japanism in the post-liberation period can be regarded as an ideological construction, which was inevitably required to reshape their national identity, rather than as a reasonable and serious critical consideration of colonial Japan. Anti-Japanism functions as an identification framework in an era when Koreans needed to develop a new discourse which reflects the rapid politico-socio-cultural changes of that period. Under military control of the United States and the Soviet Union, Koreans made Japan the other in a number of ways in order to unite their nation state and national identity, relying specifically on racial difference and hierarchy. First, Korean intellectuals, who once cooperated with colonial Japan in the political sphere or in their ordinary lives, explicitly revealed their anti-Japanese sentiments in their writings right after liberation. Second, after liberation, anti-Japanism emerged from a process that Koreans would exploit, after demarcating the moral difference between themselves and the remaining Japanese migrants, to exclude the Japanese from their community. Finally, anti-Japanism in the post-liberation period can be detected in Koreans' tenacious attitude, as they tacitly restricted the articulation of filial or cultural hybridity with the Japanese people in order to reconfigure their national identity.

Many writers of political economy in the 1660s and 1670s agreed that there were too many clergy and divinity students in England. This surplus of ministers and aspiring clerics, they argued, would better contribute to the public if they worked as productive laborers in agriculture and manufacturing. The question of whether preaching constituted labor had been a contentious theological debate in the late years of the Interregnum, and the proposals advanced by commentators like William Petty and Edward Chamberlayne to put ministers to other work assumed that clergy were comparable to profane professionals who labored for their keep. This article traces how this fraught question continued to confront schemes of political economy that otherwise sought to avoid religious controversy. In the 1670s, Christopher Wase responded to calls to limit clergy and free schools with an innovative survey and arguments drawn from empirical evidence, scriptural exegesis, and economic principles. Wase was one among other contemporaries who assigned a productive place for learning despite its irreducibility to a form of labor. His efforts thereby elevated the status of the clergy on a foundation of economic premises arrived at through engagement in theological debate.

University sport was less developed in Italy than in other European countries in the first decades of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, in April 1922, students from the University of Rome organised a national multi-sport event, which they called the Olimpiadi Universitarie (University Olympic Games). Many eminent figures of the ruling class supported the initiative and thousands of undergraduates participated in the competitions. The Olimpiadi Universitarie also had an important international impact and facilitated the establishment of the International University Games, which were held from 1924 to 1939. The Olimpiadi Universitarie were based on a patriotic-educational concept of sport and played a significant role in spreading physical activities in Italian universities. Additionally, they promoted the idea of sport that in the following years would be accepted by the Fascist regime. The regime developed university sport enormously, but replaced the autonomous initiative of students with control from above.

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth century witnessed a dramatic increase in the number of pauper lunatics being admitted to institutions and many mentally-ill paupers found their way into workhouses. The range of options existing for the admission of paupers, who at the time were described as lunatics or insane, included private madhouses, charitable asylums, public asylums as well as workhouses. Legislation relating to transfer from a workhouse to a one of these other institutions was ambiguous and depended on the concept of dangerousness and whether a workhouse inmate was manageable, rather than the nature of their illness. Because demand exceeded the space available because of overcrowding, workhouses and public asylums continually needed to increase provision by means of converting existing facilities or erecting new buildings. Nevertheless, the transfer of patients between asylums was commonplace and extensive. This article will explore the interface between two urban workhouses in the West Midlands of England and their local asylums from the late eighteenth until the end of the nineteenth century. It will demonstrate that, although local circumstances at any one time may have contributed to decisions on transfer, the overriding difficulty in the correct placement of pauper lunatics throughout the time period was institutional overcrowding, mainly driven by the increasing numbers of pauper lunatics.

