This special issue, “On Their Own Terms: Experts in Imperial China,” examines various kinds of expertise from Han times into the twentieth century from the angle of practitioners themselves, and sometimes even on their own terms.

In the final decades of its existence, the Qing imperial state sought to unify and standardize policies of frontier management. In this context, mapping and surveying practices developed as socio-technological discourses that transformed how Qing authorities asserted their territorial claims in the Eastern Himalayas. Most scholarship on the history of Qing-era frontier management has tended to focus on Chinese nation-building practices. However, this article foregrounds the deconstruction of the epistemic regime governing the production of geo-knowledge about the Eastern Himalayas by investigating the appropriation and rejection of the interlocutors of local and indigenous knowledge, networks, and actors.

How did military surveyors establish authoritative ideas about their own expertise? This article focuses on the late-Qing surveys of the Dzayul river basin commissioned by Zhao Erfeng and carried out by his subordinate officials Cheng Fengxian, Duan Pengrui, and Xia Hu. Between 1910 and 1911, Zhao Erfeng ordered new surveys of the regions located at the north-easternmost tip of modern-day Arunachal Pradesh, to demarcate the Qing Tibetan dominions and Chinese territory from that of British India. The surveyors Cheng Fengxian, Duan Pengrui, and Xia Hu, mapped the route of the Dzayul River which flowed into British Indian territory through the Mishmi hills into Assam as the Lohit. These surveys largely claimed that natural features marked the “natural” or “traditional” boundaries of the imperial state, against local knowledge productions that framed those same topographical features as connectors rather than dividers. By dissembling the various strands that informed this archive of Qing colonial knowledge, I investigate the processes by which state-produced narratives created new kinds of citational practices to designate who could be recognized as an “expert” of the mountainous geography of Tibet and the trans-Himalayan regions.

This article explores female healthcare at the crossroads of bacteriology and obstetric research. Puerperal fever or childbed fever manifested as an epidemic since the nineteenth century, and in both Europe and America, it charted a distinct course for bacteriological research. With the identification of bacteriological causes, new sets of public health regimes were instituted in both regions. The experience of the colonies, however, differed. This paper focusses on how colonial discourse on obstetric nursing, midwifery, clinical hygiene, and maternal healthcare can be positioned in this global history of female health research. The paper explores why, in India, on one hand, bacteriological research in female health suffered in terms of priority (unlike that of cholera and plague) despite the alarming rate of maternal mortality. On the other hand, medical practitioners trained in Europe worked as the conduit through which the bacteriological research of Europe made its way into India. Contemporary documents reveal how colonial prerogatives were channeled through the race theories linked to Indian cultural practices related to midwifery and obstetric nursing, and how the female health discourse was still marred by the notion of tropicality.

The outbreak of the American Revolution thrust would-be revolutionaries into a paradoxical relationship with the law. As they overthrew colonial governments from New Hampshire to Georgia during the summer and fall of 1775, leaders of the resistance to Great Britain found themselves in the awkward position of having to justify rebellion against British authority while still professing to be law-abiding Britons. The revolutionaries’ mandate to govern rested on protecting rights to property and representation that many colonists believed had been violated by agents of the Empire, but the practicalities of war demanded extra-legal measures. The popular governments that replaced colonial administrations had to find a way to balance upholding many of the laws of the old regime while simultaneously organizing an armed insurrection against it. Much of this burden fell on revolutionary committees at the town and local level. As the Continental Congress and provincial elites vacillated between rebellion and reconciliation and struggled to assert control over the fast-growing revolutionary coalition, ad hoc governments comprised of ordinary citizens took on the tasks of governing their regions and organizing for armed struggle. For much of 1775 and early 1776, these popular regimes precariously balanced the need for extra-legal expediencies with the need to maintain at least a semblance of law to maintain their legitimacy.

This paper develops a parallel between prudence and population ethics. I argue that developing a standard guiding the evaluation of the comparative prudential value of different lives is challenging because it shares a similarity with population ethics: In both contexts, we assess the comparative value of populations of person-stages/people, which may vary in number and level of well-being. Based on this analogy, I show that Arrhenius’ fifth impossibility theorem can be applied to prudence. I develop and compare five possible escape routes: Critical-Level Views, Totalism, Limited Aggregation, Nebel’s Lexical Threshold View and what I call the Negative Lexicality View.

During World War II, German occupation obstructed foreign tourism to Amsterdam. The local tourist association VVV did not, however, cease its promotional activities. On the contrary; as a public–private association largely financed by the Amsterdam municipality and the local Chamber of Commerce, the VVV functioned as an institutional nexus between the German-controlled municipal authorities, local entrepreneurs in the city’s tourist industry, tourists and local citizens. This article argues that the VVV played a significant role in promoting the return to ‘normalcy’ and an acceptance of aspects of a new normal in the Dutch capital. In a wide variety of initiatives, it encouraged domestic tourists and local inhabitants – largely ignoring the gradual exclusion of Jews – to continue a public life of amusement, cultural enrichment and identification with local and national heritage.

