In 1806 the antiquarian Francesco Cancellieri wrote a treatise on the new bells fabricated for the campanile of the Capitoline palaces, replacing earlier ones destroyed during the Roman Republic of 1798-9. Cancellieri's text, and the story of those bells which it contains, offers important insights into the significance of bells in early nineteenth-century Italian Catholicism and also about clerical responses to trauma and loss. Close reading shows how Cancellieri used historical techniques to reconstruct an auditory community around the bells, part of the wider programme of ‘resacralisation’ which took place in Rome at this time. His words also hint at a complex and nuanced perspective on how to reconcile Rome's papal and republican traditions, which contrasts to later, more reactionary endeavours.

The present study reports on the effect of study abroad on the choice of request perspectives in formal and informal situations using the intermediary of an open role play test. The study is a longitudinal one involving 24 Ghanaian L2 French learners. At least 12 out of the 24 did a study abroad in France and the other 12 in Benin. Both groups studied for a duration of 10 months in their respective contexts. Additional data included learner’s self-reported volume of interaction in French per day. The main results show that the effect of formality of the context on the choice of request perspectives is only observed after study abroad. This seems to be as a result of their interaction with L1 speakers during study abroad leading to the adoption of native-like use of request perspectives in formal and informal situations.

In the wake of Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea, US president Barack Obama infamously called Putin’s Russia “a regional power […] threatening some of its immediate neighbours, not out of strength but out of weakness. […] The fact that Russia felt it had to go in militarily and lay bare these violations of international law indicate[d] less influence, not more.” Obama’s words reportedly angered Putin, who had long striven to convince the West, and primarily the USA, to treat Russia as a geopolitical equal. Being considered a regional power fundamentally denied equality with superpowers such as the USA.

Recently several authors have proposed proxies of welfare that equate some (as opposed to all) choices with welfare. In this paper, I first distinguish between two prominent proxies: one based on context-independent choices and the other based on reason-based choices. I then propose an original proxy based on choices that individuals state they would want themselves to repeat at the time of the welfare/policy evaluation (confirmed choices). I articulate three complementary arguments that, I claim, support confirmed choices as a more reliable proxy of welfare than context-independent and reason-based choices. Finally, I discuss the implications of these arguments for nudges and boosts.

This article tracks the remarkable role played by a commercial property developer, the Arndale Property Company, in the transformation of urban Britain across the second half of the twentieth century. This was an era of great change in cities, as urban environments were remodeled and urban centers had to adapt to deindustrialization and the rise of a consumer-driven and service-dominated economy. Arndale was at the forefront of these changes, installing dozens of shopping centers in British towns and cities from the 1950s to the 1990s. The company imported American-inspired commercial architectures, furnishing cities with new landscapes of consumption and mass leisure through which the affluent society was encountered and made concrete. Arndale was also a driving force in the growing financialization of urban property development that began in Britain as early as the 1950s and gathered pace as the century wore on. The company's history thus illuminates important shifts in economic activity and cultural life that had far-reaching impacts on British cities and society. It also highlights Arndale's role at the heart of the postwar urban renewal order, showing how far the company's success depended on its status as a favored partner to public planning authorities pursuing town center redevelopment. The centrality of such public-private developmental partnerships, often overlooked, particularly within adjacent urban disciplines, reveals much about the precise contours and political economy of the British postwar settlement.

This article investigates the ethnic entanglements of the land reform debate in the first Polish Diet (1919–1922). Against the backdrop of global comparative studies, interwar Poland, haunted by land hunger, rural poverty, and high concentration of land ownership, is an odd case. Despite conditions conducive to far-reaching land reforms, that is, a high level of inter-elite conflict and semiautocratic order, the Polish reform was very moderate, if not disappointing. Unpacking the series of moves in the debate and the sequence of hairbreadth voting on its shape, I ask why, despite broad acceptance of the reform across the political spectrum, it could not attract enough support to be swiftly executed. The ethnic composition of the country triggered controversies concerning German farmers and peasants of the ethnically diversified eastern borderlands. Major political parties shared tacit Polish nationalism, but the history of political alignments made the nationalist politicians susceptible to the lobbying of the landed elite and estranged them from peasant parties. The land holdings of nobles were considered a bulwark of the nation, which effectively blocked the alternative idea of integrating the ethnic minorities via land ownership.

The distribution of labials and coronals within Spanish CVCVCV words and English and Dutch CVCVC words has been studied from a functional perspective and in fine detail. We argue that word recognition is key in the explanation of the results; as a word is pronounced, an increasing number of word candidates is eliminated, and consequently the beginning of the word has a higher communicative load than the more predictable end. We argue that this explains the favouring of labials at the beginning of the word and (some) coronals at the end. A novel finding in this study is that lexical stress is a relevant factor in the distribution of the studied consonants. A possible explanation is that stress plays a role in the elimination word candidates. In Spanish, English, and Dutch discourse, the majority of words begins with a stressed syllable and, therefore, an unstressed initial syllable eliminates more word candidates and the communicative load is reduced more, which affects the distribution of labials and (some) coronals.

Lack of economic data based on ethnicity makes the study of minority economies in linguistically or ethnically mixed regions problematic. Yet, there is much to learn from these hard cases of economic development in terms of the policies that guarantee ethnic or linguistic survival and reproduction. The present article investigates the long-term economic development of the Slovenian minority in Italy between 1954 and 2020. It does so by applying the theoretical framework by new institutional economists Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson (2005), which looks at the dynamic role of political and economic institutions for the generation of economic growth. The parable of this community’s economy shows that political power and economic success can be flimsy and ephemeral. Strategic, long-term economic planning and, especially, contingent planning against foreseeable risks, both of which require the systematic collection of accurate data and the coordination of representative organizations, are key to successful reproduction and sustained growth.

This article examines the survival strategies of forestry workers and craftspeople in the late Ottoman Empire. Through the example of the Tahtacı, a semi-nomadic community specialized in lumbering in the forests along the western and southern coasts of Anatolia, it visualizes the adaptation strategies of forestry labourers in the changing economic and ecological environment of the Mediterranean Basin, which became warmer, less forested, and more integrated into regional and global markets after the mid-nineteenth century. Contrary to the generally accepted view that perceives the Tahtacı as a self-isolated, authentic clan with a static way of life, this article considers them a highly adaptive community that developed a wide range of strategies to earn their livelihood under intense commercialization in forestry and agriculture.