David Boonin argues that in a choice between creating a person whose life would be well worth living and creating a different person whose life would be significantly worse, but still worth living, each option is morally permissible. I show that Boonin's argument for this view problematically implies that in a choice between creating a person whose life would be well worth living and creating another person whose life would not be worth living, each option is also morally permissible.

This paper takes up Axel Honneth’s suggestion that we, in the 21st century Western world, should revisit the Marxian idea of reification; unlike Honneth, however, this paper applies reification to the ways in which humans relate to non-human animals, particularly in the context of scientific experiments. Thinking about these practices through the lens of reification, the paper argues, yields a more helpful understanding of what is regarded as problematic in those practices than the standard animal rights approaches. The second part of the paper offers ways of overcoming reification that go beyond Honneth’s idea of recognition by introducing Iris Murdoch’s idea of attention. This proposed strategy makes the ethical relevance of reification more salient and makes it possible to counter reification through a practice such as attention which, unlike recognition, can be consciously established.

The Swedish North is sometimes described as a resource periphery, while others choose to label it a pleasure periphery. Regardless of the terms used, the region is characterised by problems such as out-migration and demographic issues. This study investigates why there are such different perceptions of the same area, and whether there is any contradiction between extractive resource industries and the tourism industry. This is done by collecting visitor data from mining companies and conducting interviews with a variety of respondents in three mining communities in northern Sweden. Mining tourism is a phenomenon occurring in this region and can be regarded as a context in which the two main narratives meet while being a rather overlooked form of tourism. This is partly due to the low level of knowledge regarding its impacts, but also to a somewhat established idea of mining tourism as a “bad” form of tourism. Individuals’ perceptions of mining tourism as a phenomenon seem to be highly value-related and influenced by both location and occupation. As such, various opinions can be explained by social exchange theory, which proposes that attitudes will be influenced by individuals’ evaluation of outcomes for themselves and their community. In this paper, the emergence of mining tourism is understood as knowledge creation rooted in a regional path dependency on mining and tourism. Hence, mining tourism becomes a new regional tourism product that contributes to tourism, at least in terms of standard technical visits and, at best, a well-developed tourist attraction that appeals to visitors in quantities similar to iconic regional attractions such as the Icehotel. Then again, a tourism industry selling dreams of “untouched nature” argues that this tourism product produces “bad imaging”.

Maritime archaeology has been identified as a significant field among the humanities that could contribute to the global sustainable development agenda. This article explores the relevance of maritime archaeological studies to initiatives of climate action. Βy reviewing the contributions of various state-of-the-art projects and by linking their aims and outcomes to specific targets of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, the author highlights the benefits of involving maritime archaeological research in the pursuit of sustainability and climate resilience. This involvement could play a key role in reinforcing human-centred and culturally aware solutions to the current climate change effects that threaten human populations, especially in maritime regions. It is hoped that this discussion will inspire researchers in the humanities, archaeology, and maritime archaeology in particular, to use their expertise within the framework provided by the sustainable development agenda to help build a better future.

In determining the metrical structure of quantitative poetic metres, heavy (i.e. long) syllables are usually associated with metrically strong positions. In this study, examining the case of Persian metres, I argue that the metres must be treated as temporal patterns in music, where research on rhythm perception has shown that the metrical strength of an event is not directly determined by the inter-onset interval following it but sensitive to the overall arrangement of the attack points. To identify metrically strong positions, I introduce a different method based on the performance practices of participants in the poetic tradition. The strength hierarchy is then used to offer constituency trees for the metrical forms and classify them. The structures identified for metrical forms are different from those suggested in previous accounts of Persian metres, in that they allow incomplete constituents at the left edges of metres. Building upon this general framework, a set of constraints chiefly based on well-known universal rhythmic tendencies is introduced and the Persian metre inventory is accounted for as emerging from the interaction of these constraints.

On 3 February 2018, in the town of Macerata, an Italian citizen with far-right sympathies deliberately fired several shots from his car at nine African immigrants, injuring six. The article argues that this shooting can be considered an act of lone-actor terrorism, an anomaly in the Italian context. Based on the social science literature on this subject, the paper analyses the profile of the shooter and the dynamics of the attack. Moreover, adopting a relational perspective to radicalisation, it examines the attacker's interactions: on the one hand, he was in contact with different political organisations that could represent ‘echo chambers’ for the tacit validation or even the justification and amplification of radical beliefs, including on the relation between immigration and security; on the other hand, he was not subject to their discipline and social control. This peripheral social position helps explain this case of lone-actor terrorism, in a national context where far-right mobilisation and violence have historically assumed collective forms.

