Existing scholarship on China's industrial politics in the early post-Mao era has not paid adequate attention to the tension between two seemingly contradictory tendencies: the reform drives to consolidate managerial despotism in urban public enterprises, and policy endeavors to strengthen formal institutional channels for workers to participate in their enterprises’ democratic management. Focusing on the city of Wuhan in 1984–1985, this article examines the policy logic behind these two overlapping tendencies and how workers experienced and reacted to them. It argues that, on the one hand, Wuhan's local authorities merely intended the institutional formalities of democracy to facilitate and build popular support for the inauguration of managerial despotism. On the other hand, workers’ very involvement in this façade of democracy accidentally emboldened many of them to air grievances, make subversive demands, assert agency, and even resist managerial despotism. These findings shed light on the nuanced historicity of 1980s China and contribute to a rethinking of the meaning of workplace democracy.

Traditionally, verbs like base have combined with the preposition on to express a meaning of derivation (based on). However, many writing in a US context have noticed the rapid rise of based off (of) alongside based on (Curzan 2013; Behrens 2014; Janda 2021). In this article, we document the relative increase of off in two English-language corpora in the verb base and six other verbs. The results show a clear real-time trend of increasing use of off, with some differences in the course of the change across different verbs. We also see an increase in use of off in apparent time, which we infer from the topical organization of comments in one of our corpora, the social media site Reddit.

This study explores the emergence and dispersal of grog-tempered pottery in south-eastern Europe, particularly southern Romania. During the second half of the sixth millennium bc, a dynamic zone emerged between the Danube and the Carpathians, facilitating the spread of innovations through multiple communication routes. Among these innovations, grog-tempered pottery began to appear around 5300/5000 bc and became prevalent during the fifth millennium. Despite being frequent, its origins, dispersal, and intensity remain poorly understood. This article aims to trace and explain the emergence and distribution of grog-tempered pottery in southern Romania. By integrating data from existing literature with new results from macroscopic and archaeometric analyses of twelve pottery assemblages from Middle Neolithic, Early, and Middle Chalcolithic sites, the author seeks to provide insights into the significance of the first grog-tempered pottery in a south-eastern European context.

This study investigates the wages and labour contracts of Khoe workers in Graaff Reinet, a district on the Cape Colony's eastern frontier in the early nineteenth century. Using wage registers from 1801 to 1810, we offer the first individual-level analysis of wages for both male and female Khoe workers, examining payment forms, socio-economic stratification, and gendered wage dynamics. The findings highlight a persistently high reliance on in-kind payments – aligned with the pastoral economy and cultural preferences of the Khoe – but reveal a gradual shift towards cash wages, driven by the colonial administration's efforts to reduce labour coercion. Gender disparities emerge as a critical theme, with female labourers experiencing higher wage inequality and receiving a larger proportion of in-kind wages. The analysis underscores the intersection of colonial economic policies, labour practices, and social inequalities, challenging aggregate approaches to understanding inequality and living standards in colonial Africa. These insights expand our knowledge of coercive labour systems and frontier economies.

While the category shift of deverbal prepositions has been well documented in grammaticalization studies, its accompanying process of subjectification remains underexplored. Adopting a constructionist perspective, this article addresses the gap by analyzing data from the Corpus of Historical American English. We present a multivariate analysis of the deverbal preposition considering to examine the role that subjectification has played along the way to it becoming a preposition over the past 200 years. Specifically, we investigate whether the two grammatical variants, participial and prepositional considering, can be anchored in context, focusing on a set of subjectivity indicators and their gradual changes over time. The findings are twofold. First, the two variants can be distinguished by six contextual features, namely subject animacy, subject person, contextual polarity, presence of degree modifiers, presence of modal auxiliaries and genre. Second, over time, there is an increasing correlation between the prepositional variant and levels within contextual features that indicate greater evaluative subjectivity. Previous scholarship has debated whether subjectification is independent of grammaticalization. This study contributes to this discourse by illustrating how various facets of subjectification may interact and manifest to varying degrees within the process of grammatical change.

