Historical accounts of the Indian space programme inevitably invoke the figure of Vikram Sarabhai (1919–71), credited as the father of its early development in the 1960s. A physicist by training, Sarabhai was best known for his ‘leapfrogging’ vision, into which social applications of space technology would catapult developing countries out of poverty. By interrogating official and unofficial records, speeches, cinematic productions and obituaries, this article examines how Indian leadership utilized Sarabhai’s persona to substantiate the role of space flight in the nation’s domestic modernization and geopolitical leverage. Especially after his death in 1971, the making of Sarabhai into the pioneer of Indian space flight allowed India to fashion a geocentric appeal specific to its space programme, which construed the benefits of low-earth-orbit satellite communication to tackle unequal development. In the 1990s, Sarabhai’s image was further appropriated by international powers and actors to propagate the commercialization of satellite systems. Despite its elitist outlook and subscription to received notions of nationhood and modernity, a closer look into the public resonance of Sarabhai’s persona reveals how the geocentric promise of space flight in the Indian context contributed to the formation of post-1960s astroculture globally.

In the early modern period, the waters of East and Southeast Asia saw a bustling maritime trade. To conduct this trade, ships needed competent sailors to safely travel between ports. Chinese sources name one person as particularly important: the huozhang 火長. The sources tell us that the huozhang were charged to use the compass and, employing sailing manuals, to guide ships in the correct direction. In this role, they had to work closely with other sailors, such as duogong 舵工 (steersmen). This article reconstructs the role and function of the navigating personnel on Chinese ships, as well as the tools they used to determine course in the period between the fifteenth and eighteenth century.

When the British East India Company (EIC) conquered the West Himalaya region in the 1810s, it faced a critical challenge commonly encountered by colonial empires: determining the extent of intervention in intracommunity criminal matters among colonized subjects. This article examines the archived correspondence of colonial officials regarding this challenge and scrutinizes the various arguments made for and against intervention. It shows that the alterity of the subject population was strategically employed by both sides of the debate, who simultaneously promoted contradictory agendas: for those advocating intervention, alterity rendered involvement in criminal matters necessary and just, whereas those averse to intervention employed the very same notion to justify the opposite stance. This dual usage is explained by exposing the contemporary ideas about criminal justice that underlay each of these positions: that criminal law should represent the general will of society, and that it must be executed by a centralized power so as to maintain public order. While these two tenets are commonly perceived as supporting one another, the analysis reveals their decoupling in colonial settings. The debates of EIC officials thus demonstrate how the colonial setting distorts ideas foundational to modern criminal law systems, casting doubt over whether they were ever truly in harmony to begin with.

This study employs neutron activation analysis (NAA) to examine pottery from Middle Bronze Age (MBA) (c. 2200–1700 bc) Mitrou in East Lokris, central Greece. The analysis of 112 samples from all ceramic phases reveals complex patterns of production and exchange at multiple scales. Limited production of tablewares is evident within the immediate coastscape, contrasting sharply with abundant imports of tableware from other communities (most prominently, central Euboea and Boeotia), revealing a highly interconnected central Greek world. The NAA results also reinforce previous petrographic analysis, emphasizing connections with the broader regional maritime sphere, including the Cyclades, Aegina, Crete, and the south-eastern Aegean. The results challenge previous perceptions of the central Greek MBA as isolated, provide new insights into MBA connectivity, and highlight the need for further analytical work at other central Greek sites.

In the autumn of 1934, Bishop Johannes Geisler of Brixen/Bressanone denied two Italian-speaking priests, Carlo Torello and Giuseppe Ricci, permission to teach within his predominantly German-speaking diocese. In response, Benito Mussolini threatened to expel all Church representatives from the state education system and, by extension, to unravel the recently signed Lateran Accords. Untangling the motivations behind Geisler’s decision, the escalating tensions it precipitated, and, ultimately, the discussions that led to its quiet resolution reveal much about Fascist and Church ambitions in the newly annexed territory of Trentino-South Tyrol. This ‘Torello-Ricci Affair’ provides a micro-historical lens with which to better understand the political and cultural infrastructures of power in interwar South Tyrol and their relationship to institutions in Rome. In particular, it illustrates the ongoing battle between civil and religious officials to assert moral authority within the region, most importantly as it regarded the education of its children.

When writing Limits, Bentham introduced the idea of laws in principem: they are duty-imposing commands, receiving determination from a sovereign, and prescribing to him what he shall do. Hart argues that Bentham’s laws in principem are not duty-imposing, but power-conferring or disability-imposing, which courts accept as reasons for invalidating enactments conflicting with them. After presenting several major criticisms, he concludes that Bentham’s idea of laws in principem cannot be reconciled with his command theory, and that a ‘fundamental transformation’ of the latter is required to accommodate the former. I show that Bentham correctly regards laws in principem as essentially duty-imposing, and that his command theory can easily survive Hart’s criticisms. I conclude that it not only can accommodate laws in principem, but can better explain their nature and operation.

