What would the ‘sharing economy’ look like if platform providers optimised for racial and other forms of diversity? This article considers that question. Following the Introduction, Part 2 of this article reviews the widespread nature of race and other forms of discrimination in platform technologies. Part 3 uses core strands of property theory to analyse the ways in which racial privilege translates into property entitlements. Part 4 discusses a range of reforms within property law that can contribute to eliminating the value – and ultimately the fact – of whiteness as a property entitlement in the platform economy.

Geoffrey Pullum has produced countless contributions to linguistic theory over his 50-year career in the field. Given this exceptional scientific achievement, his philosophical work often goes underappreciated. In this article, I discuss and critique three themes from Pullum’s philosophy of linguistics, namely, cardinality neutrality, model-theoretic syntax and normativity in language. I conclude by showing how these seemingly disparate elements might indeed be connected in terms of a normative constructivist approach to linguistics.

The article was inspired by Justice Alito's selective and often misleading use of the medieval history of abortion law to justify the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Hoping to offer a corrective view of the larger conversation about abortion during the premodern era, this article hopes to drive home a number of points. First, modern authorities need to acknowledge that the word “abortion” (aborsus) meant something different then than it does now. Second, at its origins, abortion was conceived as a crime against husbands, and thus it falls into a larger body of misogynous law designed to protect men and their heirs from women who exploited their reproductive potential to trick men out of their rightful inheritance. And third, medieval laws against those who provided abortions labeled them as witches or poisoners. Medieval laws about abortion are thus intertwined with fears of the devil and of the woman's body as poison.

The modern history of Tianjin, a northern port city in China, offers an intriguing urban case for scholars interested in comparative colonial practices. From the 1860s to the 1940s, Tianjin was home to up to nine foreign concessions and a sequence of different Chinese municipalities. While much scholarship on colonial history has focused on the interactive dynamics between the colonizer and the colonized, Tianjin’s colonial past draws attention to the multiplicity, multilateralism and multilayered trajectories at the heart of the colonial experiences of both imperialist powers and the Chinese. At the heart of this short survey are some reflections on the multi-imperial dimensions of the city of Tianjin. It also explains how the multi-imperial dimensions operated in Tianjin in its treaty-port incarnation and offers some considerations of how the Tianjin case contributes to broader historiographical conversations germane to the imperial–global–urban complex.

The relation between perception and production in social meaning is often taken to be transparent, with social meaning associations learned from observations of language use. However, recent work has suggested that this relation is often more complex than previously thought. Here, we present new data comparing the social meaning of realized variable liaison in spoken French, couched within the framework of the pragmatic sociology of critique. We recall data from a recent matched guise experiment showing that listeners associate the realization of liaison with meanings like “professionalism”, specifically in social situations where efficacy and expertise are at issue. Basing ourselves on this finding, we use a production task, presenting these same social situations to amateur and professional actors. We find that our participants do not exploit the social meaning potential of variable liaison, producing liaison at lexically-determined rates on a par with previous corpus studies. We discuss this discrepancy between perception and production, which suggests that the link between the two is dependent on the linguistic variable under investigation.

This article explores the history of Japan’s municipal electricity regulation. We find that in the early phase of Japanese electrification, rights-of-way and municipal franchises remained undefined compared with these concepts in Western societies. Consequently, Japanese cities started electrification without municipal regulations. Although municipal franchises were introduced to Japan as a regulatory framework in the 1900s, they were tailored to Japan’s political and ideological context. Moreover, the Road Law of 1919 weakened the legal basis for municipal regulation. With the revision of the Electric Utility Law in 1932 and World War II, the decline of municipal regulation became inevitable.

This introduction to the ‘Survey and Speculation’ special issue ‘Empire and Cities’ outlines how this collection came about, summarizes the six contributions and draws general conclusions.

In 1820 two French scientists – Pierre Joseph Pelletier and Jean Bienaimé Caventou – discovered and named the active alkaloid substance extracted from cinchona bark: quinine. The bark from the ‘wondrous’ fever tree, and its antimalarial properties, however, had long been known to both colonial scientists and indigenous Peruvians. From the mid-seventeenth century, cinchona bark, taken from trees that grow on the eastern slopes of the Andes, was part of a global circulation of botanical knowledge, practice and profit. By the 1850s, Europeans eager to bypass South American trade routes to access cinchona plants established plantations across the global South in French Algeria, Dutch Java and British India. Wardian cases – plant terrariums named after British physician Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward – would fuel new imperial efforts to curb malaria, contemporaries argued. And yet cinchona trees proved difficult to transport over land and sea, and did not easily or universally thrive in new tropical climates. As a result of the growing demand and uncertainty around cinchona, as Pratik Chakrabarti has argued, from the late eighteenth century there was ‘a global scientific obsession’ with finding a ‘substitute’ for cinchona, particularly local alternatives in India and China.1