The Centennial International Exhibition held in Melbourne in 1888 showcased the city's exceptional wealth and cultural aspirations. As part of the exhibition, the visiting English conductor Frederic Hymen Cowen presented 263 orchestral concerts, cultivating a taste for classical music that would sustain a further orchestra, conducted by the English composer G.W.L. Marshall-Hall, that presented several concerts per year from 1892 to 1912. Immigration both before and during that period was a key factor in the urbanization and modernization of Melbourne as well as the success and achievements of Marshall-Hall's orchestra. Yet little is known about individual members and the trajectories of their careers. By examining the lists of members appearing in 19 years’ worth of programmes of the orchestra, this study contributes to the practice of ‘urban musicology’ by providing compelling evidence of the role of immigration in laying the foundation of music performance and performance training in a settler colonial city, and highlights three major steps in the evolution of the profession: the increasing presence in the orchestra of talented and in some cases exceptionally talented Australian-born musicians who were to succeed the older European-born and -trained musicians; the growing participation of women in the orchestra as well as the profession more broadly; and the strengthening of the Musicians’ Union's stranglehold on professional accreditation at the expense of women, amateurs and foreigners.

This article examines the origins and evolution of Hong Kong triads since 1842 through official archival documents, media analysis, interviews with triad members and an analytical framework of criminal politics (organized crime–state relations). We propose ‘the urban criminal polity’ as a novel concept to explicate urban criminal organizations as a non-state power in the city. We argue that interactions between triad societies and the British colonial government were primarily characterized by enforcement–evasion rather than confrontation. Since the 1990s, alliances have grown between patriotic triads and the Chinese central government, which enhances the Chinese government's control over the city.

Geopolitical interventions since the end of the 1980s—such as the collapse of the Soviet Union, a decline in the activities of state-owned coal companies, and governmental initiatives to increase tourism activities—have affected the community viability of two main settlements on Svalbard: Barentsburg and Longyearbyen. This paper explores how the residents of these settlements (with different cultural backgrounds) perceive the effects of socioeconomic transitions on community viability. The analysis of qualitative interviews with residents of Barentsburg (n = 62) and Longyearbyen (n = 36) reveals the residents’ perceptions of the pace of the transition and the changing community composition. New types of commercial activities, such as tourism, contribute to local value creation and socioeconomic development but come with concerns grounded in community fluctuation, environmental protection, economic prioritisation, and power relationships. Compared to Longyearbyen, Barentsburg has undergone relatively minor demographic and social changes and remains stable in terms of culture, language, and management practices. We conclude that the viability of Longyearbyen and Barentsburg during the transition was affected by community dynamics and fluctuations, social relationships within and between communities, and local institutional practices.

This article asks under what historical conditions people who consider themselves as belonging to the ingroup resort to collective violence against free labour migrants. Based on cases in the North Atlantic, and largely limited to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it offers a starting point for a more global approach. By using the concept of boundary work, I conclude that once ethnic boundaries are in place they need maintenance, through discourse, legislation, and surveillance. Migrants defined as outsiders, who did not accept their inferior role and thus became direct competitors for such key resources as jobs and houses, were bound to evoke irritation, protest, and, in extreme cases, mob violence. The latter occurred a number of times in early modern England, but such incidents occurred especially in the period 1860–1880 (US and Australia), 1880–1900 (Western Europe), and on both sides of the Atlantic around World War I. In all these cases, boundary-making (through heightened nationalism, imperialism, and embedded racial hierarchies) was prominent, while, at the same time, the state was unable or unwilling to protect its citizens against competition on the labour market and to provide a welfare safety net. This lack of actual boundary maintenance could lead to mob violence, especially when authorities were unwilling or unable to intervene. Moreover, it is striking that violence was directed especially against outsiders who were considered racially or culturally inferior. These included the Chinese and African-American internal migrants in the United States and colonial migrants in the United Kingdom.

The law of international watercourses consists mainly of a series of bilateral, multilateral, regional, and global agreements that establish binding rules through which state parties jointly manage transboundary water resources. China similarly manages its shared freshwaters through a series of bilateral agreements. Increasingly, however, it relies on non-binding soft law instruments to manage these resources with its riparian neighbours. An important example of this is the Lancang-Mekong Cooperation, a branch of the Belt and Road Initiative. Its use of soft instruments, which recognize international law and promote projects, displays evidence of merging and emerging normativities, ensuring that it is capable of playing both a supporting and a developmental role in the law of international watercourses.

