In the “terrible year” of 1870–71 – spanning the Franco-Prussian War through the Commune – Parisians looked on with horror at the nightmarish transformation of their Ville Lumière. They not only watched, they listened – garnering crucial information but also failing to shut out belliphonic sounds that rendered them sleepless, sick or even unable to function. In a flood of lectures and treatises, a generation of neurologists and psychiatrists assessed the impact of this year on French minds and bodies. Moreover, Charcot and Janet formulated early understandings of trauma amidst the cultural memories and traumatized populations impacted by 1870–71.

Weaving together contemporary medical discourse, journals, reportage and iconography, this article reveals a topography of Parisian sonic violence. Drawing on Mark M. Smith and Jennifer Stoever's work on how race, gender, and class structure listening, this case study analyses the positionality of sound's traumatic impacts on nineteenth-century Parisians. Connecting sound, the events of 1870–71, and early conceptions of trauma also critically integrates these decades with subsequent experiences of la grande guerre. As I ultimately situate a specifically urban theorization of the aural experiences of war, I conclude with how sonic trauma of l'année terrible might stretch far beyond 1870–71. Borrowing from Andreas Huyssen's concept of city as palimpsest – where visual reminders of violence leave ‘absent presences’ in the heart of an urban space – I query how sonic memories of conflict might similarly leave traces – sonic scars? – in both physical places and in individual and collective memories.

This article traces how Ottoman interpretations and uses of Islamic law adapted to deal with non-Muslim rebellions between roughly 1769 and 1830. Drawing on Ottoman fatwas (legal opinions), bureaucratic registers, sultanic decrees, and chronicles, as well as British diplomatic records, it argues that the Ottoman state actively reinterpreted its commitment to the Islamic legal tradition in order to forge the law of rebellion into a weapon against both foreign and domestic enemies. The Ottomans first used declarations of rebellion to mobilize military forces against its imperial rivals, then to discourage and suppress domestic dissent, and finally to deny rebels’ sovereignty under international law. In doing so, the Sublime Porte effectively redefined sovereignty by interleaving Islamic and international concepts. The article places this development in global context, arguing that it resembled legal moves made by Atlantic states as they dealt with the Age of Revolutions. At the same time, this story shows how the Ottoman state’s commitment to Islamic law, and its employment of officially authorized scholars to interpret that law, could both license and constrain state policy. The Islamic legal tradition was flexible, but also meaningful. Interpretation occurred at different levels, and was done by different actors. While the state had significant latitude, it faced limits arising from the substance of the law and the process of interpretation itself.

Massive, rapid capital accumulation is usually associated with capitalist development, but historically, socialist states were among the most aggressive accumulators. Accumulation in Maoist China was faster than even in Stalin's Soviet Union, despite the fact that China was a much poorer country with fewer natural resources. China's accumulation rate, defined as the ratio of gross capital formation to gross national income, reached twenty-five to thirty per cent in 1957–1962, peaking at forty-four per cent in 1958. This level proved to be unsustainable, but after a slowdown in the early 1960s, the rate rose back to thirty-six percent.1 As is well known, the cost of China's rapid industrialization was borne mostly by its rural population.2 My aim in this chapter is to show that it was disproportionally borne by rural women, who contributed to socialist accumulation in direct and indirect ways: directly, as collective farmers, growers of the grain, cotton, soy, tea, sugarcane, etc. that fueled industrialization; and indirectly, by biologically, socially, and materially reproducing the country's labor force and by submitting to a regime of extreme austerity that allowed the government to extract scarce resources and direct them to the cities and the export trade. My argument proceeds in three steps. I will begin with an overview of socialist primitive accumulation under Mao, its preconditions and mechanisms, and the ways it replicated earlier Soviet policies or diverged from them. Next, I will discuss the various ways in which rural women's work underpinned capital accumulation and laid the foundation for China's rapid industrialization in the years since Mao's death. Finally, I will look in some detail at rural women's work at home, to show how their self-exploitation, overwork, and underconsumption in the domestic realm created the conditions for accumulation. My focus is on cotton work – both cotton cultivation and domestic cloth production – but I will also look at other ways in which domestic work supported accumulation.

Markus (2021) argues that the causal modelling frameworks of Pearl and Rubin are not ‘strongly equivalent’, in the sense of saying ‘the same thing in different ways’. Here I rebut Markus’ arguments against strong equivalence. The differences between the frameworks are best illuminated not by appeal to their causal semantics, but rather reflect pragmatic modelling choices.

The Late Iron Age has traditionally been portrayed as an age of swords, Celtic-patterned shields, and bronze cauldrons, a time of warfare, banquets, and raids, mostly starring male warriors. But what do we know about the rest of the population, especially women? Is it possible, based on the same data, to uncover an alternative narrative that includes women? This article focuses on the northern Meseta of Iberia, an area with a long research tradition, in which women are almost invisible in accounts of the Iron Age. Drawing on a range of archaeological and textual evidence, this study brings the roles of women to the forefront, offering a critique of traditional research discourses and a discussion on how Iron Age societies worked from a gender-inclusive perspective.

