Many rulers of newly formed Indian Princely States enacted substantial administrative reforms in the first half of the nineteenth century as they sought to reinforce their power and secure revenue in the wake of British colonial conquest. In one such case, the ruler of Alwar, Banni Singh, recruited Aminullah Khan, a former record-keeper in Delhi's colonial courts, to serve as diwan (chief minister) and undertake administrative reforms starting in 1838. These reforms focused on agrarian taxation, the civil courts, and the military, and included changes to the roles of local officials, methods of record-keeping, and the language of governance. The reforms were encoded in seven slim volumes of regulations and model forms, handwritten in Persian. Through a study of these regulations, I situate the reforms of Alwar's administration within Banni Singh's broader self-fashioning as a modern ruler in a Mughal mode and show how the reforms drew from both Mughal and colonial ideas of statecraft. The regulations represented a shift toward a legalistic conception of that state as seen in the ideals of good governance that they espoused, and they constructed contractual relationships among villagers, low-level officials in the districts, and the central state through the extensive bureaucratic procedures that they encoded.

On 16 September 1987, the main chlorofluorocarbon-producing and -consuming countries signed the Montreal Protocol, despite the absence of a scientific consensus on the mechanisms of ozone depletion over Antarctica. We argue in this article that the rapid diffusion from late 1985 onwards of satellite images showing the Antarctic ozone hole played a significant role in this diplomatic outcome. Whereas negotiators claimed that they chose to deliberately ignore the Antarctic ozone hole during the negotiations since no theory was able yet to explain it, the images still loomed large for many of the actors involved. In Western countries, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) satellite visualizations were diffused through the general press and television stations. Other popular and mass media outlets followed quickly. In describing the circulation and appropriation processes of these images within and beyond the scientific and negotiation arenas, we show that the ozone hole images did play an important part in ozone diplomacy in the two years leading up to the signing of the Montreal Protocol, both in the expert and diplomatic arenas and as public diplomacy tools. We conclude by encouraging scholars to engage with new visual archives and to contribute to the development of the vibrant new field of research on visual diplomacy.

Right-Node Raising is generally considered to impose stricter identity conditions than other kinds of ellipsis, such as VP ellipsis, according to Hankamer & Sag 1976 and Hardt 1993. In this paper, we investigate voice mismatch in French Right-Node Raising (RNR) through a corpus study and two experiments. We show that RNR with voice mismatch can be found in a written corpus (frTenTen 2012) and that many examples involve coordination of a reflexive active and a short passive form. We suggest this is because semantic contrast (here, between self and external agent) plays a role according to Hartmann (2000) and Abeillé and Mouret (2010). We ran two acceptability judgement experiments to test voice mismatch and semantic contrast. We did not find any penalty for voice mismatch with VP ellipsis but an interaction with semantic contrast. We also found an effect of semantic contrast when coordinating an active and a passive VP without participle ellipsis. We conclude that voice mismatch is acceptable with RNR and propose a Head-driven Phrase-Structure Grammar (HPSG) analysis, following Chaves (2014) and Shiraïshi et al. (2019).

This article is a study of Chilean popular music produced during the 1990s, the first decade following the end of the Pinochet dictatorship. The return of democracy and a period of strong economic growth contributed to a boom in the Chilean music industry. A wealth of music was recorded and the opportunities for listening to live music multiplied. The article's main objectives are to illuminate the ways in which Chilean popular music addressed democracy's inspiring promises and frustrating limits and to consider how Chileans used popular music to foster new post-authoritarian identities. First, it argues that music was used to reclaim national symbols that had been coopted by the dictatorship. Second, it considers the music of two generations of musicians who returned to the country after living in exile. Finally, it focuses on punk and hip-hop, the styles that produced the most significant examples of protest music in the post-authoritarian period.

This article focuses on the documentary The Songs of Fire by Nikos Koundouros (1975). Shot immediately after the fall of the military dictatorship (1967–74) in Greece, it exhumes the elation of three public concerts and demonstrations, capturing the enthusiasm for the return to democracy expressed through singing and chanting. The article focuses on the ways in which popular songs became the vehicles of the popular demand for democracy during the early transition to democracy. It shows how the film was crucial in establishing a narrative of resistance in collective memory that was centred on singing and listening, investigating the ways in which this sonic narrative, performed collectively and publicly, also betrays a latent reaction to a brutal regime fought by the few. It argues that collective singing seems to merge in memory with the ‘singing resistance’ performed individually and in secret during the dictatorship. Extended back in time, this sonic narrative registers an unconscious desire to repress the fact that large parts of society had remained silent during the regime's seven-year rule.