War and peace are the two incompatible notions. War and compassion are not: war often calls for human compassion to save not only friends but also enemies. As the technology of war has advanced since the nineteenth century, the targets of compassion in the form of philanthropy, social work, and humanitarianism have also expanded to include soldiers, civilians, and children. In this article, I explore the link between war and compassion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by focusing on the plight of Japanese war orphans in Japan and Chinese war orphans in China. These sixty-seven Chinese war orphans were brought to Japan in 1939 by a member of the Japanese Imperial army stationed in occupied China. The founders of orphanages in Japan argued that war incited their compassion to save the young victims of war. Yet they were also forced to work under the watchful eyes of the State. How did Japan's power structures, which created misery in both Japan and China, change over time? How did the Japanese social structures, which tried to help alleviate misery among children, change? My goal is to relate these questions to each other for further understanding the link between war and compassion between 1867 and 1945 and in the early postwar era.

This article grapples with ‘Let It Rain’, the title track of Bishop Paul S. Morton and the Full Gospel Baptist Church Fellowship's 2003 release, which revises Michael Farren's contemporary Christian ballad by braiding it together with Prince's ‘Purple Rain’ and the formal logic of Black gospel tradition. As the Full Gospel version of this song commingles these seemingly discordant components, Morton, choir, and band turn a sung prayer into an assertion of interworldly presence. Building on its received musical materials, this gospel power ballad performs the Black gospel tradition's characteristic inflection – an arresting turn from one level of musicking to a heightened, ecstatic frame. In so doing, this song brings rain near, illuminating the links between performances of musical ecstasy and musical Blackness.

This article contributes to the literature on rural politics in Turkey by investigating peasants’ land occupations between 1965 and 1980. We show that agricultural modernization after 1945 created the structural conditions for land conflicts by enabling the reaching of the frontier of cultivable land and facilitating landlords’ displacement of tenants. The 1961 Constitution’s promise of land reform and the rise of the center-left and socialist politics helped peasants press for land reform by combining direct action and legalistic discourse. Moreover, the vastness of state-owned land and the incompleteness of cadastral records allowed peasants to challenge landlords’ ownership claims. During land occupations, villagers often claimed that contested areas were public property illegally encroached upon by landlords, and that the state was constitutionally obliged to distribute it to peasants. Although successive right-wing governments decreed these actions to be intolerable violations of property rights, their practical approach was more flexible and conciliatory. Although nationwide land reform was never realized, land occupations extracted considerable concessions via the distribution of public land and inexpensive land sold by landlords.

Taking its cue from the ‘material turn’ of recent years, this survey examines the connections between infrastructure, welfare and citizenship in north European cities in the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It argues that connections between these different constructs were fundamental not only to how cities functioned but how citizens themselves were imagined. As such, the survey critiques histories of welfare and citizenship that foreground the national and neglect the urban origins of the modern state. It does so by examining infrastructure, welfare and citizenship in smaller European nation-states such as Belgium, Denmark and Ireland rather than in the more familiar cases of Germany, France and Britain. Asking questions about the inter-relationship of infrastructure, welfare and citizenship, the survey suggests, offers an important way to reinterpret what the ‘modern city’ meant in twentieth-century northern Europe.

This article engages with notions of conservation in the Anthropocene from a history-of-science perspective. It does so by looking at an iconic case of infrastructure development that since the 1970s continues to cause controversies amongst wildlife experts: the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS). I examine how, from the 1970s onwards, the TAPS functioned as an experimental device for ecologists to test the adaptability of migratory caribou to changed environments and their dependency on unaltered ranges. Based on archival research, published reports and interviews, I show that arguments about animal learning, despite assigning a more active role to caribou in the conservation process, did not result in more inclusive forms of development that respected ecological processes and the various stakes of the caribou. In fact, a focus on caribou crossings as an easily observable, yet sole, indicator of the pipeline's impact resulted in a simplified representation of environmental relationships, that was used by the oil industry to argue for additional extraction projects. Arguments based on the material interdependencies of caribou with their environment, though seemingly similar to traditional arguments about range preservation, emerged as part of conservationists’ attempts to account for the ecological stakes of caribou, other animals and people.

