This paper examines the contest between Canadian American industrialist Cyrus Eaton and the Pugwash scientists’ leadership for influence over the early Pugwash scientists’ conferences. Eaton's activism has generally been dismissed in the historical literature as ineffective, naive and too uncritical of the Soviet Union. This paper argues that he was genuinely committed to international peace and security, that Eaton shared with Pugwash scientists a belief in the importance of intellectuals to global unity, and that he worked to bring about greater international peace and understanding through both his personal activism and his own conferences held in the town of Pugwash. Eaton, however, favoured a broader push for peace, which included participation by a wider range of intellectuals and a call for rapprochement with the Soviet Union. These differences between Eaton and the Pugwash scientists, I argue, were more than simply about approach: they represented different internationalist visions and manifested in different conceptualizations for the Pugwash scientists’ conferences. Eaton hoped to incorporate non-scientists and humanism into the conferences, and integrate them into his own broader conference programme at his Thinkers’ Lodge at Pugwash. The scientists, however, wanted to keep their conferences as distinctly scientists’ events, tied to science and its authority.

The heritage of World War II left an indelible mark on the relations between Italy and Yugoslavia. During the détente period, however, these two countries were able to overcome many historical resentments and established a fruitful co-operation in Cold War Europe. This article questions the engagement on state, regional and municipal levels and analyses the role of twin cities in this multilayered process. With the help of primary sources, we learn how the heritage of World War II played an important role in building new forms of post-war co-operation. In fact, post-war twinning is often the result of shared anti-fascist activities from the war years. However, this is not confined to communist municipalities or ‘red’ regions in Italy on one side, and socialist Yugoslavia on the other, but is a more fluid and flexible practice which involves historical ties, geographical positions, personal capacities and economic needs.

In recent years, China has expanded its national weather modification programme to exploit climatic resources and adapt to climate change. The unprecedented scale of China's weather modification programmes has raised concerns over potential environmental impacts, including transboundary impacts. This article analyzes the domestic governance of weather modification in China and the extent to which this legal framework satisfies China's obligations under customary international law to minimize risks of significant transboundary harm. We find that existing arrangements do not satisfy procedural obligations under customary international law; nor do they adequately address the risks of environmental impacts associated with the increased use of weather modification. Procedures for transboundary environmental impact assessment (EIA) and engagement with regional neighbours are needed for China to comply with international law and promote stability in the region.

Modern Chinese diplomatic histories rarely discuss the marriages of diplomats, leaving the impression that women made little impact on their husbands' careers. The extraordinary performance of Oei Hui-lan (1889–1992), wife of celebrated diplomat Wellington Koo (1888–1985), challenges this view. Hui-lan's contributions to diplomacy call our attention to the role played by Chinese diplomatic wives: as reception hostesses and embassy managers, they cultivated social relationships to facilitate diplomatic exchange. Hui-lan's story reminds us that to study modern diplomatic history solely through the lens of professionalization and institutionalization – while forgoing perspectives of gender and family – is insufficient to explain China's success in this period. Hui-lan's Peranakan family background in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) equipped her with the financial assets and cosmopolitan upbringing to shine as a diplomatic wife. And yet, though she benefited from her overseas origins, Hui-lan had an uneasy relationship to her Chinese identity. Concealing the tension in her two autobiographies, Hui-lan later reconstructed her past, emphasizing her patriotism and ethnic Chineseness to befit her established position. Thus, her case also shows how the complicated process of identity rebuilding and selective adaptation played out for elite overseas Chinese women through their engagement with modern China.

This study offers a diachronic look (1840-today) into the direct partial interrogation system in Quebec French. The main goals are to provide empirical evidence of the rise of the in situ variant within the Quebec French system, and to understand how the system evolved over centuries, independently from Hexagonal French. The data (based on more than 1600 tokens) show that the emergence of the in situ variant seems to depend on the wh word itself, but its usage seems to be more important in Montreal. There are a few examples of in situ found before the 1970s, but this variant was never publicly condemned nor associated to “bad usage”. This article, inspired by a historical sociolinguistics approach, provides much needed original data from five different corpora, both (written) historical and (oral) contemporary, and shows that the partial interrogative system in Quebec is not stable over time. The Montreal data suggests a system evolving differently in this city than in other regions of the province, and the data from each wh word show that interrogatives with comment still only marginally allow the in situ variant.

