To date, research on work in the mines in Greece has ignored the significance of gender in the workplace, since mining is associated exclusively with male labour. As such, it is considered, indirectly, not subject to gender relations. The article examines the influence of family and gender relations on labour in the Greek mines in the period 1860–1940 by highlighting migration trajectories, paternalistic practices, and the division of labour in mining communities.

Sources include: official publications of the Mines Inspectorate and the Mines and Industrial Censuses, the Greek Miners’ Fund Archive, British and French consular reports, various economic and technical reports by experts, literature and narratives, the local press from mining regions, and the Archive of the Seriphos Mines.

In 1942, the British government created the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey (FIDS) to enforce sovereignty over the Antarctic Peninsula. The small groups of men who worked for the Survey called themselves Fids. During the late 1950s when Antarctic sovereignty was being hotly debated and worked out by national governments, Fids serving at British bases criticised the British government’s use of science as a bargaining chip. Using in-house magazines written and printed at FIDS bases and oral histories, this article examines how Fids viewed Antarctic politics and how those events influenced daily life at bases on the Peninsula.

Gypsies (Ciganos in Portuguese) have been present in Brazil since the earliest days of Portuguese colonization. Part of the (free) masses (o povo, “the people”), they were known primarily as itinerant traders of trinkets, slaves, and animals, and were one category of intermediaries who made the internal economy function. Authorities viewed their lifestyle and activities with suspicion. Focusing on the state of Bahia, in the north-eastern region of Brazil, between the late sixteenth and late nineteenth centuries, this article shows that the tenuous position of Gypsies was amenable to transformations reflecting political priorities and ideas about the proper social order. The continued difference of Ciganos and their independent way of making a living were at times problematized by elites, embodying wider tensions between the authorities and the people. The case of Bahian Ciganos is revelatory within Romani-related historiography in that it foregrounds connected developments within locales enmeshed in a metropole–periphery relationship, continuities between imperial and nation-building projects, and the centrality of race on which they were built.

In 1938, the British enacted Section 377A of the Straits Settlements Penal Code, criminalizing male same-sex acts in Singapore. Although the law was neither the first nor only attempt to regulate same-sex activity, it represented a stark intensification in sexual policing. Yet, the reasons for the introduction of Section 377A remain elusive. New sources, including recently declassified documents, reveal that Section 377A intersected with the colonial state's wider project of social control. In the early 1930s, intensified policing of female prostitution inadvertently magnified the visibility of male prostitution in Singapore, just as homosexuality was emerging as a distinct conceptual category. Meanwhile, scandals about sexual liaisons between European officials and Asians men threatened British legitimacy. This “discovery” of homosexuality led the British to introduce Section 377A. As British troops arrived in Singapore in the late 1930s in response to Japanese expansionism in the Far East, concerns about blackmail, military discipline, and the colonial color line governed the enforcement of Section 377A. Between 1938 and 1941, the British disproportionately used Section 377A to punish Asian male prostitutes whom they thought had seduced European men. Secondarily, the British used the provision to deter European soldiers, sailors, and non-officials from exposing themselves to extortion. Seen in this light, Section 377A served as a response to changing configurations of race, class, and sexuality in colonial Singapore.

Over the past few years, the number of climate cases being filed against corporations and public authorities around the world has been on the rise. Aware of the central role of finance in economic development, the financial sector has remained vigilant. Traditionally, climate litigation in financial markets had been rare, but that seems to be changing: in 2018 there were more cases filed than in any previous year. The development of existing and forthcoming private and public sector initiatives with the aim of promoting sustainable finance may usher in even greater numbers in the next few years. This article provides the first systematic overview of climate cases in financial markets and introduces a typology to classify this type of climate case. This classification reveals common issues across different financial systems and raises questions for further enquiry that define a new research area within the emerging literature on climate litigation.

Are similarities of temperature, snow and ice cover, and (certain) marine mammals sufficient to warrant both polar regions being considered a single object of study or governance? We argue that their treatment as a unit is an invitation to examine the motivations behind the choice to be polar rather than Arctic or Antarctic. For individuals such as James Clerk Ross or Roald Amundsen, logistical requirements and analogous goals facilitated careers spanning both the Arctic and the Antarctic. This trend continued through the 20th century as individual scientists studying phenomena such as glaciers, sea ice, or aurora defined their research as “polar” in nature. Organisations such as the Scott Polar Research Institute and Norwegian Polar Institute could draw on traditions of national exploration in both polar regions, while the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute in St. Petersburg gained its southern mandate with the importance of the International Geophysical Year. By comparison, neither the Arctic Institute in Copenhagen nor the Argentine Antarctic Institute felt any need to become polar. The creation of polar identity is ultimately a matter of geopolitics, of the value states see in instruments and symbols that speak to polar rather than Arctic or Antarctic interests. In cases such as Finland’s icebreaker industry, a technological capability justified Antarctic interest even without any national research tradition. We conclude by asking whether there is anything more natural about the polar regions than there is about the concept of a “tripolar” world in which the high alpine regions form a natural unit along with the Arctic and Antarctic.