This article examines the history of energy use in colonial Senegal from 1885 to 1945, and it considers how African populations and French colonial officials built a colonial energy economy through overlapping and competing infrastructures of local and imported fuels, labor, and networks of transportation. As the colonial state constructed a new system of infrastructure, from railways and roads to trains and trucks, the French extended their reach into the interior and increased the production of cash crops. At the same time, peasant farmers, migrant workers, and urban merchants incorporated colonial infrastructures into their own regimes of energy use while also fashioning an infrastructure of locally produced fuels. Through the entanglement of local and colonial infrastructures and labor, as well as the appropriation of various forms of technology, Africans and their colonizers forged a hybrid colonial energy economy — not organic, not industrial — specific to the context of colonialism.

Recent studies have shown that the media in developing countries recognizes the anthropogenic impact on climate change, while ignoring the mitigation and adaptation responsibilities of national political actors. This article addresses the discursive motives underlying the disconnect between the impact of climate change and the responsibility of those in positions of political power. This study analyzes Turkish news articles and columns on climate change published in three newspapers with different political orientations between June 2018 and January 2020, a period during which the school strike movement and other local uprisings and debates began. It claims that news related to national climate policy largely omits or obscures references to the anthropogenic causes of climate change, to the degree that the political responsibility of tackling it remains unaddressed and absolves readers and politicians from taking action. The article also aims to underline the impact of political parallelism in terms of the print media’s approach to the government’s neoliberal economic policy and its duty to tackle climate change. Finally, it argues that these approaches generate specific types of environmental discourses which are embodied in newspapers’ conceptions of nature, their solutions to climate change, and the actors of those solutions proposed by newspapers.

We argue that topic-modeling, an unsupervised machine-learning technique for analysis of large corpora, can be a powerful tool for legal-historical research. We provide a non-technical introduction to topic-modeling driven by the presentation of an example of how researchers can use the data that topic-modeling produces. The context of the example is pre-industrial English caselaw on finance. We generate new insights on the timing of pertinent legal developments, the linkages of law on finance to other areas of law, and the relative importance of common-law and equity in the emergence of law and legal ideas relevant to finance. We argue that topic-modeling has the potential to bridge traditional legal history and economics, increasing the influence of the former on the latter, which is overdue. The output of topic-modeling includes the data required to generate a quantitative macroscopic overview of the flow of legal history. These data can be used in many ways in subsequent legal-historical research. Epistemologically, topic-modeling offers an escape from the temptations of Whig history and opens up new avenues for inductive analysis characteristic of traditional historical research.