This article analyses the naming of streets in late nineteenth-century Kyiv. Building on scholarship on critical toponymy and using unpublished archival sources, it presents street naming as more multifunctional than usually recognized. Besides orientation and ideology, toponyms were believed to be able to raise property value and attract tourists. By highlighting the debates among landlords, municipal authorities and imperial officials around commercialization and temporalization of the streetscape of late imperial Kyiv, the article demonstrates how economic priorities accompanied and even sometimes outweighed political considerations in determining toponymical choices.

Bishkek became the administrative centre of the Kara-Kirghiz Autonomous Oblast in December 1924, meaning that Bishkek became the capital city for the Soviet Kyrgyz Republic when it was declared in 1926. This elevation in status coincided with an inauspicious economic and social situation for the city, which was still recovering from the violence of the late imperial era. Ethnic relations in Bishkek and its environs were strained, particularly over the land question. Yet, the acquisition of pastureland by the Kyrgyz population in the Bishkek region appears as a quirk of urban land management rather than a conscious policy of reparations.

This article re-examines the geography of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Havana through the gendered lens of Black freedom and enslavement. The author uses fragmentary evidence surrounding the disappearance of Margarita, a young, enslaved girl in 1820s Havana, to suggest how the city’s African and African-descended residents navigated urban space in opposition to colonial design and function. In the process, the author suggests the ways in which the interventions of Black residents, influenced by the ecologies internal to the port, were pivotal to the production of urban space and the geographies of slavery.

Starting in the 1830s, French musicians began to fully engage with the concept of nostalgia as an affective category and as a musical trait. The deliberate artistic process of naming music and musical works as ‘nostalgia’ contributed to the demedicalization of the term while transforming its original meaning as homesickness into a spectrum of spatiotemporal emotions. Musical renditions of nostalgia also displaced expressions and discussions of this emotion away from the countryside, where it had originally been rooted, towards the city. Musicians thus directly participated in the transformation of nostalgia into a commodity, a fashionable product that could be purchased in music stores, experienced firsthand in entertainment venues, and tailored to the needs and desires of an urban population.

This article traces the shift in the evocation of nostalgia in music and the musical press during the nineteenth century in Paris, where it became most prevalent in dozens of vocal romances and instrumental pieces. The compositions that I analyse, rather than forming a unified depiction of the city, offer a range of sonorous and thematic ideas that provide a more comprehensive understanding of the place nostalgia played in the imagination of an urban population increasingly conscious of its artistic value and impact. I thus uncover three main stages in this shift, which show how successive generations of musicians, influenced by different attitudes to urbanity, conceived nostalgia. I investigate why composers drawn to nostalgia were attracted to certain types of musical and formal models, what these choices reveal about their understanding of nostalgia and its purpose, and, more importantly, what this musical nostalgia sounded like. This article provides the first overview of works that deliberately use nostalgia as an explicit topic across genres and generations in nineteenth-century Paris.

This article explores urban memory politics in Komsomolsk-na-Amure – a military-industrial stronghold erected in Russia’s Far East in the 1930s with the participation of Komsomol volunteers from across the USSR. Known as pervostroiteli or ‘first-builders’, Komsomolsk’s founders became the city’s first chroniclers, who played an enduring role in shaping the city’s heroic popular image. I argue that the Soviet government’s active efforts to glorify Komsomol builders endowed the figures of pervostroiteli with unparalleled moral authority, which participants in the city’s early development used to curate their own memorialization and local historical politics.

This article explores nuclear cultural heritage-making as a spatial activity in the context of nuclear secrecy and restricted access. It focuses on the closed city Sarov, formerly Arzamas-16, the birthplace of Soviet nuclear weapons. Since the end of the Cold War, Sarov has cultivated its image as a heritage site, opening a Museum of Nuclear Weapons, pioneering nuclear scientists and local history, as well as reconstructing religious sites. Based on interviews and fieldwork in Russia, this article maps the hitherto unstudied development of cultural heritage infrastructure in a closed city and its diverse and conflicting political uses and assesses the ambivalence of nuclear material culture as it is selectively preserved and deployed to achieve these conflicting goals.

This article uses amphora quantification and regression analysis to trace economic changes in the Mediterranean between the Principate (27 bc to ad 284) and Late Antiquity. It indicates that, during the Principate, there was a clear pattern of amphora distribution across the Mediterranean, which can be explained by the predominance of market forces among the factors governing trade. In contrast, the weak correlation between exports and prices observed in Late Antiquity suggests a significant shift in the underlying principles of trade during this period.

