Samuel Lebens argues that we may understand God’s act of creation by analogy with an author’s creation of fictional characters. I argue that, in the relevant sense of ‘fictional characters’, authors do not create such beings; rather, they invite us to imagine that such beings exist. I also argue that Lebens’s view would make authorship morally problematic in implausible ways. Along the way I briefly offer an account of the being of fictional characters and consider the relations between truth-in-fiction and truth.

This article examines the emigration of impoverished Azoreans and Madeirans to Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) and the British West Indies (BWI), especially British Guiana, in the nineteenth century, driven by the demand for labour following the prohibition of the slave trade in Brazil and emancipation in the BWI. It explores the shared causes of these migratory flows, migrants’ living and working conditions, and the efforts of Portuguese authorities to distinguish their labourers from other colonized peoples. Drawing on Brazilian and Portuguese archives, as well as secondary sources on the Portuguese in the British West Indies, this transnational study situates Portuguese islanders within the broader labour experiments of the nineteenth century.

This article examines the many afterlives of the Tendaguru Expedition—a 1909–13 fossil excavation in the colony of German East Africa that unearthed the tallest mounted dinosaur in the world, still on display in Berlin. The long process of dinosaur assembly, which took more than three decades, meant that the Tendaguru project effectively outlived the German empire. Accounts of the expedition alongside the dinosaur exhibitions served as attempts to both theorize prehistoric life and write a history of the empire in terms compatible with the many twentieth-century German regimes that followed. These (re)negotiations of Tendaguru were reckoned with an ever-growing list of lost worlds: the prehistoric, the imperial, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, and the postwar Germanies. At stake in these dinosaur stories was not merely the progress of some neutral, apolitical, or abstract paleontological science but rather national pride, international authority, civilizational superiority, and imperial legitimacy.

On 18 June 2024, a fire devastated Block D of the Barbados Department of Archives (BDA), destroying irreplaceable local governance and health records. This disaster underscores the fragility of Caribbean archives, which face chronic underfunding, aging infrastructure, and climatic threats such as humidity, pests, and mold. Barbados’s documentary heritage is dispersed across local and global repositories. While digitization offers improved access, it cannot replace original records and introduces new risks of technological obsolescence and cost barriers. Post-pandemic, the BDA fire and closures of other local repositories disrupted research access for over a year, reminding us that archives need to be accessible for safeguarding national memory and governance. This article places the BDA fire within a larger context of regional vulnerabilities and examines policy gaps in disaster risk reduction (DRR) for Small Island Developing States (SIDS) in archives management. It argues for integrated strategies that balance modernization with conservation, prioritize cultural heritage in national planning, and strengthen collaboration among professional heritage managers in galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAM). Sustained investment and transparent reporting are essential to protect and manage Barbados’s archives.

This article discusses the University of Kansas’s Kenneth Spencer Research Library as an unexpectedly rich resource for British and Irish studies. The library’s location in Lawrence, Kansas, at a distance from the coastal research corridors, means that its collections tend to be underexplored, despite their significance. Spencer Library’s strength in eighteenth-century British imprints is complemented by extensive manuscript holdings. Among these are several centuries of estate papers for Britain’s prominent North family, and manuscripts documenting the Asiento (agreement) and England’s trade in supplying captive Africans to Spanish colonies in the Americas in the papers of Arthur Moore. Particularly noteworthy is the library of writer, civil servant, and Irish nationalist P. S. O’Hegarty, which offers scholars an unparalleled resource for Anglo-Irish relations and Irish history, culture, and politics. O’Hegarty’s collecting of scarce and ephemeral material, on the one hand, and books with significant provenance, on the other, makes his library a valuable resource for researchers even in an age of digitized text.

This study proposes a new qualitative method in historical pragmatics to extract politeness formulae for master-servant directives from nineteenth-century French advice literature. Whereas traditional politeness models study strategic face-saving, this study investigates non-strategic, routinized or conventionalized politeness by mapping explicit linguistic instructions in historical prescriptive metasources. Because etiquette and conduct books targeted middle-class households – typically defined as having at least one live-in servant – they routinely discussed interactions with servants. The self-built corpus comprises 43 sources: etiquette and conduct manuals, alongside servant manuals. Through close reading I manually extract politeness formulae, which are compiled into a formulary. Historians underline servants’ harsh conditions and social erasure, typically mirrored by bare imperatives. Advice on a kind prosody is widespread, but politeness formulae (e.g. voulez-vous? – je vous prie) only emerge in the 1870s, when the crisis of domestic service begins. This shift suggests that domestic service was increasingly viewed in transactional rather than purely hierarchical terms. Despite these changes, master-servant, servant-master and peer directives remain rigidly compartmentalized. The article addresses a notable gap in French historical im/politeness studies by showing how politeness formulae in prescriptive discourse reveal the persistence of caste-like social structures in nineteenth-century French domestic service.