Nineteenth-century physicians increasingly favoured leeching – the placing of a live leech onto a patient’s skin to stimulate or limit blood flow – as a cure for numerous ailments. As conviction in their therapeutic properties spread, leech therapy dominated European medicine; France imported over fifty million leeches in one year. Demand soon outpaced supply, spawning a lucrative global trade. Over-collection and farming eventually destroyed leech habitats, wreaked environmental havoc and forced European merchants to seek new supply sources. Vast colonies of leeches were found to inhabit the immense wetlands of the Ottoman Empire, which soon became a major exporter of medicinal leeches. Following the Treaty of Balta Liman (1838), the Ottoman state moved to exert control over the lucrative trade, imposing a tax on leech gathering and contracting with tax-farmers (mültezim) to collect the taxes. British diplomats, merchants and other stakeholders protested the imposition of the tax, as had previously happened with the commodification of wildlife; their pursuit of profit led collectors and farmers to over-gather leeches, with catastrophic consequences. By the end of the century, so great had their worth climbed that the leech population faced extinction. This paper situates medicinal leeches as therapeutic actors of history and adopts an interscale approach in formulating the human-leech interaction. It offers a substantive contribution to the history of medicine, in revealing the centrality of leeches to the rise of modern medicine and global trade, but also by making visible their role in shaping imperial diplomacy and worldwide economic markets.

The theory that the people of the early modern period slept in well-defined segments of ‘first’ and ‘second’ sleeps has been highly influential in both scholarly literature and mainstream media over the past twenty years. Based on a combination of scientific, anthropological and textual evidence, the segmented sleep theory has been used to illuminate discussions regarding important aspects of early modern nocturnal culture; mainstream media reports, meanwhile, have proposed segmented sleep as a potentially ‘natural’ and healthier alternative to consolidated blocks of sleep. In this article, I re-examine the scientific, anthropological and early modern literary sources behind the segmented sleep theory and ask if the evidence might support other models of early modern sleep that are not characterised by segmentation, while acknowledging that construction of such models is by nature limited and uncertain. I propose a more diverse range of interpretations of early modern texts related to sleep, with important implications for medical and social history and literary scholarship.

The essays in this forum demonstrate how attending to the intricacies of documentary practice provides a way to see legal practices over the long haul. Different materials—for instance, paper and palm leaves—manifested different ways of understanding and doing law. But change from one way of doing law to another is sticky; old practices persist alongside new ones. Appreciating this helps us see past apparent ruptures in ways of living brought about by states and empires as they come and go. By looking closely at the routines and physical materials through which law works, we can look past simple binaries: European vs. indigenous; pre-colonial vs. colonial; resistance vs. accommodation; oral vs. literate; manuscript vs. print; paper vs. palm leaf.

The fear of the malingering soldier or veteran has existed in Australia since its first nationwide military venture in South Africa. The establishment of the Repatriation Department in 1917 saw the medical, military and political fields work collectively, to some extent, to support hundreds of thousands of men who returned from their military service wounded or ill. Over the next decades the medical profession occasionally criticised the Repatriation Department’s alleged laxness towards soldier recipients of military pensions, particularly those with less visible war-related psychiatric conditions. In 1963 this reached a crescendo when a group of Australian doctors drew battle lines in the correspondence pages of the Medical Journal of Australia, accusing the Repatriation Department of directing a ‘national scandal’, and provoking responses by both the Minister for Repatriation and the Chairman of the War Pensions Assessment Appeal Tribunal. Although this controversy and its aftermath does allow for closer investigation of the inner workings of the Repatriation Department, the words of the doctors themselves about ‘phony cronies’, ‘deadbeats’ and ‘drongoes’ also reveal how the medical fear of the malingering soldier, and particularly the traumatised soldier-malingerer, lingered into the early 1960s and beyond. This paper will analyse the medical conceptualisation of the traumatised soldier in the 1960s in relation to historical conceptions of malingering, the increasingly tenuous position of psychiatry, as well as the socio-medical ‘sick role’, and will explore possible links with the current soldier and veteran suicide crisis in Australia.