Towards the end of the nineteenth century, British colonists in Jamaica became increasingly exasperated by the damage caused to their sugar plantations by rats. In 1872, a British planter attempted to solve this problem by introducing the small Indian mongoose (Urva auropunctata). The animals, however, turned on Jamaica's insectivorous birds and reptiles, leading to an explosion in the tick population. This paper situates the mongoose catastrophe as a closing chapter in the history of the nineteenth-century acclimatization movement. While foreign observers saw the introduction of the mongoose as a cautionary tale, caricaturing British Jamaica as overrun by a plague of weasels and ticks, British colonists, administrators and naturalists – identifying a gradual decline of both populations – argued that the ‘balance of nature’ would eventually reassert itself. As this paper argues, through this dubious claim they were attempting to retrospectively rationalize or justify the introductions and their disastrous aftermath. This strategy enabled them to gloss over the lasting ecological damage caused by the mongoose, and allowed its adherents to continue their uncritical support of both the Jamaican plantation economy and animal introductions in the British Empire.

This article traces the spread of a norm of confidentiality within elite political culture during the Warring States, Qin, and Western Han periods. Instead of an emphasis on secrecy within military and administrative contexts, it explores discussions of “leaking” (xie 泄/洩 or lou 漏) and characterizations of “confidentiality” (zhou 周 and mi 密) in idealized representations of political action. While Warring States texts drew upon a medical language of qi circulation to fashion a model of a perfectly leakproof ruler, by Western Han attention had shifted from rulers to officials. This valorization of official confidentiality was connected to institutional developments, especially proscriptions against leaking from privileged spaces at the imperial court, visible in sources from the late Western Han. In this final period there arose a celebrated norm of circumspection, shared by rulers and officials alike, that in theory would allow all parties to evade disaster.

In 1935, the Nazi Party promulgated the Reich citizenship law, which, to protect the purity of the Volksgemeinschaft, denaturalized numerous people who perceived themselves as German. Despite this perceived threat to the national body, the Third Reich drafted some mixed-race men to serve in the Wehrmacht during World War II. Traditionally, scholars have focused their studies of mixed-race veterans on the so-called Jewish Mischlinge who served in the Wehrmacht. This article expands the aperture by examining the oral history testimony of Hans Hauck, a Black German Wehrmacht veteran whose wartime experiences present a complex story of a man who claimed to be German despite legal structures and normative ideals about Germanness that excluded him. Drawing on Hauck's oral history testimonies regarding two periods of his military service, I argue that Hauck used his body, symbols, and physical spaces to seek recognition as a legitimate claimant of Germanness.

This article highlights the continuing relevance of a classic bioethical text, “Bioethics as a Discipline,” published by the Hastings Center’s cofounder Daniel Callahan in 1973. Connecting the text’s programmatic recommendations with later reflections and interventions Callahan wrote about the development of bioethics illuminates how the vision Callahan established and the reality this vision helped create were interrelated—just not in the way Callahan had hoped for. Although this portrait relies on an individual perception of the development of bioethics, it might nevertheless, through its unique linkage of different bioethical temporalities, contribute to a broader reassessment of what bioethics became and why.

Since its initial publication in 2018, Professor Anya Plutynski’s Explaining Cancer: Finding Order in Disorder has garnered a great deal of accolades.1 In 2021, The London School of Economics and Political Science conferred Professor Plutynski the Lakatos Award, recognizing the book’s significant contribution to the philosophy of science. On the heels of its recent reissuing as a paperback, it is an ideal time to revisit this remarkable work.

Drawing on a qualitative study conducted with both individuals who have been shunned from the Jehovah’s Witnesses community and those who were in a position to shun others, the authors identify areas of development within the Serious Crime Act 2015 and propose that there is scope to interpret the law broadly to include instances of people shunned from the Jehovah’s Witnesses community.

Much has been written about the so-called Franklin expedition (1845–52?), but not about the master mariners, who joined as “Greenland pilots,” as experienced whaling masters on Royal Navy expeditions were usually called in the 19th century. Having been on no Royal Navy expeditions before, next to nothing was known about Scottish whaling master James Reid, the ice master of HMS Erebus in Franklin’s expedition. Putting together all the available biographical information about him for the first time, the goal of this article is not only to tell who he was but also to tell how and why he joined the expedition, and as far as this is possible to say – what he experienced in its course.

“Scleroderma,” the rheumatologist said after examining my stiff swollen arms and legs. “Unfortunately, given your biomarkers, it’s likely to get worse before it gets better, but you never know.” She gave a quick rundown of what I might expect—rapidly progressive skin and joint tightening, GI symptoms, high likelihood of multi-organ involvement…. “Let’s hope for the best.” She paused, then asked if I had any questions.

I defend a weak version of the Pigou–Dalton principle for chances. The principle says that it is better to increase the survival chance of a person who is more likely to die rather than a person who is less likely to die, assuming that the two people do not differ in any other morally relevant respect. The principle justifies plausible moral judgements that standard ex post views, such as prioritarianism and rank-dependent egalitarianism, cannot accommodate. However, the principle can be justified by the same reasoning that has recently been used to defend the core axiom of ex post prioritarianism and egalitarianism, namely, Pigou–Dalton for well-being. The arguably biggest challenge for proponents of Pigou–Dalton for chances is that it violates state dominance for social prospects. However, I argue that we have independent reason for rejecting state dominance for social prospects, since it prevents a social planner from properly respecting people's preferences.