While climate adaptation has been widely viewed as a local problem, more national government strategies are also needed to achieve more favorable policies. We seek to direct attention to the impacts of national government adaptation policies on attitudes of vulnerable citizens. Specifically, we argue that responses to different forms of climate disaster, such as flooding (as opposed to drought), can more readily reduce citizens’ trust in government. Examining extreme weather victim views in Guatemala, one of the world’s most vulnerable nations, we consider differences in the impacts of flood-related extreme weather and drought-related extreme weather. Using a 2023 national survey with flood and drought over-samples, we show that flood zone respondents, especially those reporting firsthand climate impacts, have a more negative view of government adaptation performance than those suffering “slow harms” droughts which respondents did not as readily attribute to climate change.

This work explores the travels of Ugandan Enoch Olinga, as an example of a person who enjoyed connections with global minorities across national boundaries and as a unique lens into the Black international experience in the mid-twentieth century. I examine his internationalist experiences through the lens of emotions to emphasize different dynamics of global racial identities and transnational diasporic connections during the 1950s–1970s, an era of decolonization and civil rights movements. I argue that Olinga, a prominent Baha’i who traveled worldwide during this era, advocated for unification among global minorities by emphasizing common racial and cultural heritages and expansive concepts of a politicized kinship. Through the Baha’i Cause, he articulated his own ideas about striving for global harmony and racial unity, with a connection to Africa serving as the linchpin. Emotional analysis provides insights into how Olinga invoked diverse notions of family and kin to arouse particular emotions amongst people of color both within and beyond the unity offered by the Baha’i Faith.

There has been growing public interest in traditional cheese production and consumption over the past decade, in contrast to the 1990s and 2000s, when food safety regulations excluded traditional cheesemakers from Turkey’s dairy commodity chains. This article focuses on two cheeses, Kars Kaşarı and Boğatepe Gravyeri, designated in 2015 with national Geographical Indication and international Slow Food Presidium labels. Drawing on archival and long-term ethnographic research, we trace the historical trajectory of commercial dairying in Kars and its articulation and disarticulation within national and international commodity chains. Against the backdrop of twentieth-century transformations, we investigate how place-based labels have contested neoliberal agricultural policies that imposed industrialization and standardization on the dairy sector. We argue that the re-articulation of Kars in the 2010s relied on community development and collective action, and practices negotiating between tradition and standardization to establish new conventions of quality. This article conceptualizes re-articulation as a transformative socio-ecological process rather than a simple reversal of disarticulation. It demonstrates how peripheral regions re-enter markets through locally negotiated strategies balancing standardization, authenticity, and solidarity. It also foregrounds material and ecological relations, recognizing the agency of non-human elements – such as pastures and artisanal tools – in shaping value and quality.

Some of the most fundamental questions in linguistic theory concern grammatical architecture. Focusing on morphosyntax specifically, how many components are ‘morphosyntactic’ phenomena distributed over, and how do they divide up their labor? Answers differ: some versions of Distributed Morphology posit a rich postsyntactic morphological component, whereas Morphology-as-Syntax approaches sharply reduce its role. Against that backdrop, this article investigates theme vowels, which are often analyzed as purely morphological (nonsyntactic). A diagnostic is introduced for their derivational origin, based on the narrow-syntactic phenomenon of lexical selection (L-selection): if a theme vowel is L-selected (to the exclusion of others) by a higher head, it must be in the narrow syntax; otherwise, the test is inconclusive. The former situation obtains in Latin: in synthetic causatives, fac- ‘make’ can be immediately preceded by -ē/-e but no other theme vowel. An analysis is developed on which theme vowels are syntactic and hence L-selectable. Alternative analyses on which theme vowels realize dissociated nodes added postsyntactically fail empirically or become notational variants of the syntactic analysis, since they must give theme vowels narrow-syntactic featural ‘precursors’. Theme vowels, then, are syntactic, introduced by (External) Merge. Insofar as dissociated-node insertion can be replaced with Merge, suspicious theoretical duplications are avoided, in line with minimalist goals.

This paper examines Ballard’s narrow pro-theistic argument for the claim that a world created by God would possess more bestowed worth than a world not created by God. I argue that not only could the world have just as much bestowed worth were it not created by God, but it could possibly have more.