It is possible to distinguish between empire, as a form of political order, and imperialism, as a process of aggressive expansion. Mill's liberalism allows for a legitimate empire, in which a civilized state rules a less civilized foreign people paternalistically to prepare them for liberal democratic self-rule. However, it rejects paternalistic imperialism, in the sense of aggression designed to establish such an empire. Apparent textual evidence to the contrary really demonstrates Mill's commitment to three distinct theses: that imperialism may benefit those subject to it, and this can mitigate its evil; that it is easier to justify non-aggressive, empire-creating wars of conquest in response to aggression by barbarian powers; and finally, that civilized states are justified in engaging distant uncivilized peoples non-aggressively, even though the latter's aggressive tendencies mean that such engagement renders empire-justifying wars more likely.

The paper explores the tale of two 'epicentres’ – metropolitan New York and Lombardy – and seeks to depict the socio-demographic patterns that characterise the worst cases of infection, hospitalisation, and death during the first six months of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. By drawing upon secondary data concerning sub-territorial units within the two regions – ZIP-code level and counties in New York and municipalities in Italy – the paper compares the characteristics of the two areas in an effort to understand both how they became the original major epicentres and how their experiences of the pandemic differed. We suspected initially that the pandemic in Lombardy was a function of a complex constellation of variables, such as the age of the population, the unexpected emergence of the virus, and features of the local health system. In New York, the pattern seemed to fit a more familiar dynamic, the kind one would expect from the course that most pandemics take: the poor suffer the worst. The paper tries to extend the understanding of the complex and not univocal mix of social variables that can facilitate the spread of a pandemic and make its effects extreme.

By examining a series of events involving sightings of multicolored clouds and discoveries of colorful minerals in China's southwestern provinces, this article considers the political implications of natural manifestations of polychromy in the Yongzheng period. Through previously unexamined written and material correspondence between governor-general Ortai (1680–1745) and the Yongzheng emperor (r. 1723–35), I argue that physical occurrences of color, both above and below ground, were understood as signs of Heavenly approval of the emperor's governance at a time of questionable military expansion into the Southwest. I also consider how celestial phenomena and colorful stones were translated into design motifs and carved into exclusive items at the Qing court, positing that these objects were understood as signs of the Yongzheng emperor's political legitimacy and concrete evidence of Qing control over the remote reaches of the empire.

This article studies two late works by Schumann: the Lied ‘Meine Rose’, Op. 90 No. 2 (1850), and the Fantasiestück, Op. 73 No. 1, for clarinet and piano (1849). It analyses the works in the light of nineteenth-century developments in approaches to the treatment of tonality. Both ‘Meine Rose’ and the Fantasiestück are miniatures and can thus be linked with music-making in private salons. The choice of the two works is based on musical as well as aesthetic factors. Musically, they both avoid confirming their main tonic in a firm manner, a feature that the article links with aesthetics of the time. Most importantly, the music's inability to secure a firm tonal centre can be associated with early nineteenth-century aesthetics of longing: in the same way that unsuccessful attempts to secure the tonic underlie the two Schumann works, so contemporaneous aesthetics saw human existence as being governed by unfulfilled longing. The paper argues that in ‘Meine Rose’ the Romantic ideology can be connected to transcendental qualities associated with nature, while the Fantasiestück can be associated more generally with infinity and longing. In both works, it is precisely Schumann's special treatment of the tonic, drastically departing from Classical conventions, that justifies connecting the works with these aesthetic issues.

Some of the linguistic changes which are crucial in the history of English and have traditionally been ascribed to Middle English can already be observed in late Northumbrian. One of these changes is the extension of genitive singular -es from the a-stems to other noun classes. Another is the spread of nominative/accusative plural -as from the masculine a-stems to the neuters and to other declensions. The aim of this article is to establish the actual scale on which these two interparadigmatic analogical changes are found in the glosses to the Lindisfarne Gospels and to the Durham Collectar, both dating from the tenth century.

The present study intends to shed more light on the process of morphological restructuring affecting the declensional system of late Northumbrian, and has three main aims: (a) to determine the pattern of dissemination of the innovative inflectional endings; (b) to establish which variables are significant in these analogical processes: declension, type and token frequency, grammatical context, Latin lemma, demarcation; and (c) to account for the different developmental tendencies of these two linguistic changes.