In the early nineteenth century a centralized political entity, the Galinhas kingdom, emerged in southernmost Sierra Leone. Based on sources from Cuban, British, American, Spanish, and Sierra Leonean archives, this article examines the factors accounting for the emergence and consolidation of Galinhas. I argue that the postabolitionist (1808) redeployment of North Atlantic slave trading actors, networks, routes, and spaces, particularly the connection with Cuba and resources from the island, created the conditions for Galinhas's commercial growth and the centralization of its political power. I then problematize the relationship between warfare, the Atlantic slave trade, and state making. During the foundation of a predatory state, before a slaving and political frontier existed, wars were detrimental to trade. When warfare and commerce — or any social activity — coexisted in the same physical space, the interdependent balance between them, which supported the slave trade itself, was disrupted. After the end of the war, political stability boosted slave trading operations.

This article aims to further understand the Irish immigrant experience with U.S. slavery by studying Irish overseers on southern plantations. The Irish relationship with U.S. slavery varied according to circumstances. However, as foreign-born outsiders, Irish immigrants in the South had to accommodate the region's slaveholding culture. This article takes the story of the Irish as urban pioneers of the antebellum South out into the southern countryside. Those who sought employment as overseers had no qualms about profiting from racial slavery, and the nationality of a successful overseer was immaterial to planters. Irish overseers were not categorically different from native-born southern overseers. Indeed, Irish overseers had to be as ruthless as their American counterparts if they hoped to be successful. The expansion of the southern economy in accordance with the rise of the ‘second slavery’ created more significant opportunities for Irish immigrants to become overseers and demonstrates the essential whiteness of the Irish in the South.

This article discusses hearing disability in early modern Europe, focusing on medical ideas to demonstrate a profound shift in thinking about deafness over the course of the eighteenth century. Scholars have previously described changes in the social status of the deaf in the eighteenth century, pointing at clerics’ sympathy for the deaf and philosophers’ fascination with gestures as the origin of language, but there is remarkably little scholarship on the growing interest in deafness and hardness of hearing by physicians. From the seventeenth century onwards, however, medical men investigated earwax and mucus in the Eustachian Tube and developed theories about the propagation of sound waves via fluid airs and nervous juices in relation to hearing and deafness. This article argues that this focus on fluids brought about a new medical understanding of auditory perception, which viewed hearing and deafness not as dichotomous but as states along a continuous spectrum. As such, this article offers a new perspective on the study and treatment of hearing difficulties in early modern Europe, arguing that there was no solid dividing line between deafness and hearing; if anything, it was permeable and unstable.

American child psychiatrists have long been interested in the problems of delinquent behaviour by juveniles. With the rise of specific psychiatric diagnoses in the 1960s and 1970s, delinquent behaviour was defined within the diagnosis of conduct disorder. Like all psychiatric diagnoses, this concept was shaped by particular historical actors in context and has been highly contingent on assumptions related to race, class and gender. The history of conduct disorder illustrates the tensions in child psychiatry between the expansive goals of the field and the often limited uses of its professional authority, as well as individual children as the target of intervention and their interactions in groups.

During the last decades of colonial rule, Belgian colonial authorities, health agencies and researchers intensely engaged with kwashiorkor, a severe syndrome that was deemed widespread among young children in some parts of the Belgian Congo and Ruanda-Urundi and chiefly attributed to protein malnutrition. To fight kwashiorkor, the Belgian government, in the early 1950s, set up a joint milk distribution campaign with the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund, Food and Agriculture Organization and World Health Organization, the first of its kind in colonial Africa. Placing this campaign in the context of mounting international and inter-imperial concern about kwashiorkor and other nutritional problems in Africa and across the globe, this article explores its rationales, mechanisms and consequences, and in particular, how the campaign was shaped and publicised by FORÉAMI, one of the main health providers on the ground. It not only contributes to the history of European colonial medicine and nutritional policies, but also opens new perspectives on international health collaboration during late colonialism. It argues that Belgian authorities were wary of international interference in colonial policies, but that especially FORÉAMI also viewed and used the campaign as an opportunity to display its ‘mastery’ in rural and infant healthcare and control the narrative on Belgium’s colonial medicine.