Cultural evolutionary models of bargaining can elucidate issues related to fairness and justice, and especially how fair and unfair conventions and norms might arise in human societies. One line of this research shows how the presence of social categories in such models creates inequitable equilibria that are not possible in models without social categories. This is taken to help explain why in human groups with social categories, inequity is the rule rather than the exception. But in previous models, it is typically assumed that these categories are rigid – in the sense that they cannot be altered, and easily observable – in the sense that all agents can identify each others’ category membership. In reality, social categories are not always so tidy. We introduce evolutionary models where the tags connected with social categories can be flexible, variable, or difficult to observe, i.e. where these tags can carry different amounts of information about group membership. We show how alterations to these tags can undermine the stability of unfair conventions. We argue that these results can inform projects intended to ameliorate inequity, especially projects that seek to alter the properties of tags by promoting experimentation, imitation, and play with identity markers.

Although industrial modernization in Eurasia both preceded and outlived the Soviet project, in popular and scholarly imaginations, manufacturing cities located in the continent’s eastern regions are often understood as quintessentially ‘Soviet’. Yet, this perception tends to ignore the ways in which earlier urban developments were integrated with socialist innovations. This special issue seeks to decentre the concept of ‘Soviet urbanism’ by placing socialist forms into a longue durée perspective on industrial modernity and destabilizing popular equations of ‘post-socialism’ with ‘post-industrialism’. The collection’s contributions explore how modernist urbanism has intersected a variety of political and economic regimes over the past century and how evolving industrial processes continue to shape and reconfigure Eurasia’s urban landscapes.

Focusing on the case of Mongolia during the Cold War, this article analyses how the goals of resource extraction and socialist development shaped urban and regional planning in the country. The article examines the negotiations for development assistance between Mongolia, the Soviet Union, East Germany and Czechoslovakia since 1962, with a particular focus on the foundation of the mining city of Erdenet in 1973 as a key outcome of these negotiations. It demonstrates that mineral extraction was the central aspect of socialist assistance. The requirements and scale of mining infrastructure provided a distinct logic to urban and regional planning in the country. The article argues that in the socialist development vision, extraction was integral to urban thinking. The socialist approach to resource development in Mongolia employed a heavy-handed approach of extensive urbanization, contrasting sharply with post-socialist urban patterns shaped by investments from private extractive industries.

Baku, Azerbaijan, is one of the most significant historical sites of industrial oil production in the world. Yet, the oil industry is largely ignored in the official heritage and tourism strategies. Drawing on ethnographic research in Baku, this article examines the place of the industrial past in the top-down and bottom-up heritage practices. It identifies three different heritage discourses pursued by different actors: the government, state-linked corporate actors and city tour guides. It argues that industrial heritage has significant touristic potential which, in the context of a strongly centralized state, can only be unlocked if the official heritage actors incorporate the industrial past into its heritage discourse.

Transnational corporations pose a dilemma for scholars of normative political economy. On the one hand, many think that such entities must be tamed by instruments of legal accountability and political control, lest they be allowed to act relatively untamed by legal and moral concerns. On the other hand, the very concern about regulating transnational corporations lends itself to suspicion of such efforts. Just as corporate power often reflects the interests of some class or national interest, efforts to extend normative standards can be seen as a vehicle for powerful nations and actors to extend their influence in the guise of moral or legal accountability. Reviewing three books that touch on different aspects of corporate accountability, this essay considers the way business ethics, human rights due diligence, and extraterritorial legal enforcement attempt to find the balance between these concerns. It concludes that meso-level institutions, which play an important role in all three books, may provide unique spaces for the mediation of normative accountability and power politics.

Critical-Level Utilitarianism entails one of the Repugnant Conclusion and the Sadistic Conclusion, depending on the critical level. Indeterminate Critical-Level Utilitarianism is a version of Critical-Level Utilitarianism where it is indeterminate which well-being level is the critical level. Undistinguished Critical-Range Utilitarianism is a variant of Critical-Level Utilitarianism where additions of lives in a range of well-being between the good and the bad lives make the resulting outcome incomparable to the original outcome. These views avoid the Repugnant Conclusion, they avoid the Sadistic Conclusion, and they agree on all outcome comparisons not involving indeterminacy or incomparability. So it may seem unclear whether we have any reason to favour one of these theories over the other. But I argue that Indeterminate Critical-Level Utilitarianism still entails the disjunction of the Repugnant Conclusion and the Sadistic Conclusion, which is also repugnant. By contrast, Undistinguished Critical-Range Utilitarianism does not entail this conclusion.