This article examines how statecraft (jingshi 經世) policies were implemented in the Late Qing period. It focuses on Dai Zhaochen, a prefect who served in Shandong and Guangdong in the 1860s. Dai was from a noted family of officials and had numerous “weak ties” with prominent jingshi officials. One of his handbooks, this paper shows, drew primarily on the Collected Statecraft Writings from the Qing Dynasty (Huangchao jingshi wenbian 皇朝經世文編). In office, Dai adapted policies from it and other collections, appealing to practicability and simplicity as the criteria for policymaking. More generally, he insisted that he was just a humble practitioner of the art of governance. The conclusion reflects on that disavowal, arguing that existing definitions of “statecraft” do not attend to Dai’s core concerns. I propose, therefore, that we stop seeking an essential definition of “statecraft” and instead pursue a broader socio-intellectual history of policy in the Qing.

How did one become an astronomer in imperial China? Where did one start? What texts did would-be astronomers study, and what criteria did they have to meet? Combining the regulation of the Yuan (1271–1368) Bureau of Astronomy with biographies of astronomers who worked in different sections of the Bureau, this paper explores the physical, technical, and literary skills required for this profession in late medieval China. It underscores the pivotal role of family in training astronomers and offers fresh insights into the relationship between bureaucracy and science in imperial China.

When kidney transplantation evolved from an experimental into a clinical treatment of end-stage renal disease (ESRD) in the 1960s, it was conceptualised as a collaborative therapy. Before specific immunosuppressants were introduced in the 1980s, the best chances for patient and graft survival were expected from finding ‘good’ matches between donor and recipient tissues. Therefore, the pioneers of clinical transplantation in Europe started to recombine their growing patient pools. They created trans-border organ exchange organisations such as Eurotransplant and Intertransplant, based on shared patient databases.

The article traces international and transnational co-operation in kidney exchange using the example of state-socialist Germany. How did the German Democratic Republic (GDR) get involved with the interconnected networks of knowledge, data, and organ exchange in ESRD treatment? In what ways did the domestic system of kidney transplantation depend on intra- and trans-bloc exchange? How did the GDR profit, and what did it have to offer on an international scale, both in the First and the Second World? The article sheds light on the under-explored transplantation history of the socialist East and thereby investigates the possibilities and limits of trans-bloc collaboration in Cold War Europe.

Do-support involves the mandatory inclusion of the auxiliary do, historically bleached of semantic meaning and now serving purely morphosyntactic functions. While extensively researched in English since Ellegård (1953), its counterpart in Scots has received less attention (although see Meurman-Solin 1993; Gotthard 2019, 2024a). This article investigates whether early Scots do exhibited similar functions to English ‘intermediate do’, as analysed by Ecay (2015), before stabilising into its current role, as this would indicate that the emergence of do-support is more likely to be an independent development in Scots. This investigation aims to gauge the likelihood of Scots do-support resulting from contact with Southern English during anglicisation, the process which saw English forms favoured over Scots in Scottish writing. Proportions of affirmative and negative declarative do from the Parsed Corpus of Scottish Correspondence (1540–1750; Gotthard 2024b) are measured across various syntactic contexts, with results assessed against criteria for contact-induced change. The social context and timing of the rise of Scots do suggest do-support being a transfer from Southern English, but its intermediate do qualities compromise this analysis. However, the presence of an intermediate do in Scots might represent a northward diffusion of such a grammar from English into Scots.

This article concerns the practice of bed burial, a rare funerary custom found in some sixth- to early tenth-century ad graves ranging from southern Germany to Scandinavia and England. Existing research has often overlooked the diversity of bed burials, focusing mainly on the reconstruction of the beds, their style, the status of the deceased, and the objects associated with them, without examining the broader implications of the ritual. Here, the author explores the variations in bed burials, their relationship to the deceased, the artefacts linked with them, and the surrounding contexts. Her study is based on a new assessment of every aspect of the ritual, including the location of the graves, the biological and social identity of the deceased, the burial assemblage, and whether the beds were complete. This approach aims to demonstrate that the practice of bed burial should be addressed in the plural.

Common sense morality follows – in many cases – the prescriptions of threshold deontology. Governments, for example, are expected to follow their own rules, but in the face of an extreme price increase, public opinion has often supported changing the rules ex post to increase tax revenues. Such moral license in extreme situations is puzzling from a philosophical and an economic point of view. We present a simple contractualist solution to this puzzle using a game-theoretic model. We argue that allowing for deviations from the social contract in extreme circumstances is a necessary condition for the stability of any social contract.