During South Korea's authoritarian period (1961–87), student activists employed songs to express their anti-government and pro-democratic views. Known as minjung kayo (people's songs), these protest songs can be traced to the modern American folk music embraced by South Korean youth in the 1960s. By the late 1980s, however, minjung kayo carried emphatically anti-American, nationalistic, and socialist tones, echoing the minjung ideals that strove to achieve authentic ‘Koreanness’. This article unravels the complexities underlying the process of minjung kayo's development into an emblem of the pro-democratic movement, which entailed a shift away from its initial reflective and poetic style inspired by American folk music (exemplified in the songs of Kim Min-ki) and a move towards the militant style influenced by the Marxist composer Hanns Eisler. It argues that minjung kayo embodied the complex relationship South Korean activists held with their colonial past and autocratic present, as well as visions of their democratic future.

A discussion of the metaphysics of spiritual experience requires that we are clear about the nature of metaphysics, and I take as my starting point the ‘transcendent metaphysics’ described and supposedly eliminated by A. J. Ayer. Most analytic philosophers agree with Ayer (and Kant) that transcendent metaphysics in the relevant sense is deeply problematic, and they associate it with platonism, theism, and religious thinking more generally. Assuming then that spiritual experience takes us into religious territory, and this territory is forbidden, a metaphysics of spiritual experience is going to involve transcendent metaphysics, and it will be similarly problematic. Ayer's conception of transcendent reality is itself deeply problematic, and I shall argue that his metaphysical framework helps to motivate atheistic spirituality by ruling out the possibility of an empirically grounded and hence defensible religious alternative. I shall challenge this framework, set out an alternative with the help of Arthur Schopenhauer, and spell out the implications for a metaphysics of spiritual experience.

The earliest Bronze Age Mediterranean primate representations on frescoes are found at the Aegean sites of Knossos (Crete) and Akrotiri (Thera). By contrast, monkeys have so far been missing from Mycenaean frescoes in mainland Greece. A fresco fragment of a cultic scene from Tiryns changes this; it depicts a bipedal partial lower body, with a hanging tail. This image, previously interpreted as a human wearing an animal hide, had already been suggested to represent a monkey. A re-examination of this miniature fresco identified various features that seem to confirm the representation of a monkey, most probably of a baboon-like primate. Assuming that the fresco from Tiryns is part of a cult scene, similar to those from Akrotiri, this adds a further image to a small corpus of Aegean depictions connecting monkeys with important female figures or deities. Furthermore, the Tiryns fresco fragment indicates that primates were not entirely absent from local Mycenaean iconography.

In 1839 the working hours of the computers employed on the lunar and planetary reductions of the Royal Observatory, Greenwich were reduced from eleven hours to eight hours. Previous historians have explained this decrease by reference to the generally benevolent nature of the manager of the reductions, George Biddell Airy. By contrast, this article uses the letters and notes exchanged between Airy and the computers to demonstrate that the change in the working hours originated from the computers as a reaction to their poor working conditions. Through the exploration of these archival materials, the article shifts the focus of the analysis to the working experience of the computers, rather than to the administrative history of the project that inevitably tends to highlight Airy's actions. By doing so, the article shows how the computers were treated as a disposable low-skilled workforce, as opposed to aspiring astronomers with considerable mathematical talent. Through this reframing, the article takes a step towards a working history of the observatory.

This article examines how musical practices in 1970s Spain formed ways of imagining democracy and how they participated in the wider social struggle to define freedom and equality for the final years of Franco's dictatorship and its immediate aftermath. I shall analyse two case studies: a large-scale experimental art festival held in the streets of Pamplona in 1972 and a grassroots musical collective created in 1973 on the initiative of the composer Llorenç Barber. Drawing on previous studies on the relationship between music and democracy, participatory art and the politics of spectatorship, and the insights of political science and philosophy into democracy, I offer a critical reassessment of the Pamplona festival and explore the relationship between grassroots collaboration and ideas of participatory democracy, and analyse the significance of this relationship in 1970s Spain.

The opening of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 provided a spectacular climax for Samuel Huntington's third wave of democracy. It represented the triumph not only of a people over their oppressive regime but also, ultimately, of Western economic liberalism; the post-socialist democracy of German reunification was a singular one with consumerism at its core. In the early 1990s, many East German reform socialists resisted this inevitability, and exploited the temporary political and bureaucratic void that emerged in East Berlin as a space in which to imagine alternative democratic futures from the socialist past. In this article I explore the attempts by two very different East Berlin musical communities to incubate anti-capitalist worlds from the legacies – both official and unofficial – of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). First, I reflect on the autonomous musical worlds that were created by members of the GDR's alternative bands in occupied buildings in Prenzlauer Berg and Mitte. Second, I consider the articulation by the ZwischenWelt-Festival, a reincarnation of the GDR's Festival of Political Song, of a more outward-looking future for East Germany, based on the ideals of international solidarity.