The question of unity between Egypt and Sudan has received extensive scholarly attention, with most studies focusing on the monarchy’s efforts to preserve both polities as a single geopolitical entity. A prevailing view holds that the Free Officers abandoned this project, relinquishing Egypt’s claims to Sudan. Drawing on materials from the Egyptian National Archives and the National Archives in London, this article shows instead that unity with Sudan remained a core objective of the new military regime. I trace how an ostensibly secular regime strategically deployed religion in pursuit of this objective. I demonstrate that transnational networks of al-Azhar and Sufi orders were central to the Free Officers’ efforts to maintain Egyptian hegemony in Sudan. This analysis offers new insight into the religious diplomacy of the post-1952 regime, complicating our understanding of a key episode in Egyptian–Sudanese relations and highlighting the interplay between religion and statecraft in shaping Egyptian politics, especially under Nasser.

September 2024 marked the 20th anniversary of the commencement of operations of the Antarctic Treaty Secretariat. Despite the importance of this institutional milestone, it went largely unnoticed and sparked little critical reflection in Antarctic governance circles. This article seeks to fill that gap by assessing the Secretariat’s role, performance, and evolution within the Antarctic Treaty System as a whole. The article explores the Secretariat’s contributions to continuity, coordination, transparency, and institutional memory. It also examines the constraints the Secretariat faces due to its lack of international legal capacity, limited mandate and budget, and the political dynamics among the Consultative Parties. Finally, the article offers reflections on the Secretariat’s future role in a changing geopolitical and environmental landscape, arguing that strengthening its functions may be essential to ensuring the continued order and stability of the Antarctic region.

This article reinterprets John Milton’s Paradise Lost as a contribution to contemporary analytic philosophy of religion. Milton offers a novel free-will defence, similar to Alvin Plantinga’s, grounded in original philosophical accounts of God, creation, freedom, and meta-ethics. Milton’s monist God creates worlds and creatures ex deo out of God-self. God – and everything else – is animated matter: one substance both material and spiritual. Milton rejects materialism, dualism, and idealism. Only animist monism delivers the libertarian freedom that Milton’s free-will defence demands. God has agent-causal libertarian freedom. God’s reasons don’t necessitate God’s choices. God freely chooses which worlds to create, which commands to issue, which hierarchies to institute. God radically transcends creatures – especially in relation to God’s meta-ethical power. Milton’s implicit meta-ethic, rejecting both voluntarism and intellectualism, resembles Robert Adams’s theist meta-ethic, where God’s nature determines excellence and God’s actual commands determine obligation. God also plays another meta-ethical role – instituting hierarchies where some creatures command others. Satan’s fall is epistemic and meta-ethical. He refuses to recognise God’s meta-ethical transcendence – to believe that God is God. Belief in God always requires a leap of faith beyond evidence and argument – because even perfect creatures cannot comprehend God’s transcendence. Creaturely epistemic freedom means there is no explanation why some angels fall while others stand.

Few songs of the British nineteenth century have had the staying power of ‘Home, Sweet Home’. With music by Henry Bishop and words by John Howard Payne, it first appeared in Clari; or, the Maid of Milan (1823) at London’s Covent Garden. The song remained in the repertory well into the twentieth century and is still a point of reference in the twenty-first. In the initial dramatic context, it was a solo vehicle for the titular heroine, a means of expressing Clari’s longing to return to her ‘humble’ home. Once the number became a breakout hit, the opera’s narrative details ceded significance to a vaguer international vogue for nostalgic sentiment. Like the much-discussed Swiss maladie du pays or the contemporary craze for the ranz des vaches, Bishop and Payne’s creation piqued the public interest in imagining a home out of reach. As the decades wore on, however, the song’s invocation of home acquired a distinctive national accent. By the mid-Victorian period ‘Home, Sweet Home’ had come to anchor an ideology of English exceptionalism. To perform or attend to this song in 1871 was to partake in a quasi-ritualistic affirmation of the doctrine of the hearth. This was partly bound up with the specious claim that other languages lacked an adequate word for home, but it was also connected to a shift in the geography of belonging. In lieu of the Romantic yearning for a distant homeland, this new Victorian nostalgia fixated on the heteronormative family home with its promise of shelter from the trials of urban modernity and the vices of foreign politics. Drawing on a range of musical, visual, and literary sources this article explores a key passage in the history of British ambivalence to city living via a song that emerged as a powerful amplifier of anti-urban desire.

This study revisits the long-standing consensus that the number and nature of basic-level administrative units in imperial China remained static over two millennia. It argues that this view underestimates the size and sophistication of field administration during the Northern Song dynasty (960–1127). During this period, towns (zhen) emerged as administrative centers, undertaking roles akin to the predominantly rural counties but within urban settings. Through a systematic analysis of the administrative functions of towns, this article reveals that approximately 30 percent of the 1,891 towns documented in 1085 were staffed by imperial officials and played a crucial role in delivering urban public goods such as fire prevention and law enforcement. In doing so, they supported the Song state’s extraordinary reliance on commercial taxation. These findings prompt a reassessment of the prevailing view in Chinese urban history that a disconnect between administration and commerce began during the Tang-Song transition.