Cette étude offre un portrait diachronique (1840 à aujourd’hui) global de la variation à l’intérieur du système d’interrogation partielle directe en français québécois. L’objectif principal est de contribuer de façon empirique à la compréhension du développement de la variante in situ en français du Québec, et d’en arriver à montrer l’évolution, indépendante de celle ayant lieu en France, sur plus d’un siècle. Nos données (plus de 1600 occurrences) montrent que l’émergence de la variante in situ dépend du mot wh utilisé, et qu’elle semble plus avancée à Montréal qu’ailleurs. Nous avons trouvé quelques traces de la variante in situ avant 1970 dans les documents métalinguistiques, et montrons que cette variante n’a jamais été condamnée. Le présent article s’inscrit dans une approche de sociolinguistique historique et fournit des données originales, tirées de corpus historique (écrit) et contemporains (oraux). Ce portrait quantitatif montre à quel point le système d’interrogation directe partielle n’est pas stable dans le temps, et suggère une évolution dans la communauté montréalaise qui se distingue des autres communautés étudiées. Le mot interrogatif comment résiste encore à la variante in situ, mais les taux globaux d’utilisation nous permettent de considérer la variante in situ comme faisant partie intégrante de l’interrogation en français québécois oral.

The paper examines the introduction of trained female nurses for the British army men in colonial India between 1888 and 1920. It discusses the genesis of the Indian Nursing Service (INS), including the background and negotiations leading up to its formation, terms of employment, duties and working conditions of the nursing sisters. The memoir of Catharine Grace Loch, who served as the first Chief Lady Superintendent of the service is used extensively to trace the early experiences and challenges of the nursing sisters. The paper primarily argues that the INS being a new service, the colonial government maintained tight control over its functioning, and extreme conservatism in spending, thus retarding the growth of professional army nursing in India. Secondly, in examining the relations between the sisters and the (male) nursing orderlies, sub-medical and medical officers, the paper argues that the inadequate delineation of the nursing sisters’ position in the military medical hierarchy was an important reason for the undermining of their expertise and status. Thirdly, the paper contends that as an all-women service, nursing constituted an important avenue of female agency within the patriarchal colonial establishment, which subjected the sisters to scrutiny both professionally and socially. The paper analyses the resultant conditions and regulations imposed on the sisters – most of them determined by gender and class notions. Finally, the paper discusses the gradual establishment and recognition of the service as an important cornerstone for the health of the army, while highlighting the shortcomings that yet persisted up until 1920.

Elite conferences, such as the Nobel Symposia organized by the Nobel Foundation since 1965, have often put a premium on the uninhibited exchange of ideas rather than the broad exchange of information. Nobel Symposium 14, The Place of Value in a World of Fact (1969), combined this ethos with the ambition to engage with ‘world problems’ that were thought by many at the time to constitute a global crisis. This paper examines the relationship between the Nobel Foundation's ideal of scientific neutrality/objectivity and the ‘neutral activism’ in Swedish 1960s foreign policy. Furthermore, it investigates the social networking that preceded and followed the symposium, arguing that these processes were more important for the symposium's impact than the actual meeting. They formed channels through which it was able to influence other larger meetings, like the 1972 UN conference on the human environment, and contributed to the creation of international organizations, most importantly the International Federation of Institutes for Advanced Study. This suggests that the common historiographic focus on science meetings as events should be complemented by analytical perspectives that also view them as processes.