“Direct action” emerged as a central concept in labour-movement politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This article traces and explains that process of invention. In doing so, it seeks to settle three currently unresolved historical problems: the problem of the meaning of direct action; the problem of its relative novelty; and the problem of its relationship to nation. The article draws upon pamphlets and newspapers published on four continents in English, French, Spanish, and German. It argues that the concept of direct action was used in several analytically distinguishable ways: categorical; performative; and strategic. While aspects of direct action were evident in many nations over several decades, French activists played a decisive and catalytic role in the development of the concept. They welded the categorical, performative, and strategic together. They assembled key performances into an agreed repertoire. And they underlined the revolutionary significance of this combination. This new assemblage was then widely taken up across the global labour movement.

In colonial Hispanic America, widows and widowers were in an unfavorable position if their spouse died without a will, only inheriting from them if the deceased left no blood relatives to the 10th degree of kinship. This article examines the extent to which the intestate position of the surviving spouse improved in the new civil codes of the sixteen republics, and how their approaches were influenced by the circulation of ideas. It finds that in all except one the spouse came to be favored over the extended family. If the deceased left children, two approaches developed with respect to the inclusion of spouses: where they obtained an unconditional right to an inheritance share equal to a child, and where their inheriting depended on their relative poverty or need. These reforms took place in concert with the rise of the centrality of the conjugal unit as the focus of affection, loyalty, and responsibilities, and prior to such reforms in Europe. The countries that went furthest in elevating the position of spouses, Venezuela and Argentina, were those most deeply influenced by the ideas and changes fostered by liberalism.

Across the contemporary world, neoliberalism operates as an anticipatory regime through which mediatised conceptions of the future are aligned to an aggressive (absolute) marketisation of social life. Alongside a critical, queer-theoretical attention to homonormativity, this article uses multimodal critical discourse studies techniques to analyse how such a neoliberal future for LGBTQ people is envisioned in #HoldTight, a pride campaign by an Australian and New Zealand bank. #HoldTight focused on how the act of holding hands can be turned from a source of shame to a joyful, powerful tool for social action: ‘if you feel like letting go, hold tight’. My cultural-phenomenological analysis of #HoldTight demonstrates how this imbrication of LGBTQ rights discourse and mediatised capitalism engaged embodied, hopeful affects as semiotic resources. In this way, I argue that the bank enshrined a speculative, anticipatory chronotope of a future better world, while validating neoliberal governmentality as a benevolent form of LGBTQ agency. (Neoliberalism, multimodal critical discourse studies, queer linguistics, affect, embodiment, cultural phenomenology)*

The longstanding practice of building opera librettos on stories from classical antiquity (especially Greece and Rome, and, to a lesser extent, Egypt, Persia and Babylonia) waned in the early 1800s, as impresarios began to favour plots with more obvious current-day resonance (though sometimes set a few centuries in the past, to skirt objections from government censors and, in some lands, church authorities). Still, imaginative librettists and composers found ways of rejuvenating an ancient setting and producing an opera that spoke to the day's audiences instead of feeling stuffy or academic. One of the biggest successes in French serious opera of the 1850s was Félicien David's Herculanum, set to a text primarily by the renowned playwright and poet Joseph Méry. Widely hailed, not least by composer-critics Hector Berlioz and Ernest Reyer, the work freshened the ‘ancient Rome’ conventions by locating the action far to the south, near what is today Naples, and by including, as the main characters, two powerful aristocrats from the Euphrates valley, and two young adepts of the nascent Christian movement – and a fifth character, Satan himself, come to wreak havoc in the world. All of this would seem a stewpot of a librettist's wild imaginings were it not for the quality and impressive variety of David's music – and the opportunities that libretto and music together give to imaginative performers, as has been demonstrated in the work's three major revivals beginning in 2014 (in Belgium/France, Ireland and Hungary).

This article analyzes Hungary’s kin-state policy starting from the premise that the concept of collective narcissism most succinctly captures its emotional foundations. I look to substantiate this claim by examining at a wide range of sources on how Hungary feels toward neighboring states and show the preponderance of emotions connected to collective narcissism. The real-life consequences of collective narcissism are demonstrated through a case study of the relationship between Hungary and Ukraine before and after the Russian attack of 2022. Overall, I find that anger is the master emotion of Hungary’s kin-state policy, resulting in a lack of solidarity and characteristic self-centeredness in Hungary’s foreign policy, which cannot be explained by rational factors alone.

Adolescents, particularly those in multiethnic, multilingual communities, have become central to sociolinguistic research in the variationist tradition (Cheshire, Nortier & Adger 2015). In several studies of adolescent speech in European urban centres, the same set of Arabic-derived epistemic phrases, namely wallah, wallahi and related phrases meaning ‘swear’, appear to be in use (see, e.g., Quist 2005; Opsahl 2009; Lehtonen 2015). In this article, we document how these phrases are used in the speech of adolescents from a borough of West London and demonstrate the functional similarities between the current data and studies of adolescents in other West European contexts. Using a distributional analysis, we also draw several comparisons between our data and data collected in previous studies of adolescent speech in London. We find functional and distributional similarities and contrasts in both cases. We then discuss the consequences of these findings for the study of epistemic markers and their relevance in adolescent speech.

In 1989, after few decades of Soviet disinformation, a fourth investigation by the state commission finally recognized Bykivnia, located on the outskirt of Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, as being a burial place for victims of the Soviet regime. Later in 1994, the Historical and Cultural Reserve “Bykivnians’ky Graves” was launched at the site, marking the initial point of the state remembrance of victims of Soviet political repressions and consequently indicating the importance of the victimhood narrative when portraying the Soviet past. This article examines the historical recognition of Bykivnia and the development of a martyrological landscape on the site in context with the establishment of state legislative actions and commemorative policies regarding victims of Soviet political repressions. The case study of Bykivnia should provide a basic understanding of domestic and international contradictions when creating a victimhood narrative and will question approaches taken for adapting this narrative in building a national identity.