Australian cities were transformed in the 1950s and 1960s by the spread of the automobile and suburbanization. This article examines the patterns of retail diffusion that followed and the resultant adoption of the shopping centre form. Further, it considers the broader implications of retail innovation during a period of urban disruption, revealing intersections between urban geographies, business innovation and retail hierarchies. In the Australian case, dominant firms were able to leverage their market power to adapt to shifting retail geographies and new technologies, while some small entrepreneurial developers catering to the needs of these established retailers laid foundations for national and international expansion. A by-product of these processes was the creation of a unique Australian shopping centre form.

On 9 October 2018, the Court of Appeal of The Hague (the Netherlands) upheld the District Court’s decision in the case of Urgenda, thus confirming the obligation of the Netherlands to reduce its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by at least 25% by 2020 compared with levels in 1990. This case raised some of the thorniest issues in climate law. As the Netherlands is responsible for only a tiny fraction of global GHG emissions, is it right for a court to hold that a national emissions reduction mitigation target is necessary to prevent dangerous climate change and its impact on human rights? If so, how can this target be determined? The District Court and the Court of Appeal of The Hague have provided inspiring responses, although they are perhaps not entirely convincing.

In order to advance both the mapping and theorizing of transnational law, this article considers a range of tactics used by small-scale fisheries (SSFs) in Europe and North America to improve market access, political influence, and legal recognition. Transnational law enables the framing of initiatives not only as implementation practices that occur as a result of international law, but also as transnational regulation in support of SSFs. The article uses the case study of SSFs to draw attention to the rise of ‘transnational localism’. This is defined as the reinforcement of local-specific approaches (reflecting local ecologies, values, and socio-economic specificities) within a transnational structure that provides support and recognition. It offers an alternative to the view that globalization necessitates global, uniform regulatory solutions. Transnational localism challenges the fascination with large certification schemes such as that administered by the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) in fisheries governance. It implies a need to reconcile transnational challenges with heterogeneous values and community approaches. To capture the simultaneous demand for the local and transnational within transnational law, this article proposes treating the described empowerment tactics within the scope of transnational standards. This requires a rethinking of standards away from fixed technical rules that are uniformly applicable across the globe.

The controversy around Bruce Gilley's article “The Case for Colonialism” has drawn global attention to a stream of revisionist claims and visions on the history of colonialism that has emerged in academia and in the media in recent years. Authors such as Nigel Biggar in the UK, Niall Ferguson in the USA, and Pieter Emmer in the Netherlands, have all published similarly revisionist claims about colonialism, arguing that postcolonial guilt and political correctness blind the majority of their colleagues to the positive side of the colonial project. Their argument chimes with wider societal trends, transforming the revisionist defenders of empire into heroes of a reinvigorated nationalist right within and beyond academia. The public influence attained by these approaches to colonialism requires historians to expose the deep methodological flaws, misreading of historical facts, and misrepresentations of prior scholarship that characterize the writings of this emerging revisionist trend. It is for this reason that the Editorial Committee of the International Review of Social History (IRSH) has decided to devote its first ever Virtual Special Issue to labour history's case against colonialism. This article, also an introduction to the Virtual Special Issue, sifts through the logical implications of the claims made by Gilley and like-minded scholars, providing both a contextualization and a rebuttal of their arguments. After assessing the long absence of colonial labour relations from the field of interest of labour historians and the pages of the IRSH itself, this article shows the centrality of a critique of colonialism to labour history's global turn in the 1990s. Using a selection of articles on colonial labour history from the IRSH's own archive, the article not only reconstructs “labour history's case against colonialism”, but also shows why labour history's critical insights into the nature of colonialism should be deepened and extended, not discarded.

During the nineteenth century, British public schools became increasingly important, turning out thousands of elite young men. Historians have long recognized the centrality of these institutions to modern British history and to understandings of masculinity in this era. While studies of universities and clubs have revealed how fundamental the rituals and everyday life of institutions were to the creation of masculinity, public schools have not been subjected to the same scrutiny. Approaches to date have emphasized the schools’ roles in distancing boys from the world of the home, domesticity, femininity, and women. Focusing on three case-study schools, Winchester College, Charterhouse, and Lancing College, this article offers a reassessment of the relationship between home and school in the Victorian and Edwardian period and contributes to the growing literature on forms of masculine domesticity in the second half of the nineteenth century. In the reformed public schools, the ideal of the patriarchal household was often essential, and in producing it, the presence of significant women—the wives of headmasters and housemasters—could be vital. The schools also worked to create a specifically masculine form of domesticity through boys’ performance of mundane domestic tasks in the “fagging” system, which was often imagined in terms of the chivalric service ideal. Letters from the period show how the everyday worlds of school and home remained enmeshed, revealing the distinctive nature of family relationships forged by the routine of presence and absence that public schools created.