Reproductive health in state socialism is usually viewed as an area in which the broader contexts of women’s lives were disregarded. Focusing on expert efforts to reduce premature births, we show that the social aspects of women’s lives received the most attention. In contrast to typical descriptions emphasising technological medicalisation and pharmaceuticalisation, we show that expertise in early socialism was concerned with socio-medical causes of prematurity, particularly work and marriage. The interest in physical work in the 1950s evolved towards a focus on psychological factors in the 1960s and on broader socio-economic conditions in the 1970s. Experts highlighted marital happiness as conducive to healthy birth and considered unwed women more prone to prematurity. By the 1980s, social factors had faded from interest in favour of a bio-medicalised view. Our findings are based on a rigorous comparative analysis of medical journals from Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia and East Germany.

This article explores missionary medical discourses in three Telugu journals published in the early twentieth century, to analyse how caste pivoted denunciations of alcohol, especially toddy and arrack, in the Madras Presidency and the Hyderabad state. It argues that one women’s missionary journal, Vivekavathi, deployed medical knowledge to formulate subtle and occasionally explicit condemnations of toddy and arrack as unclean and unhealthy substances. The journal relied on universal medical and missionary, British and American knowledge frameworks to mark out Dalits and other marginalised castes as consumers of these local beverages. This stigma was conjured through medical narratives of marginalised castes as lacking in the knowledge of alcohol’s relation to digestion, toddy’s role in ruining maternal and child nutrition, the unhygienic environment of arrack shops and their propensity to ‘alcoholism’. However, this article also traces counter-caste voices who too invoked ‘the power of the universal’ to dispel caste stigma against marginalised castes. While both sets of voices deployed medical ‘enslavement’ to alcohol as an interpretive move, they differed in their social imperatives and political imaginaries, defined in caste terms. This article explores a third set of implications of the term ‘universal’ by analysing global medico-missionary narratives of alcohol in two other Telugu journals. On a methodological plane, this article also pushes for a hybrid reading of what counts for ‘scientific instruction’, where hymns, catechisms, parables and allegories are considered alongside conventional scientific experiments. In that sense, it upholds vernacular missionary publications as an invaluable resource for the social history of medicine.

During the interwar period, France put unprecedented efforts into public health measures targeting the colonised populations of sub-Saharan Africa. This investment in health was seen as crucial to ensuring the renewal of the African labour force needed for the economic development of the colonies. Syphilis, although less deadly than other endemic or epidemic diseases such as yellow fever, sleeping sickness and bubonic plague, was one of the most widespread infections in France’s sub-Saharan colonies. This article demonstrates the contradictory nature of the colonial medicine approach to this disease during the interwar years. The negative impact of syphilis on population growth in Africa made it a major threat to the colonial project, and France put significant, costly investment into tackling the disease, focusing its efforts on maternal and child health. However, a closer look at syphilis control in sub-Saharan Africa reveals that the disease was also minimised as a public health issue, under-resourced and downplayed by colonial doctors and administrators. This neglect was embodied in the invention of a new colonial disease, ‘exotic syphilis’, which was presented as being a relatively benign skin disease among the African populations. It was also reflected in care practices, via a form of mass medicine based on the use of blanchiment, which consisted of knowingly limiting treatment to a superficial effect.

Non-judicial remedies for corporate human rights abuses have a viable and complementary role to judicial remedies in mature jurisdictions, although in Ukraine the ‘bouquet’ of effective remedies is more of a still-life. The national mediation community is gaining momentum and the authors argue that mediation may take place within state-based non-judicial remedies when institutionalized by the office of the Ombudsman. The objective of this article is to scrutinize the rule of law, access to justice, and the effectiveness criteria of the UNGPs with regard to mediation. The authors conclude that mediation can meet all of the effectiveness criteria requirements and special effort should be devoted to addressing the challenges of power imbalances between parties, the confidential nature of mediation and the public demand for transparency, to ensure that mediation outcomes are in accord with internationally recognized human rights. Based on the findings, the authors suggest that a state-based business and human rights mediation scheme, in line with the UNGPs’ effectiveness criteria, should have its own three pillars, namely, accessibility, availability and awareness, with quality assurance as its cornerstone.