This article examines the economic culture of urban food markets in early modern England. It focuses on London between 1590 and 1640 to argue that market regulation, even in fast-growing, commercializing cities, was underpinned by moralized values. It also assesses a largely untapped citywide book of fines, containing payments for regulatory offences. The first section outlines London's market system and regulation, the second looks at enforcement in practice and the third discusses the underlying values. This contributes to our understanding of day-to-day food marketing and proposes that studies of ‘moral economy’ should examine everyday commerce and major cities.

In the eleventh to thirteenth century, Southern African Nguni-speakers made a counterintuitive choice to begin investing in large herds of cattle. Despite a long-standing knowledge of cattle, the earliest Nguni-speakers did not take to cattle-keeping as a way of life. Rather, the transition came as the result of changing social circumstances as households sought to manage the lifecycles of young men and reliably exploit their labor through gendered and generational expectations of decorum. Nguni-speakers grounded new concepts about cattle in older practices and norms regarding the social reproduction of young men. Agropastoralists situated cattle-keeping among the obligations young men faced after passing through initiation, giving cattle local salience. The transformation unfolded in gendered and generational household choices, but was shaped by the broad context of an increasingly interconnected Southern Africa.

In August 1677, the Genevan consistory, a church court preoccupied with regulating sexual sin, summoned Louise Bouffa. Louise was a single woman recently hired by the wealthy Sarasin family as a wet nurse, an occupation that signaled to the consistory that she had recently given birth. The pastors and elders wanted to know who the father was and where the child was now. Louise was at first evasive. She claimed not to know the name of the father, although she did admit that the man with whom she had had sex was “very well dressed.” She said that she had given birth not far from Geneva, in the village of Gy, where the baby had been baptized and then had died. These claims turned out to be false. The Genevan consistory contacted the pastor in Gy who denied that her child had been baptized there. Summoned to tell the truth, Louise admitted that she had given the baby away to a man named Bertet to present as his own child for baptism, although she added that she was aware he had not done so. She also revealed that the father of the infant was a well-respected Genevan citizen and lawyer, Léonard Revillod, in whose household she had been working when she became pregnant. The consistory admonished Louise for lying about the baptism and sent her and her master to the criminal court to be prosecuted. This court, an elected body called the Small Council, duly fined Léonard for having had sex with his servant and for having “obliged her to give the baby to a stranger.” As for Louise, she was merely sent back to the consistory, which excluded her from participating in communion. No further investigation of the fate of the infant ensued.

This article investigates the relationship between legal personality for nature and Indigenous philosophies by comparing two cases: the Ecuadorian Constitution of 2008 and the 2014 Te Urewera Act of Aotearoa, New Zealand. Through these case studies the article considers the nature of Indigenous relations with the concept of rights of nature, arguing that this relation is primarily strategic, not genealogical. The article engages with the concept of legal personality and shows that it is not a direct translation of Indigenous conceptions, but rather a potential straitjacket for Indigenous emancipatory politics. The radical character of Indigenous ontologies is not fully reflected in the concept of legal personality. Furthermore, the way in which rights are granted to the natural environment is an important part of the effect that such rights might have on Indigenous communities. Despite some affinities between rights of the environment and Indigenous philosophies, overstating the connection might constrain the radical political and legal implications of Indigenous thought.

The COVID-19 Pandemic a stress test for clinical medicine and medical ethics, with a confluence over questions of the proportionality of resuscitation. Drawing upon his experience as a clinical ethicist during the surge in New York City during the Spring of 2020, the author considers how attitudes regarding resuscitation have evolved since the inception of do-not-resuscitate (DNR) orders decades ago. Sharing a personal narrative about a DNR quandry he encountered as a medical intern, the author considers the balance of patient rights versus clinical discretion, warning about the risk of resurgent physician paternalism dressed up in the guise of a public health crisis.

This study analyzes circumstances tied to the implementation of the Dayton Agreement’s provision for the reunification of Sarajevo. Three months after the signing, Sarajevo was again a united city territorially, but pre-war inhabitants of Sarajevo who identified themselves as Serbs were almost entirely absent from the reunited town under the control of the Federation government. This article addresses the causes of the flight of the Serbs, who had been living in Sarajevo’s suburbs before the start of the Bosnian war and stayed, in their view, to defend their homes. I argue that the incentives that led a majority of Sarajevan Serbs to leave the city and its surroundings were the result of actions not only of the Serb leadership but also of Bosniak leaders and the international community. Our analysis is complementary to the scholarship examining the impact of massive population migrations and displacement in the aftermath of conflicts. I analyze the dynamics of Sarajevo’s unification within the Federation and its consequences, demonstrating that once a partition is accepted at a higher level, it is almost impossible to prevent its emergence on a local level.

Berlioz's essay ‘Le chef d'orchestre, théorie de son art’ (1855) was among the first and most widely disseminated attempts to describe the art of modern conducting. Drawing together technical with literary and scientific language, it aimed to capture the relationship between leaders and players and, more broadly, the modes of animation underpinning nineteenth-century orchestral performance. Central to the essay are notions of electricity – animal, artificial and mesmeric. For Berlioz, the conductor's job is no longer simply to marshal his orchestral troops but to galvanize them: ‘his inner flame warms them, his electricity charges them.’ Here, I examine the medical and physical technologies that underpinned these descriptions – the ways in which podium conducting became newly intertwined with theories of bioelectricity, notions of spiritual or metaphysical ‘spark’, and emerging forms of electrical communication that rewired European conceptions of the body politic.

In Part I, I examine the ‘electric baton’ which allowed Berlioz to control the enormous orchestral forces of his 1855 Exposition Universelle concerts, generating a quasi-telegraphic network with imperialist resonances. Part II examines the role of nervous electricity in Berlioz's accounts of conducting, and his conception of music itself as a charged substance. Part III draws technological and medical discourses into conversation with magical cultures, showing how notions of nervous power (and peril) united Berlioz, Mesmer and the famous Robert-Houdin. The new romantic conductor, as I conclude, was a figure poised at the intersection of medicine, electric technology, and a newly charged spirituality.