The 1984 Helsinki Festival introduced Finnish and international audiences to contemporary Soviet composers via what was perhaps the largest repertory of contemporary Soviet music in the West up to that point. The week of concerts did not include any premieres, but several works by Schnittke, Gubaidulina, and Denisov that were performed during the festival were recent compositions that had received only a few performances at that point. And yet, the week was also a compromise, prominently featuring Khrennikov and other conservative composers. This article discusses the context and processes that led to the festival’s realisation and its relation to changes in the Soviet musical world at the time. In the past, Soviet authorities often torpedoed attempts to perform nonconformist works in the West and almost never allowed composers to travel. In Helsinki, Schnittke, Gubaidulina, and several other composers were allowed to attend.

This article investigates the ways children begin spelling from the start of grade 1 to the end of grade 2 in France. It presents the results of a longitudinal study with 676 children faced to the complexity of French orthography and asked to write words and sentences. The corpus was analysed with regard to phonogrammic and morphogrammic principles at work in the French orthography.

Based on the literature and the specific features of the French writing system, we hypothesized that both skill types would develop as early as Grade 1 of elementary school, with lexical spelling skills developing more rapidly. The findings suggest that the development of the phonogrammic, lexical morphogrammic, and grammatical skills of pupils may take into account different variables: consistency, frequency, syntactic context within which words are used, words that can feature different morphograms or not.

This article takes a usage-based Construction Morphology perspective to examine the polysemy of the locative prefixoid up in complex words such as upstairs, upland, upheaval and uproot. Drawing on a relational structure model of morphosemantics, it is argued that the prefixoid systematically approximates the functions of different syntactic categories in different complex words: up functions like a preposition (upstairs), adjective (upland), adverb (upheaval) and verb (uproot). These constructions consequently require bases of specific syntactic categories and differ in the ways in which the prefixoid semantically relates to the second element. These subschemas are investigated in detail using corpus data from the BNC, collostructional analysis and various productivity measures to analyze the selectional restrictions of the open slot of the constructions as well as the semantics of the complex words. This approach elegantly solves the question of category change and the difficulties in identifying the syntactic category of the base in complex words with locative prefixoids, providing an alternative to the righthand head rule.

Examining the systemic exploitation of mentally ill individuals, this study focuses on the practices of the British colonial administration in Kabba Province, Northern Nigeria (1900–1947). This research investigates how colonial authorities employed biopolitical strategies to categorise, control, and exploit this vulnerable population for labour, prioritising colonial economic and administrative interests. The study utilises a qualitative methodology, primarily analysing archival documents from the National Archives of Nigeria (NAK), Kaduna, and Arewa House Archives (AHA), to uncover the forced labour system’s practices and rationalisations. Crucially, it incorporates oral sources from direct descendants of ethno-medical practitioners, former colonial staff, traditional chiefs, and learned community members. This oral history component provides vital intergenerational knowledge, contextualising archival findings and offering perspectives often absent from official records, ensuring a nuanced understanding of pre-colonial mental health practices and colonial-era lived experiences. Secondary literature on colonial biopower, mental health history, and regional history provides a comparative framework. Findings indicate the colonial administration systematically repurposed traditional care and established new mechanisms to identify, isolate, and compel mentally ill individuals into various forms of forced labour for infrastructure and economic extraction. In conclusion, this research significantly contributes to scholarship on vulnerable populations during colonialism, illuminating the intricate link between mental illness, labour, and power in colonial Nigeria, and informing contemporary debates on mental health, human rights, and historical justice.

To what extent does refugee protection in Western Europe depend on the ethno-religious and gender identity of asylum seekers? This article examines how selective humanitarianism, shaped by the identity of asylum seekers and migrants, shapes their protection status. It offers an analysis of Germany’s response to Yezidi refugees, in comparison with that of France, in the wake of the genocidal campaign carried out by the Islamic State in 2014. Drawing on fieldwork that includes interviews with Yezidi refugees and stakeholders in Germany, we argue that contemporary asylum regimes operate through three interrelated mechanisms: the securitization of certain groups, selective humanitarian exceptions, and neoliberal selection criteria. The Yezidi experience illustrates how these mechanisms generate hierarchies of protection, wherein even recognized victims of genocide must meet increasingly economic thresholds to secure lasting refuge. While specialized programs for women survivors represent important humanitarian innovations, they often exclude male family members, thereby producing new forms of vulnerability. Struggling to align with dominant narratives of economically valuable migrants, Yezidis encounter a renewed form of liminality in Europe.

During the forty-thousand-mile voyage of HMS Beagle (1831–6) Charles Darwin compiled an extensive corpus of manuscript materials, containing a highly specialized chromatic vocabulary. Darwin’s dedicated use of binomial colour terms, such as ‘aurora red’, ‘orpiment orange’ and ‘gamboge yellow’, was the result of his regular consultation of a work popular among British naturalists: Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours (1821) by Patrick Syme. A copy of this compact colour manual was among Darwin’s ‘most useful’ possessions on the Beagle. Now held in Cambridge University Library (DAR LIB T.620), Darwin’s copy of Syme’s book evidences both the difficulties of capturing accurate colour in exploratory natural history and the mechanisms by which this was attempted. Mining the Beagle archive for representations of coloured phenomena, this article reveals for the first time the extent of Darwin’s reliance on Werner’s Nomenclature for collecting and communicating chromatic data, across distance and against the fugitive, subjective and shifting nature of natural hues.