By examining various literary and visual representations of rivers, this article addresses meaning-making processes related to memory, identity, and belonging in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina. Focusing on representations of the border rivers – the Drina, the Sava, and the Una – this article explores how postwar social transformations, including coming to terms with war-time loss, displacement, and destabilized meanings of homeland, are understood when the narrative focus shifts from landscapes to riverscapes. Concurrently, this article also contributes to scholarly discussions on representations of posttraumatic landscapes by redirecting attention from wounded landscapes, where the impact of violent human interventions is evident, to wounded waterscapes, which elude such identification. Generally, rivers symbolize steady and uninterrupted historical progress in nation-building narratives and the formation of national identities. In the Balkans, rivers are usually appropriated by nationalistic narratives tied to territorial claims, which resurface during times of crisis. Following the Bosnian War of the 1990s, in literature, cinema and arts rivers have become sites of multiple and overlapping meanings, suggesting a possible new emotional geography of the country beyond the exclusionary ideas of homeland and belonging.

This article revisits and attempts to explain the failure of settlement in England between the outbreak of civil war in late 1642 and the execution of Charles I in January 1649. It argues that doubts about the process—and not just the proposed terms—of settlement worked against the possibility of an accommodation in the 1640s. An influential parliamentarian faction regarded negotiated treaties as inherently problematic instruments of peacemaking, which were unable to provide adequate security against the possibility of future abrogation and vengeance on the part of the king. While widespread anxieties about royal dissimulation were partly a product of the “statist” paradigms of political analysis that had become firmly established across Europe by the mid-seventeenth century, specific events in England during the 1640s served to reinforce and accentuate them. Moreover, as the decade progressed there was an increasing tendency to see duplicity, dissimulation, and vengefulness as inseparable features of monarchy, and thus a negotiated peace between prince and people after civil war as an impossibility. Ultimately, these concerns formed an integral, if often overlooked, justification for the regicide.

This article suggests that classification exercises were the quintessential modality for both the narrative and labour–management relations of occupational health and safety in Indian mines for the period 1895–1970. The extant literature has underestimated the cause-and-effect relationship that such classification practices had, including punitive safety regulation clauses, compensation clauses, the public image of firms, forms of knowledge, and stakeholder bargaining. The narrative of work hazards fundamentally forged casualty classification patterns. The ascertainment techniques applied to casualty, perceptions of occupational risk, and the politics of restitution shaped the narratives and defined patterns of casualty classification. Management devised various ways to present a decent picture of mining through casualty statistics. Later, critiques of this business practice exposed statistical discrepancies and flaws in the classification system, challenging the built-in business-blindness. From the late 1920s, the informed, organized mineworkers articulated their experiences of workplace risk; they confronted the managerial discourse of “unavoidable” work hazards and mineworkers’ liability for casualty. The mineworkers’ publicists and the government of the Republic of India took an interest in research on occupational health and safety and its regulation. They aimed at industrial efficiency and national reconstruction by creating a healthy, contented, and experienced workforce. All this steered the classification exercises of industrialists and public authorities towards favourable changes. The twin forces of capital and working people converged on the restitution measures articulated within the utilitarian paradigm. The latter, ironically, contributed to valorizing the narrative of risk and sacrifice in the lives of mineworkers.

Catalyzed by the surge in climate litigation worldwide, this article examines the tension between the moral imperatives of intergenerational justice and the operational constraints of positivist legal frameworks. It hypothesizes that while positivist doctrine prima facie challenges judicial application of intergenerational justice principles, reconciliation is possible through contextually attuned adjudication and evolved conceptions of legal principles for the Anthropocene. The article explores three key litigation strategies: dynamic interpretation of existing rights, application of constitutional future generations clauses, and procedural mechanisms for representing future interests. Building on European climate judgments, it analyzes how these approaches strain positivist tenets and animate separation-of-powers objections. The article argues that addressing interpretive and foundational challenges posed by climate change requires both doctrinal innovation and theoretical reconstruction. It shows how contextual constitutionalism can help courts to acknowledge intergenerational duties while preserving legal determinacy, and explores how positivism might evolve to accommodate multigenerational climate governance. Situating leading cases within debates between positivism and non-positivist theories, the article offers a roadmap for developing a framework of legal validity suited to the era-defining challenge of climate change.