In 1805, during a lull in hostilities between England and France, minor Warwickshire landowner and slaveholder Bertie Greatheed was on a European tour with his family when his son died, leaving behind an illegitimate child. Greatheed acquired his granddaughter from her Dresden-based mother and brought the child up as his own. This article revisits Steedman's earlier scholarship on Greatheed, which focused on questions of domestic service, through the lens of slavery. It uses the seventeen volumes of his diary-writing compiled between 1805 and 1825 to explore the connections between Greatheed's ownership of enslaved people on his St. Kitts estate and his possession and nurturing of his grandchild. It considers the contradiction between Greatheed's position as an abolitionist and his profit from slavery and slave ownership, which he used not only to sustain a way of life, but also to develop Leamington, Warwickshire, into a spa town and pleasure resort.

This article takes a micro-history approach, focusing on the life of a man identified only in the British records as “Ned” in order to illuminate the complexity and slipperiness of categories of “race.” Ned had lived in the Zulu Kingdom and, after fleeing a civil war there, became employed in Natal by an English colonist-settler, Thomas Handley. Ned traveled with the Handley family to England in 1859, and during this time, unexpectedly “disappeared” from the Handley's residence near Sheffield. A manhunt ensued and, as locals ruminated on Ned's possible status as a “slave,” the case attracted the interest of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. Ned was eventually taken to London and housed in the Strangers’ Home for Asiatics, Africans and South Sea Islanders before his tragic death a few months later. His repeated escapes transfixed the public and resulted in detailed press coverage. Numerous parties became interested in his case, and complex and changing processes of racialization were key to the shifting ways in which he was represented. In this article, we both search for Ned's agency and volition, and demonstrate how the case also speaks to major issues in British history, including race, humanitarianism, and enslavement.

Historians of colonial and postcolonial attempts to deal with undernutrition in Africa have generally argued that, after the Second World War, scientists and doctors “medicalized” hunger by emphasizing specific deficiencies that could be medically “cured” or alleviated through dietary supplements, thereby covering up the economic, social, and political causes of (post)colonial hunger. This article argues that this explanation obscures the persistence of a more holistic approach immediately after the Second World War, which rejected this narrow vision of hunger and, on the contrary, framed it as a very broad problem requiring interdisciplinary research and ambitious economic and social solutions. It focuses in particular on the work of British nutrition specialist B. S. Platt and his “experiment” in The Gambia that was meant to devise a replicable recipe to cure colonial malnutrition through mechanization and agricultural development. Like many other such colonial projects, the project ended in dismal failure, but it illustrates how malnutrition was understood at the end of the war as a broad economic and social problem. It also shows how this more holistic approach was tightly associated with the postwar project of colonial “development” and was predicated on an ambition to thoroughly re-engineer colonial landscapes and subjects.

Since the mid-2010s, conflicts at UNESCO over the interpretation of Japanese colonial rule and wartime actions in the first half of the twentieth century in Japan, South Korea, and China have been fierce. Contested nominations include the Meiji Industrial Revolution Sites for the World Heritage List (Japan), the Documents of Nanjing Massacre for the Memory of the World (MoW) Register (China), and two still pending applications on the Documents on the Comfort Women (South Korean and Japanese NGOs). This paper examines the recent “heritage war” negotiations at UNESCO as they unfolded in a changing political, economic, and security environment. Linking World Heritage and MoW nominations together for a holistic analysis, this paper clarifies the interests of State actors and of various non-State actors, such as NGOs, experts, and the UNESCO secretariat. We discuss the prospects for these contested nominations and recommend further involvement of non-State actors to ensure more constructive and inclusive heritage interpretation to enable a more comprehensive understanding of history.

While the plague of Provence is the most studied outbreak of the disease in early modern Europe, there is little in the extensive historiography on this topic about fears of the cross-species transmission of disease which re-emerged in the early eighteenth century because of events in southwestern France. Concerns about the interplay between cattle murrains and human plague resurfaced in the early eighteenth century because the plague of Provence followed an outbreak of cattle disease which swept across Europe and killed tens of thousands of animals. This article focuses on the debate about the spread of contagious diseases between species which occurred in Britain during this time. Links between the health of animals and that of humans became objects of heated discussion especially following the issuing of the 1721 Quarantine Act, which was designed to prevent the plague currently ravaging southwestern France from taking hold in Britain. It then considers the different beliefs regarding contagion and the transmission of diseases between different species during the plague of Provence. While focusing on the richly documented and highly revealing discussions in early eighteenth-century Britain about the interplay between plague in cattle and plague in humans, it also utilises materials from earlier centuries to examine more fully how early modern populations understood the relationship between plague in humans and cattle murrains.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, Mid-Atlantic States expanded guardianship to include habitual drunkards. Legislators in Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey empowered courts to put habitual drunkards under guardianship, a legal status that stripped them of their rights to own property, enter into contracts, make wills, and, in some states, even vote. Amid the dramatic nineteenth-century expansion of male suffrage, the habitual drunkard signified a masculine failure of self-government that disqualified propertied men from the privileges of full citizenship. The struggle to define habitual drunkenness, detect the habitual drunkard, and put him under guardianship transformed the courtroom into an arena for contesting the thresholds of compulsion, policing respectable manhood, and drawing the borders of full citizenship in the nineteenth-century United States.

Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Georgia became a key destination for Russian migrants, who significantly influenced the local housing market. This article explores the impact of the influx of Russian migrants into Tbilisi, which caused a surge in rental prices and aroused feelings of social insecurity among Georgian citizens. Using qualitative methods, including social media analysis and semi-structured interviews, the study investigates the emergence of “informal sanctions” imposed by Georgian Airbnb and Booking.com hosts as a means of expressing political dissatisfaction with their own government and protecting national interests. This article identifies four patterns of informal sanctions, such as rejecting, discomforting, avoiding, and exploiting Russian tenants, which reflect a form of patriotism from below. We argue that these spontaneous, everyday practices of resistance lead to the politicization of mundane host-tenant relations and the collective stereotyping of a migrant group in a time of insecurity. The theoretical proposition here is that everyday nationalism is closely related to informality, which opens the possibility of examining grassroots responses to perceived threats and tactics of resistance, with implications for broader social dynamics in times of ongoing geopolitical conflict and wartime migration in Eastern Europe.

‘Positional goods’, a term coined by Fred Hirsch, is an important concept in economics, social sciences and philosophy; however, it is used in different ways. This paper recovers Hirsch’s concept of positional goods as scarce goods that are fixed or near-fixed in supply and argues for the usefulness of this concept. Hirsch’s concept may have explanatory power beyond the concept used by most economists – that of Robert Frank. Moreover, Hirsch’s concept is more explanatorily basic and useful than the concept used by most philosophers – that of Brighouse and Swift.

Homophonous morphs have been reported to show differences in acoustic duration in languages such as English and German. How common these differences are across languages, and what factors influence the extent of temporal differences, is still an open question, however. This paper investigates the role of morphological disambiguation in predicting the acoustic duration of homophones using data from a diverse sample of 37 languages. Results indicate a low overall contribution of morphological affiliation compared to other well-studied effects on duration such as speech rate and Final Lengthening. It is proposed that two factors increase the importance of homophony avoidance for the acoustic shape of morphs: crowdedness (i.e. the number of competing homophones) and segmental make-up, in particular the presence of an alveolar fricative. These findings offer an empirically broad perspective on the interplay between morphology and phonetics and align with the view of language as an adaptive and efficient system.