The upheavals of World War II prepared a new labour regime in twentieth-century India, in employers’ chambers, government offices, and in the newly established Labour Department, but as crucially, at the workplace and on the shop floor. This article studies the case of Calcutta port, an important military port in Southeast Asia after the fall of Singapore and Rangoon, where the complex historical processes resulting from the war generated an unprecedented impetus for the transformation of the labour regime. It examines the powerful impact and dynamics of the war at two levels: at the level of long-run changes in the work organization, and, through a microhistory approach, at the level of workers’ everyday wartime experiences. Under wartime exigencies, the employers introduced ad hoc, piecemeal, but significant reforms – food rations, bonuses, higher wages, housing provisions, and regularization of employment – that were more extensive than originally conceived of and proved to be irreversible, and, ultimately, cracked open a labour regime based on casual labour. The focus on workers’ experiences shows us how the measures designed for stabilization and efficiency proved to be profoundly unsettling in the context of dramatic events that pervaded the workplace. In the shadows of the war, workers and employers experienced a balance of forces in flux. Labour relations were marked by anticipations, hostility, tensions, and, increasingly, sharpness of conflict. The article argues that, by the end of the 1940s, the employers and the state had overcome an industrial relations crisis through nothing less than a restructuring of port labour relations, creating a highly regulated “formal sector” with significant welfare provisions.

Natsume Sōseki and Masaoka Shiki, two of the towering figures in modern Japanese literature, exchanged kanshi poems for eleven years starting in 1889 when they were students. What Sōseki and Shiki enacted in their kanshi exchanges was not simply an admiration for Chinese culture, but rather a performance of literati cultural exchange. In the personae that these two writers adopted in these exchanges, and in the poetic voices that each writer meticulously honed, they were achieving a return to a cultural homeland and to an “imagined community” in the Sinosphere. Further, the exchange of poetry in a language that was simultaneously both foreign and hauntingly familiar demonstrated a performative quality that reflected their appreciation of the dynamics of poetic exchange in China but also of the yose theater and of the rakugo performances that they frequented as students in Tokyo. In fact, for Sōseki and Shiki, kanshi composition and exchange served two paradoxical purposes: it offered both the challenge of poetic expression in a foreign language and a return to an imagined community and to the familiar rhythms and conventions of a sacred language.

In a 2018 referendum, the Irish public voted to lift the Irish state's near-total constitutional ban on abortion, bucking a recent global trend towards restrictions on reproductive rights. While abortion rights have long been a major concern of Irish feminists, appeals to national identity have often been viewed with suspicion by the women's rights movement in Ireland due to the historic role of national identity construction in perpetuating gender-based inequalities. This article explores the way(s) in which discourses of Irish identity and gender were mediated by the use of Irish in the linguistic landscape (LL) at the time of the vote. Proposing a modified version of Du Bois’ (2007) stance triangle, I argue that signs use Irish as both a means of stancetaking and as an object of stance in itself, thus effectively taking a stance on both the referendum and on Irish national identity, indexed by the language. (Stancetaking, Irish (language), national identity, gender, abortion, Eighth Amendment)

The possibility of seeding other planets with life poses a tricky dilemma. On the one hand, directed panspermia might be extremely good, while, on the other, it might be extremely bad depending on what factors are taken into consideration. Therefore, we need to understand better what is ethically at stake with planetary seeding. I map out possible conditions under which humanity should spread life to other solar systems. I identify two key variables that affect the desirability of propagating life throughout the galaxy. The first is axiological and depends on which value theory in environmental ethics is correct. The second is empirical and depends on whether life is common or not in our region of the universe. I also consider two ethical objections to an interplanetary life-seeding mission: the risk of interfering with indigenous life and the risk of increasing suffering in our galaxy.

In the lead article of this symposium, Florian Bieber predicted that the Covid-19 pandemic would have limited long-term effects on the global rise in the level of nationalism because most governments were likely to revert to their prior nationalist trajectories following the pandemic. Nonetheless, I argue that we can learn something about the role of nationalism in the management of public health crises by looking at the variable state responses to the arrival of the virus within their borders. In the modern international system, state governments are tasked with safeguarding the health and well-being of their national populations. During national emergencies, sovereigntist movements form around competing images of the nation that deserves protection. This article uses political artwork to show how different images of the idealized sovereign community were employed to justify divergent pandemic policies of US President Donald Trump and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. Over the course of the pandemic, both leaders came under fire for failing to protect their constituents, providing space for alternative leaders and models of national protection.