This article analyses a case of female patronage in Edwardian Leicester, a drinking fountain surmounted by a statuette dedicated to a female Anglo-Saxon ruler. The bequest, by Edith Gittins (1845–1910), is contextualized within the nineteenth-century perspectives on the past that identified the roots of the English people in the Anglo-Saxon period. The article explores the cultural, social and gender implications of Gittins’ intentions behind the bequest both for women's rights and for the use of the past in the construction of civic identity. These have not hitherto received sufficient attention. In order to address these questions the article exploits the potential of a 3D visualization of the urban setting where the fountain was intended to be erected to help frame the historical inquiry.

The attention that the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) has given to public–private partnerships in solving global concerns including poverty, sustainable development and climate change has shed new light on the question of duties of corporations in relation to economic, social and cultural (ESC) rights. At the same time, objections to recognizing the obligations of corporations in relation to human rights in general and to ESC rights in particular have continued to be made. At the formal level, these objections are reflected in new distinctions such as between the duties of states and responsibilities of corporations, between primary duties of states and secondary duties of corporations, and between obligations of compliance and obligations of performance. All these objections and distinctions are untenable and serve only to stultify the discourse on business and human rights. The current state of human rights is dynamic, not static; commodious, not stale. There is ample space in it to accommodate duties of corporations regarding ESC rights.

This article, which focuses on the political decision making around the leadership of India's Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), shows how this process both decentralized scientific authority in India and led to changes in India's nuclear programme. New evidence presented from the deliberations of the Prime Minister's Secretariat (PMS) shows that Vikram Sarabhai, appointed chairman of the AEC in 1966, following the sudden death of the previous leader, Homi Bhabha, was the favoured candidate from the start of the process. His view on India's nuclear programme contrasted sharply with that of his predecessor, but his authority was protected, in part, from external challenge by the jurisdictional decisions made by the PMS. This article argues that the ambiguity inherent in India's developing nuclear programme was not the result of the apprehension of external threat, but the result of internal tensions within the relevant institutions, which are both revealed and (partially) resolved by the appointment process for the new chair.

In 1871, the Swiss physiological chemist Friedrich Miescher published the results of a detailed chemical analysis of pus cells, in which he showed that the nuclei of these cells contained a hitherto unknown phosphorus-rich chemical which he named ‘nuclein’ for its specific localisation. Published in German, ‘Ueber Die Chemische Zusammensetzung Der Eiterzellen’, [On the Chemical Composition of Pus Cells] Medicinisch-Chemische Untersuchungen (1871) 4: 441–60, was the first publication to describe DNA, and yet remains relatively obscure. We therefore undertook a translation of the paper into English, which, together with the original article, can be accessed via the following link https://doi.org/10.1017/S000708742000062X. In this paper, we offer some intellectual context for its publication and immediate reception.

Following some years of declining health, Professor Maurice Crosland passed away on 30 August 2020 at the age of eighty-nine. Author of four influential scholarly monographs, Maurice played major roles in the British Society for the History of Science during the 1960s and 1970s as an active Member of Council, Honorary Editor of the British Journal for the History of Science (1965–71) and Honorary President of the society (1974–6). His academic career began in 1963 with his appointment to a lectureship in the History & Philosophy of Science at the University of Leeds. In 1974 the by-then Reader in History of Science secured a £100,000 Nuffield Foundation Grant with which to establish, for the first time, a dedicated history-of-science group at the University of Kent at Canterbury. Appointed Professor of the History of Science and Director of the Unit for the History, Philosophy and Social Relations of Science (known as the ‘History of Science Unit’ or simply ‘the Unit’), his objectives during the five-year Nuffield-funded period were to focus on promoting the research activities of the new group, build up much-needed library resources in a university which was barely ten years old, and effect a transition to a research and teaching Unit that would offer modules to undergraduates in each of the three principal faculties (Humanities, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences). His own research centred on French science during and after the Napoleonic period, with particular emphasis on the history of chemistry and the formal institutions and informal networks of Parisian science. In 1984 his work was recognized with the American Chemical Society's award of the Dexter Prize, a rare achievement for a British scholar.

Respected as one of four ‘feuilles de qualité’ in nineteenth-century France, the Journal des débats politiques et littéraires published articles by some of the most talented writers/critics of its time. In ‘feuilletons’, large articles that ran across the bottom of the first and second pages, these authors gave perceptive critiques in high-quality prose and provided their readers with relief from the political news discussed on the page above. In January 1858 literary critic Hippolyte Rigault asserted that modern criticism communicated not just through forthright judgements but also through innuendo and nuance. A sophisticated readership could then be expected to take up the task of understanding the allusions and filling in the blanks. Like Rigault, Hector Berlioz (music critic of the Débats from 1835 to 1863) and Ernest Reyer (from 1866 to 1898) used both text and subtext to convey their assessments. This study, with the goal of examining how shades of approval and disapproval could be alluded to or directly revealed, traces how they wrote about their younger contemporary Georges Bizet in the years following Rigault's article.

