The competing ideologies of nation and monarchy had a troubled beginning in the 19th century, insomuch as they derived partly from two opposing sources of legitimacy. However, from the 1830s on, their supporters achieved the establishment of an interspecific and mutually advantageous relationship. The nation gradually managed to prevail over the monarchy, justifying its presence in national terms. However, the monarchy possessed something longed for by liberal nationalists: historical legitimacy. Thus, the crown served Romantic nationalism in its search for national foundations and to generate national emotions of a collective sense of belonging. This article analyses this process by focusing on the Spanish case and using a vast range of cultural sources. I reason that the monarchy’s history was intensively used in Isabel II’s reign (1833–1868), both by the monarch herself as well as nationalist elites, to legitimate and justify their presence in the liberal world. The article is divided into three sections. The first part locates the problem into a general process that touched all the crowned heads of Europe. The second section studies the appeal of exemplary medieval monarchs in the liberal hunt for national roots. The final one focuses on the particular case of Isabel the Catholic because of the remarkable prominence it acquired.

Wine consumption is affected by intertwined needs generated by factors such as production and marketing methods, as well as by the individual's desire for social differentiation in a democratised mass drinking culture. Our study sought to determine whether consumption patterns have changed in the Italian province of Trentino and how such changes may have affected the meaning that wine drinkers living in this area assign to the concept of quality in wine. The paper presents a qualitative study (n=57 interviews) carried out in a wine producing region in north-east Italy. In addition to investigating the changes that have taken place in the area's wine drinking culture, the study also focuses on how consumers perceive and define wine quality. The findings show that economic, political and social factors have brought major changes in drinking culture and consumption over the last 50 years. In addition, changes in the wine industry have had a significant impact on how consumers’ views on wine quality and its key features have evolved. Nevertheless, the study found that some traditional aspects persist in the drinking culture and still determine the perception of quality.

The history of Israel's relationship with its Palestinian-Arab minority during the founding decades, from 1948 to 1968, is often portrayed as a story of formal citizenship that concealed large-scale, state-sanctioned oppression under military rule. This article excavates an untold history of employment affirmative action for Palestinian-Arab citizens of Israel during these two decades which does not fit neatly into this story. Drawing on original archival research, it reveals that, during Israel's founding decades, officials adopted hiring quotas for unskilled Arab workers and for educated Arabs; requirements and incentives for hiring Arabs in government offices, Jewish businesses, and organizations; earmarked jobs and established vocational training courses for the Arab population. It demonstrates that interests in safeguarding Jewish control and economic stability aligned with egalitarian aspirations, and motivated state officials to adopt measures that promoted the inclusion of the Arab population in the workforce, albeit on unequal terms. Furthermore, these measures were part of a transformation of the state's attitude towards Arab citizens, from strict military control to a regime of “hierarchical inclusion” entailing gradual integration into the Israeli economy — mostly though its lower tiers and with a second-class status. Tracing the use of these mechanisms, not then called affirmative action but recognizable as such today, to this period of subjected population management, complicates our understanding of both this chapter in Israel's history and of affirmative action more broadly.

Taking mid-nineteenth century Belize as a case study, this article considers the role of migration in forming political, legal, and spatial geographies in a region with weak state institutions and disputed borders. The Caste War—a series of conflicts starting in 1847 in the southeastern Mexican state of Yucatán— resulted in the movement of thousands of people into the neighboring British settlement of Belize. This population movement reshaped the interface between the metropole and the settlement. This was a colony-defining moment in the development of Belize, leading to an extension of imperial control that eventually culminated in the transition to Crown colony in 1871. The refugee crisis was tied to broader Atlantic questions around asylum, law and empire. The benevolent treatment of refugees became the gauge of a “civilized” colony until the refugee crisis turned into a race crisis. This article examines how local administrators used a humanitarian discourse to enshrine white settler colonialism in a territory suddenly inhabited by a foreign-born multi-ethnic majority. The refugee label became a way to secure British sovereignty over the territory and its inhabitants, including non-British subjects, while extracting resources from the newcomers.