In this paper, I will compare three reportative constructions: the French reportative conditional, Dutch zou + inf, and German sollen + inf. Although these markers share the reportative function as one of their established meanings, they clearly differ in how this reportative meaning actually functions. One of the most important differences pertains to the fact that the French conditional (and to a lesser extent Dutch zou + inf) often combines reportative meaning with epistemic denial, i.e. the speaker distances him- or herself from the content of what he or she reports. German reportative sollen also allows for such distancing interpretations but to a much smaller extent. Specifically for this paper, I will look at the behaviour of the three markers in the immediate context of the noun ‘rumours’ (French rumeurs, Dutch geruchten, and German Gerüchte), a context which – at least in theory – is strongly compatible with reportative marking, on the one hand, and with epistemic denial, on the other. On the basis of a self-compiled corpus of recent newspaper language, I will show that the French conditional occurs with a relatively high frequency in this specific context, especially in contrast to German sollen, and that the conditional often combines reportative semantics with epistemic denial, which again especially contrasts with German sollen + inf. Dutch zou + inf takes up an intermediate position in both respects.

When did fascism end? Did it end in July 1943, with the fall of Mussolini from power, or in April 1945, with Liberation Day? The argument of this article is that fascism was not simply a historical experience but a political form that attempted to transcend Italy’s social and political fractures with fantasies and unrealistic but nevertheless captivating expectations. Its hypnotic contagious power cast a mimetic spell that can be continuously reloaded: by blurring the boundaries between truth and lies; by exploiting crowd irrationality; by establishing boundaries between outsiders and insiders; by perpetuating negative sentiments of hostility, fear and envy within society; and by manipulating time. The argument, therefore, is that fascism has never ended, not merely in the sense of political and cultural continuity, but in the deeper sense of immanency within the body politic of Italy’s democracy. As such, it is meaningless to wonder whether fascism might come back. It is here and now, in the only form that current historical circumstances allow it to exist – and yet it might be countered by a process of rejection that individuals and political communities can and should exercise in their everyday life, adopting the political form generated by the Resistance.

The international community has consistently emphasized the importance of protecting the Amazon rainforest as a global carbon reservoir and climate regulator. Basin states have historically responded by rejecting the ‘internationalization of the Amazon’, arguing that they have sovereign rights to exploit the area under their own development plans. By reaffirming their sovereignty rights over international environmental concerns, they have also excluded the ancestral rights of Indigenous peoples in the basin. This article examines how the principles of absolute sovereignty (‘enclosure’), ‘common heritage of humankind’, and ‘common concern of humankind’ have been incorporated into the discourses, instruments, and practices of international environmental governance of the Amazon. These principles interact through shared anthropocentric, ethnocentric, and state-centric premises. Through an analysis of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (ACTO), the article finds that despite the discursive rejection of international forces, the basin states appeal to ‘common concern’ to embrace international cooperation while promoting transnational extractive and infrastructure projects through the principle of ‘enclosure’. This produces fragmented governance that legitimizes the expansion of extractivism under sovereign and developmental imaginaries while excluding the self-determination claims and ecological perspectives of the Indigenous peoples of the Amazon.

Fausto Corvino has recently argued in this journal that, given present people’s reasonable expectation of future people’s economic activity, present and future people stand in the relation required by both of the two main camps of justice as reciprocity: justice as self-interested reciprocity and justice as fair reciprocity. In reply, I argue that on neither view is the relation Corvino identifies the relation the view requires and that neither view endorses his principle of intergenerational distributive justice, Transgenerational Sufficiency, in a contract between generations. I show that these concerns generalize to any view of synchronic direct intergenerational reciprocity.

Historically, the picking of cloudberries (Rubus chamaemorus) for sale and subsistence has been of fundamental importance to Sámi livelihoods. Even today cloudberries are commonly described as the “gold” among berries. Based on anthropological fieldwork, participant observation and in-depth interviews with berry pickers in the Várjjat municipality of Unjárga-Nesseby, Northern Norway, this article investigates how relationships of humans, animals, plants and berries take part in the making and remaking of home place landscapes. I emphasise Sámi landscape research and theorizations to elevate their productive contributions to the ongoing, international landscape debates, by engaging with landscapes as homes.