Carpet production in the late Ottoman Empire developed during the second half of the nineteenth century in a context of growing trade with Western markets, until, by the turn of the century, carpets had become the empire's leading manufacturing export. This article examines the expansion of oriental carpet production in Armenian communities affected by violence in the mid-1890s and in 1909, and its role in their recovery. It shows that output of oriental carpets rose and production was moved into regions with limited or no “pre-violence” experience of carpet production. We shall see that the increases in production were firmly linked to market-based efforts to reconstruct those communities. Different actors, including local and regional merchant-entrepreneurs and multinational companies as well as individual transnational actors such as missionaries, all began to involve themselves in Armenian communities, both to promote trade in carpets and to offer the production of them as a solution to the post-violence ills. As a result, Armenian women and children in post-violence communities became an integral part of the global market in oriental carpets as a vulnerable, organizationally weak but cost-efficient workforce. The whole process was justified in the name of assistance to the needy and was closely associated with changing definitions of the work ethic and morality in the late Ottoman Empire.

Robert Maxwell Young's first book Mind, Brain and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century (1970), written from 1960 to 1965, still merits reading as a study of the naturalization of mind and its relation to social thought in Victorian Britain. I examine the book from two perspectives that give the volume its unique character: first, Young's interest in psychology, which he considered should be used to inform humane professional practices and be the basis of social reform; second, new approaches to the history of scientific ideas. I trace Young's intellectual interests to the Yale Philosophy Department, the Cambridge Department of Experimental Psychology and a new history and philosophy of science community. Although Young changed his political outlook and historiography radically after 1965, he always remained faithful to ideas about thought and practice described in Mind, Brain.

This article will reveal how local scientific determination and ambition, in the face of rejection by funders, navigated a path to success and to influence in national policy and international medicine. It will demonstrate that Birmingham, England's ‘second city’, was the key centre for cutting-edge biological psychiatry in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s. The ambitions of Frederick Mott – doyen of biochemistry, neuropathology and neuropsychiatry, until now celebrated as a London figure – to revolutionize psychiatric treatment through science, chimed with those of the City and University of Birmingham's Joint Board of Research for Mental Diseases. Under Mott's direction, shaped by place and inter-professional working, the board's collaborators included psychiatrist Thomas Chivers Graves and world-renowned physiologist J.S. Haldane. However, starved of external money and therefore fresh ideas, as well as oversight, the ‘groupthink’ that emerged created the classic UK focal sepsis theory which, it was widely believed, would yield a cure for mental illness – a cure that never materialized. By tracing the venture's growth, accomplishments and contemporary potential for biochemical, bacterial and therapeutic discoveries – as well as its links with scientist and key government adviser Solly Zuckerman – this article illustrates how ‘failure’ and its ahistorical assessment fundamentally obscure past importance, neglect the early promise offered by later unsuccessful science, and can even hide questionable research.

A pictorial postcard condenses a cityscape into one iconic image, which claims to summarize the place, usually in a highly aestheticized version. If that is the case, how does one present an industrial city: with factories and worker housing or rather with churches and the palaces of industrial tycoons? Using four digitalized collections (over 700 postcards) this article analyses images of industrialized cities from the late nineteenth century until the end of the Cold War. The main argument is that this idealized depiction does not focus on industry, but rather taps into the imagination of the European city.

The Indian government has recently introduced legislation to regulate ‘altruistic’ surrogacy while banning ‘commercial’ surrogacy amidst the criticism that India has become the ‘baby factory’. In the past decade, academic discourse has raised socioethical and legal issues that surfaced in the unrestricted transnational commercial-surrogacy industry. Most of the literature and ethnographic studies centred on the issues of informed consent, autonomy, decision-making and exploitation. With the proposed legislation, the Indian government has shown its will to regulate surrogacy, including the medical intermediaries as well as the contract between the intending parents and the surrogate mother-to-be. The present paper addresses the legal and socioethical context in which India introduced the Surrogacy (Regulation) Bill 2019. It examines the extent to which the proposed law responds to the legal challenges and socioethical concerns that surfaced in the course of unregulated transnational commercial-surrogacy arrangements in India. It argues that, even though the proposed legislation addresses and responds to some of the legal and ethical concerns such as informed consent and legal parentage, it stops short of ensuring the welfare and well-being of the surrogate. Second, the legal certainty of parentage and the child's rights comes at the cost of the physical and psychological well-being of the surrogate. Finally, it argues that, by presupposing the surrogate as an autonomous agent and yet imposing the requirement of marriage, the Bill overlooks the sociocultural realities of patriarchal hierarchies entrenched in Indian society – that, in its conception of ‘family’, the focus on the ‘traditional’ family not only presents a narrow view of the heteronormative family and perpetuates the patriarchal notions of gender roles, but also fails to take into consideration maternal pluralism in surrogacy arrangements, undermines the modern family and, above all, discriminates against the single person's and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) communities’ right to found a family. Since many countries that served as centres for international commercial-surrogacy arrangement (such as Cambodia, Thailand and Nepal) have recently started to take steps to prohibit or limit transnational surrogacy arrangements, the analysis of Indian law in the present paper will provide a useful context within which these countries can effectively regulate surrogacy while safeguarding the surrogate's rights and interests.