This article highlights the state’s labor coercion practices and their perpetual characteristic in defining the history of migration and migrants’ experiences in the city. It underlines the internal relationship between production processes and relations on the one hand and the mobility of workers and their families on the other. For this purpose, it focuses on the migration dynamics of shipbuilding workers in mid-nineteenth-century İstanbul, most of whom worked in the Imperial Arsenal (Tersane-i Amire) and dwelled in the neighborhoods of the surrounding quarter of Kasımpaşa. I will utilize the population records of one of these neighborhoods, the Seyyid Ali Çelebi, where the relationship between the worksite and the residential community was evident, and the wage records of the Imperial Arsenal to understand the relationality of migration and work processes. Based on an analysis of these sources, I will point to the connections between the configuration of migration networks built in or through the Arsenal and the settlement patterns in the neighborhood. I will particularly argue that relations at the workplace and the coercive dynamics that underlined these relations significantly impacted the migration and settlement patterns in the nineteenth century.

Conflict among missionary societies and missioners in Asia and Africa has been a defining feature in the history of missionary work. In 1879/80, German missionary Ernst Faber and three others were expelled from the Rhenish Missionary Society (RMG) due to a leadership dispute over the Canton Central missionary school. This conflict involved RMG inspectors, missionaries and institutional power distribution, differences in dogmatic Lutheran and liberal confession, knowledge perceptions and missionary methods within the colonial context. The expulsion of Faber had a lasting impact on RMG’s missionary course in China. However, there is a research gap concerning the causes and consequences of this conflict. Guided by the theoretical framework of entangled history, this study employs a historical material qualitative research method, drawing on the source An die General-Versammlung der Rheinisch-Westfaelischen Missions-Gesellschaft to analyze the reciprocal competition among the parties involved. It aims to examine this historical event as a microcosm of the entanglement between missionary, church and colonial histories.

Most people believe that animal agriculture for food production is permissible. At the same time, bestiality enjoys neither widespread social endorsement nor practice. It would be surprising, then, if it turned out that a commitment to the permissibility of one implied the permissibility of the other. This is the case that I make in this paper. Given the truth of some very plausible moral premises, I show that in a wide range of possible instantiations, if a social practice of raising animals for food is permissible, then so too is a social practice of raising animals for sex. While I don’t explicitly argue for this, my hope is that this compels readers to reject the permissibility of animal agriculture rather than endorse the social practice of bestiality.

Our essay aims to offer a biography of Elena Sengal (1911–1962), an Italian citizen of Ethiopian origin, whose life offers important elements to better understand both Fascist and postwar Italy. Elena was born into an Italo-Ethiopian family and became an Italian citizen after the naturalisation of her father, Sengal Workneh, a former Italian colonial subject and a lecturer in Amharic and Tigrinya at the Istituto Orientale in Naples. She grew up in Naples where she graduated and later held a teaching position, following in her father’s footsteps. When in 1939 her partner, Guido Cucci, fell in Ethiopia fighting the Ethiopian resistance, Elena found herself alone with a newborn child and struggled to make a living. Her life did not improve with the end of Fascism. Indeed, in postwar Italy it became so unbearable that she relocated to Ethiopia. However, racism and exclusion accompanied her life in the East African country too. This biography is based on archival materials as well as a body of personal letters of Elena Sengal, kindly made available by her granddaughter Maria Elena Cucci.

This article offers a critical rereading of the historiography on the role of women in the Italian Resistance. It starts with the postwar period, marked by a general silence and the prevailing image of women as mothers and staffette. In the 1970s, the first historical elaboration of women’s experiences began in all northern regions, leading to the now iconic concept of the ‘silent Resistance’. In the 1990s, a dialogue developed with other historiographical categories, such as the concept of ‘civil resistance’ developed by Jacques Sémelin and the ‘war on civilians’, but this approach ran the risk of reducing women’s contribution to ‘powerless’ acts. Although today women’s history is fully integrated into the narrative canon of the Resistance, it faces new challenges, such as the confrontation with ‘other’ (mainly non-European) resistances and new public uses of history. The article suggests that women’s history has been, if not the only, then certainly the most important means by which new dimensions of the partisan movement and the Second World War have been brought to the fore, shedding light on the specificities of the conflict experienced by women, but also shaping the very notion of resistance by overcoming a purely militarist vision.