The aim of this study is to describe the emergence of court and bourgeois salons in the nineteenth-century Principality of Serbia, in the context of the socio-historical circumstances and geopolitical background. A selection of examples of salon gatherings organized in Belgrade from the 1830s to the 1870s show the emergence of a new cultural identity through the coexistence and merging of different cultural models: Western European, Ottoman and Serbian. Starting with the first salons, organized in the 1830s in the home of Tomanija and Jevrem Obrenović, salon gatherings will be viewed through the prism of selected court and bourgeois salons. Special attention is paid to salons in which only women took part. In the period of the construction of the modern Serbian state, these salon gatherings contributed to the emancipation of women and their step from the private to the public sphere of society. In order to more comprehensively understand the role and significance of salon, the multi-layered salon practices are observed, with a focus on (1) analysis of the symbolism of interior decoration and clothing and of the social status of salon guests; (2) a reconstruction of the atmosphere through details of refreshments (food and drink), specific decorations of individual salons and dances performed; (3) analysis of the artistic and intellectual content: music, literature, poetry and science.

This article uses a case study of the Qin Empire to explore the ecology of an agrarian political system, analysis that has become possible because of the archaeological excavation of Qin administrative documents. Qin's power derived from photosynthesis, and its empire mobilized this energy and used it to conquer territory and expand its productivity. The state's power was based on its ability to extract taxes in grain from its subjects, store it in granaries, and then use it to feed laborers working on state projects. Grain and most other taxable materials were too bulky to move very far, so the government relied on a subcontinent-wide system of information gathering and processing that allowed officials at the capital to make decisions about local resource use. Qin's centralized bureaucratic system became the standard model of political organization in China, so it offers clues into the effects subsequent empires would have on their environments.

Urban histories of modern South Asia have centred on British Indian cities and the reign of colonial urbanism, with dependence on metropolitan imperatives and models regarded as givens. Focusing on Hyderabad, one of the subcontinent's five largest cities and capital of an autonomous princely state throughout the colonial era, this article establishes the analytical utility of princely urbanism as a framework for writing the history of South Asian cities. Characterized by state-directed planning, transnational urbanist networks and multiple overlapping property regimes, this mode of city development and its resonance points to hidden genealogies of modern urbanism.

Poor health is not inherently a part of Black Americans’ bodies; poor health is not in our DNA. But as Linda Villarosa says in Under the Skin “something about being Black has led to the documented poor health of Black Americans.”1 Like many other scholars of Black health have said, Villarosa proposes, and evidence supports, that “the something is racism.”2 Villarosa attributes Black people’s generally inferior health outcomes in areas like pregnancy and birth, pain care, and cardiology to racism and not a lack of social resources such as money, education, and access to healthcare. Although not always explicitly stated in her text, the stories Villarosa uses to illustrate racism’s effects on health also demonstrate racism’s influence on who has access to the social resources that are needed to maintain health and treat illnesses. Villarosa is right that more education and more income cannot de facto give Black people better health. At the same time, we cannot ignore that although racism is the force, education, money, housing, and access to healthcare are the means by which racism adversely affects health. Education and other social goods only fail to confer better health to Black people because racism serves as a roadblock.

In his landmark 1967 novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez wrote about the ‘Banana Massacre’, where plantation workers that had been striking against the United Fruit Company to improve their working conditions were killed by the military. Despite being an event depicted in a magic realism novel, this example also shows some of the characteristics of Latin America, where colonialism, the close relationship between business and governments, and the incessant fight to protect people from human rights abuses, often converge not just in literature, but in real life. Indeed, Latin America is marked by contradictions between very progressive domestic human rights frameworks and increasing levels of social inequality and poverty; by being part of global value chains while also having an important percentage of informal economy; and by promoting the development of rules and practices without a sufficiently strong rule of law and fragile democracies. To some extent, as the land of magic realism, the business and human rights field in many cases is a real-life example of the nuances and complexities of the region, where progress and challenges are frequently intertwined.

Using recently released papers, we analyze an attempted neoliberal policy revolution in 1980s Britain—the attempt to restrict the state pension to a minimal flat-rate benefit and supplement it with personal pensions. In the process, the government would abolish both the state earnings-related pension and collective employer-provided occupational pension schemes that then covered about half the workforce and owned about a quarter of all shares listed on the London Stock Exchange. Unusually, our focus is not primarily on ministers, as we unpick an attempted revolution that would have refashioned every worker in Britain as an investor-capitalist. Rather we focus on a sub-ministerial center of political power, the No. 10 Policy Unit, and the influence on it of the Centre for Policy Studies, a right-wing think tank. In doing so, we confirm the latter's importance as source of neoliberal ideas for the architects of policy change in the 1980s and reveal the centrality of the Policy Unit as a source of motive power for Britain's neoliberal revolution. We also, however, highlight the relative pragmatism of ministers as they backed away from the Policy Unit's attempted revolution, choosing instead to implement a more evolutionary set of reforms.

