The widely acclaimed Capital and Ideology, though an important contribution to the inequality debates, is limited by its use of secondary sources and fiscal state framework in its historical analysis of China. Its arguments for a Confucian trifunctional society with property rights sacralized by nobles’ and scholars’ regalian functions, and persistently low and stagnant taxation in premodern China overly simplify the historical reality. Using primary Chinese sources, this article highlights the major oversimplifications. The information and issues presented here are also worth considering for similar social and fiscal studies of premodern China.

The aim of this article is to examine the use of suitable archive sources for the study of the economic space of cities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The research is based on the integration and critical analysis of cartographic, descriptive and quantitative sources of an administrative and fiscal nature, developed by using Geographic Information Systems. The advantage of adopting this approach includes, in addition to the study of spatial relationships amongst economic activities and the urban space, the possibility of investigating discrepancies between the sources, thus facilitating their interpretation.

A decision will soon have to be taken regarding the renewal of approval of glyphosate at the European Union (EU) level; this pesticidal active substance, however, is more controversial than ever. This article critically assesses various strategies pursued by EU Member States and regional authorities which challenge the EU approach to glyphosate and aim to safeguard their higher levels of public health and environmental protection. It reflects on the prospects of success of these strategies, and their compatibility with EU law. The analysis includes the action for the annulment of glyphosate's 2017 reapproval brought by the Brussels-Capital Region, the Austrian attempt to enact a blanket ban on glyphosate-based pesticidal formulations, and the more sophisticated strategies pursued by Luxembourg and France. The article concludes that the French strategy is effective in risk regulation terms, and compatible with EU law. Nonetheless, adopting the French approach may prove rather difficult for other Member States, as a result of both structural-regulatory and practical constraints. Rather, an EU-wide strategy on glyphosate is urgently needed.

When I cracked open Marlene Laruelle’s new book, Is Russia Fascist?, I immediately wondered, who really thinks Russia is fascist? I was aware of Timothy Snyder’s study of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s glorification of the debatably fascist political theorist Ivan Ilyin, but fascist? Really? But Laruelle quickly shows in the introduction that this is not a canard or a straw man. Many reputable scholars and public intellectuals have drawn parallels between the Putin regime, its actions, and European fascism, including Snyder, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Alexander Motyl, Vladimir Inozemtsev, Gary Kasparov, Anna Politkovskaya, Madeline Albright, and Hillary Clinton. The term “fascism” has become part of the Western discussion on the nature of the Putin regime, even more so since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Cet article s’intéresse à l’emploi du subjonctif en français acadien du nord-est du Nouveau-Brunswick dans les Provinces Maritimes du Canada. Notre point de départ consiste à faire état du site de conflit qui oppose les variétés du français acadien et du français laurentien en ce qui concerne les patrons régissant sa sélection. Il a déjà été démontré que les contraintes sémantiques exercent une influence prépondérante en français acadien alors que du côté laurentien, l’effet de ces contraintes est plutôt dépassé par celui venant de contraintes lexicales et morphosyntaxiques. Nos résultats démontrent que le parler acadien à l’étude affiche des parallèles structuraux avec ce qui est rapporté en français laurentien : En plus d’être contraint à un taux variable de sélection, la productivité du subjonctif est limitée à quelques contextes spécifiques et elle n’est pas tributaire de l’effet exercé par des contraintes sémantiques. Nous suggérons qu’il n’y a pas une seule norme vernaculaire partagée par tous les parlers acadiens quant au conditionnement du subjonctif et nous nous interrogeons sur l’impact des contacts dialectaux sur la structure linguistique du français de cette région.

This article focuses on a set of aesthetic debates that took place in China in the late 1950s. By exploring the main arguments presented by different thinkers, particularly the writings of Zhu Guanqian and Li Zehou, this article demonstrates how the aesthetics took part in the ideological formation of the new socialist state. From the debates, we observe the tensions between the complexity of the material-political and the reductionism of the state ideology. We also recognize why and how aesthetics could be such an important site of political contestation in this young socialist country, and how the interactions between human senses and the material world are essential to arts universally. The dominant materialist aesthetics presented in the debate was less a theory of things than a theory of the social. This historical materialist approach might be useful as a social critique; however, when handled dogmatically, it not only rejects the autonomy of things, but also disallows art works to reflect the complex human interactions with the material world beyond economic power relations. We can find more sophisticated analysis in Zhu's aesthetic theory, which tries to incorporate the interactions between the subjects and the objects into materialism.

Amid growing interest in studying China and India together, this special issue, “Methods in China-India Studies,” seeks to open a conversation on the relevance, approaches, and stakes of China-India research. Why should we pair China and India together, how can we best do so, and to what ends? In this introduction to the issue, the editors first discuss the rationales commonly evoked as justification for studying China and India together. The first section articulates shared intellectual commitments as lending a coherence to China-India studies, and as providing a common ground and point of departure for scholars across disciplinary boundaries. The second section outlines a history of the China-India pairing from the first century CE to the end of the twentieth century, with a focus on how a range of historical actors paired China and India under shifting political circumstances and with differing objectives. This section also offers an assessment of the methodological approaches recent scholarship has extended to studying each of these periods. As a whole, this introduction reflects on the unique challenges and opportunities of conducting China-India research, and outlines some of the contributions the China and India conceptual pairing can make to other fields of study.

In 2013, the Malayalam film Drishyam, a suspenseful story of the cover up of an accidental murder, became a huge hit in India that inspired remakes in many regional languages including one in Hindi that, as with other recent Bollywood hits, traveled to China. This time, though, instead of screening the Hindi film in theaters, the narrative reached Chinese audiences with a Chinese language remake, titled Sheep Without A Shepherd《误杀》. The original film has been accused of lifting its story from a popular Japanese detective novel, The Devotion of Suspect X, which was also made into films in Japanese, Chinese, and Korean. This essay traces the many versions of the narrative to explore how comparing the Indian and Chinese films can recenter our understanding of global cinema and film circulation. When considering the many version of Drishyam, instead of focusing on tensions between center and periphery, we can examine both the anxieties and the creative power of cultural borrowing and the retelling of narratives in an increasingly inter-connected Asian film market

For many years, and within the context of pre-pandemic tourism growth in the Norwegian Arctic, governmental institutions have had expectations that Sámi indigenous people of the north of Norway should engage more strongly in the tourism economy. What does it however imply for Sámi people to become agents in tourism and take ownership to tourism development? This paper attends to Sámi people who engage as entrepreneurs in tourism in Norwegian parts of Sápmi. We suggest ways to identify when and how indigeneity emerges as a topic and meaning dimension that makes a difference in the entrepreneurship process and discuss how Sáminess can mark the process in ambiguous ways. The current paper’s exploration is enabled by a qualitative co-creative study and detailed account of a Sámi tourism venture in a coastal town in Finnmark, Norway. The paper attends to the venture as part of the entrepreneurs’ life stories, everyday life, and material relational practices and explores the intrinsic geographies and histories to which their various relational practices connect the enterprise. Sámi entrepreneurships in tourism are considered in light of the unstable and changing ethnic qualities of places, through an approach that acknowledges the current transformative complexities of indigeneity. The analysis illuminates tourism entrepreneurs’ engagements in indigenously transgressive enactments of places and of Sámi culture and tells about vitalities and vulnerabilities involved in becoming indigenous agents in Arctic destinations.