The Reformation exacted considerable changes on towns across Britain, occurring at the same time as the shift away from broadcloths to other economies. Part of the process of change was the de-sacralization of former monastic spaces. The parallel process of increased commons enclosures alongside acquisitions of church lands produced a secularized and privatized landscape which transitioned the medieval city to the modern. The active enclosures by Coventry corporation in the 1530s and 1540s, and local documents rationalizing such actions under the concept of benefiting the common weal, provide a clear example of the process.

The scholarship of high medieval warfare tends not to emphasize the contribution made by urban communities, regarding cities as the passive objects of military campaigning. This article shows that the inhabitants of medieval London, however, had emerged as an organized military community from an early date, and were regarded by contemporaries as unusually disciplined, effective, fighters.

“Policing, Profits, and the Rise of Immigration Detention in New York's ‘Chinese Jails’” explains how Chinese exclusion law created a “detention economy” in upstate New York. From 1900–1909, Northern New York jails held thousands of Chinese migrants who had been apprehended by immigration authorities crossing the U.S.-Canada border, and had filed habeas corpus claims in district courts. While scholarship on Chinese Exclusion has addressed the legal battles around due process, it has overlooked the detention infrastructure that these claims produced. Because the federal immigration service had no detention facilities in the region, they “boarded out” Chinese detainees at local jails, paying counties a nightly rate for each migrant held. These contracts transformed Chinese migrants into a commodity for rural communities looking to secure federal cash, with four Northern New York counties constructing separate “Chinese Jails” in order to increase the number of Chinese migrants they could incarcerate. This article challenges the scholarship that has presented immigration detention as a Cold War era development, instead showing how communities profited off jailing migrants at the turn of the century. Through the case of U.S. v. Sing Tuck, I argue that immigration officials eventually turned to the courts to streamline deportations and reduce their need for jail space.

This article critically examines the prevalent nationalist interpretation of historical images featuring textiles from rural regions. In an effort to disentangle the threads of folk costumes, it proposes a conscious unlearning of the way we read images of rural material culture from the late 19th century. This period has entered historiography as a period of intensifying national movements and political use of rural culture, in particular in Central and Eastern Europe. So-called folk costumes have been viewed as a symbolic representation of the nation, whereas their broader social and economic role in the history of industrial society has been overshadowed. By bringing together the production, collection, and exhibition of rural material culture, this article reveals processes in industrial society that shaped the modern history of folk costumes. It draws on late-19th-century source material stemming from a network centered in Prague that promoted textiles from rural Bohemia, Moravia, Hungary, and Galicia as ethno-commodities. Textiles were integrated into women’s industrial education and presented at events promoting national economy and the latest technological innovations. Thus, this article contributes to nationalism studies by discussing capitalism and industrialism and seeks to further scrutinize the history of nationalism in Central and Eastern Europe.

This article uses demographic data from nineteenth-century Angola to evaluate, within a West Central African setting, the widely accepted theory that sub-Saharan Africa's integration within the Atlantic world through slave and commodity trading caused significant transformations in slavery in the subcontinent. It specifically questions, first, whether slaveholding became more dominant in Angola during the last phase of the transatlantic slave trade; second, whether Angolan slave populations were predominantly female; and third, whether slavery in Angola expanded further during the cash crop revolution that accompanied the nineteenth-century suppression of the Atlantic slave trade. Besides making a significant contribution to understanding the demographic context of slavery in the era of abolition, the article aims to display ways in which historians can use the population surveys the Portuguese Empire carried out in Africa from the late eighteenth century.

Environmental law remains grounded in a ‘one-world world’ paradigm. This ontological structure asserts that, regardless of variation in world-construing, all beings occupy one ‘real’ world of discrete entities. The resulting legal system is viewed as an independent set of norms and procedures regulating the ‘human’ use of the ‘environment’ by specifying allowable harm rather than adjudicating on mutually enhancing relations. This legal form fails to fulfil its purpose of prevention and remediation, and constitutes a significant barrier to overcoming world(s)-destroying conditions. As such, we take up the injunction for a ‘legal ontological turn’ so as to lay bare these assumptions, and to be able to move beyond their constraints into a renewed exploration at the intersection of vastly differing legalities. In dialogue with systems-grounded ecological jurisprudence(s), Indigenous legal thinking, and anthropological insight, we seek to ground future discussions towards building a truly earth-sustaining form of environmental law for all beings.

The “Arctic Uchronotopias” special issue of Polar Record is an important contribution to scholarly reflection on resource extraction. The ideas, perspectives, and empirical cases that we encounter have significance for extractivism wherever it takes place, both inside and outside of the Arctic region. To see extractivism through an Arctic lens is particularly useful since it brings up many of the issues that are often at stake in extraction activities, but not always at the same time: geopolitics, transboundary relations, environmental and climate impacts, cultural and natural heritage, indigenous relations, rights issues, local and regional development, and lives and fates of communities. Above all, these papers bring out the full spectrum of issues and tensions related to ongoing major global shifts, such as the Great Acceleration and Overheating, and those transformations of which resource extraction forms a major part. The research presented in Arctic Uchronotopias demonstrates that affect and emotions have explanatory value in the geopolitics of Arctic resource extraction. It also shows that emotional and cognitive experience and wisdom carry values and properties that conventional Environmental Impact Assessments and other technologies of evaluation and decision-making can capture.

This article clarifies the precise connection between two early national Supreme Court decisions, the little-known Terrett v. Taylor (1815) and the landmark Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819). The missing link between these cases is incorporation. Both disputes arose in the turmoil of post-Revolutionary disestablishment as state legislatures directly challenged the rights of colonial corporations. While Dartmouth College had been incorporated by a royal charter in colonial New Hampshire, the litigant in Terrett, a parish vestry, had been incorporated under common law in colonial Virginia. After the Revolution, Virginia's legislature disestablished the Anglican Church, disregarded its customary incorporation, revoked its post-revolutionary act of incorporation, and seized parish property. These radical policies set Virginia apart from other states and made these disputes a critical litmus test for the rights of all corporations. John Marshall opposed these policies while serving as a delegate in Virginia's legislature, and his views on these issues prefigured his opinion in Dartmouth College. Virginia's highest court upheld these policies as lawful, but the US Supreme Court's rejected them as unconstitutional in Terret. The Court's ruling in Terrett set a significant precedent for the standing of all private corporations vis-a-vis state legislatures and laid the groundwork for the Court's decision in Dartmouth College.