Attempted assassinations have only rarely been given sustained and systematic attention by historians. This article focuses on a series of attempts to assassinate members of the British royal family across the nineteenth century. In exploring the responses of political elites and wider publics to these attacks, the author argues for the development of a robust and enduring script with which to navigate physical attacks on the sovereign and his or her family. Overall, this script tended to support the monarchy by articulating visions of the proper relationship between crown and people and contrasting these with political regimes in Europe and elsewhere. It also, however, served to highlight some of the key tensions within a modernizing institution between accessibility and publicity on the one hand and security on the other.

Scholars have treated images from the golden age of Transylvanian photography, recently elevated to prominence through the digitization of archives, as “authentic” portrayals of peasant culture. However, Hungarian, Romanian, and Saxon nationalists in Transylvania utilized photographs to brand place and nation in the global market, as well as to make claims to territory and assert competing national hierarchies. I examine here Saxon historian, folklorist and travel writer Emil Sigerus’ Durch Siebenbürgen: eine Touristenfahrt in 58 Bildern (Through Transylvania: a Tourist Trip in 58 Pictures), published repeatedly between 1905 and 1929. Sigerus’ photographic survey of Transylvania’s natural landscape, built environment and diverse populations branded Transylvania in general and Transylvanian Saxons in particular as a tourist destination unspoiled by the passage of time. Sigerus also projected an ethnically stratified social hierarchy on Transylvania’s heterogeneous population, with Saxons at the apex; asserted Saxon ownership of urban centers, thereby reinforcing Saxon claims to a “civilizing mission” in Transylvania; and laid claim to territory, simultaneously redirecting tourism from other parts of Transylvania to Saxon nationalists’ benefit. By careful curation, then, Sigerus projected a strong nationalist message often overlooked in the analysis of individual images as “objective” sources of evidence.

The actions of Dr. Isabel Grant in creating the Highland Folk Museum in Scotland in the 1930s reflect how pleasure interacted with gendered identities to form modern feminine selves in the mid-twentieth century. In examining the subjectivity of Grant and her associates through material, textual, and visual sources from the museum, I interrogate both emotional and representational aspects of her development of living history. I suggest that, along with a sense of care and duty in such museums, women such as Grant were attracted by the opportunities of imaginative play and that they formed identities that were not reducible to either traditional or modern women's roles; instead, they were drawn to a form of historical engagement that allowed them to work outside such labels, sometimes as eccentrics. Their play was more serious and nonironic than were many other forms of interwar modern culture, and living history initiatives since then have built on this modern-but-not-modern appeal.

If coverture justified patriarchal control and legally erased many aspects of wives’ separate existence, did this mean that husbands in eighteenth-century England also enjoyed absolute authority over their wives’ sexual bodies? This article examines how contemporaries described the sexual boundaries between spouses and what wives could do when they had been violated by their husbands. Wives had few legal protections and limited social and economic resources to escape unwanted marital sex, but the small number who could afford the high costs turned to the ecclesiastical courts to legally separate from their husbands. The five case studies from the ecclesiastical courts explored here are exceptional, first, because sexual problems were at their core, and second, because unusual collateral evidence survives describing attorneys’ and judges’ opinions about spouses’ bodily rights within marriage. Whether they were seeking relief from reproductive toil, venereal infection, threat of sexual violence, or trauma from marital rape, these wives wanted to escape their husbands—but they faced hurdles. Because English ecclesiastical law did not explicitly identify sexual discord as justifying marital separation, the women's attorneys had to demonstrate that unwanted sexual relations were acts of cruelty. By invoking bodily safety, decorum and propriety, and sensibility and sympathy, advocates argued against husbands’ absolute conjugal authority. The author considers how broader transformations in beliefs about gender and sexuality may have resulted in giving wives slightly more room for protection by the second half of the eighteenth century, particularly when they faced the threat of marital rape or venereal infection.

The author first presents an uncritical user’s guide to the book, then discusses why Witte, Nichols, and Garnett should consider including key chapters of the story of US religious liberty in the next edition. The author then deconstructs the normative and methodological assumptions of the book.