In 1921, when Sir Ernest Shackleton was planning his circum-Antarctic expedition on the R.Y.S. Quest, he was eager to appoint a suitably qualified young person as a cabin boy or deck hand. He expressed great admiration for the Boy Scout Movement and its founder, Sir Robert Baden-Powell. Discussions between them led to Shackleton advertising for a Boy Scout to accompany him on the expedition, believing that the experience would greatly benefit the youngster's character, as well as providing much positive publicity for the expedition. He selected two young Scouts but, while much has been written about James Marr, no account has been written about the younger boy, Norman Mooney. This is because he was unable to cope with continuous seasickness and had to return home after only four weeks at sea. This account provides some little-known detail about Mooney and why he was selected, and about Shackleton's sensitive recruiting procedure.

This article explores the understudied issue of urban problems in pre-modern China and examines the responses to the negative impact of urban development on life in the populous city of Kaifeng in the Northern Song (960–1127). Although writers, painters, and historians have portrayed the capital city's splendor for centuries, various urban problems emerged as medieval China became a more urbanized society. This article investigates Ouyang Xiu's (1007–1072) accounts of how extreme weather conditions adversely affected the lives of Kaifeng residents. These experiences, which he discussed in letters and poems, are associated with longer trends that result in climatic anomalies and disasters in the city. Ouyang Xiu also complained about living costs and medical services in Kaifeng. These reflect the difficulties in maintaining good urban provisions and services in a city of this scale.

Tianjin is the largest port city in Northern China and a major hub for water and land transportation. For geological reasons, the city has long been troubled by water drainage problems. To remove wastewater from within its walls, the city developed a drain system which relies on human labor and a series of variously sized ditches. Unlike the modern sewage system, which simply discharges wastewater into surrounding rivers and the sea, Tianjin's traditional wastewater disposal system worked in concert with an urban manure collection system. Urban wastewater was recycled as fertilizer, a valuable resource for the surrounding rural area. In tracing the origin, evolution, and influence of urban wastewater disposal in Tianjin, this article aims to reveal the potential value in Chinese traditional waste management practices. Contemporary urban waste disposal systems might benefit from a better understanding of the relationship between urban and rural areas that characterized these traditional practices.

Tonio Andrade's The Gunpowder Age is a big book. It spans roughly 800 years, in both China and Europe. Its boldest claims concern China, but Andrade delves into European history as well, making it a challenge for any one scholar to assess his evidence and arguments. Because China specialists would want to know how historians specializing in European warfare and in Western science and technology evaluate Andrade's challenges to received wisdom, the Journal of Chinese History’s editor and editorial board invited historians outside the China field to contribute to a joint review. We succeeded in recruiting a distinguished panel, all of whom have written extensively on these issues: David Parrott, author of such books as The Business of War: Military Enterprise and Military Revolution in Early Modern Europe; Philip Hoffman, author most recently of Why Did Europe Conquer the World?; Stephen Morillo, author of War in World History, among other books; and Ian Inkster, author of Science and Technology in History: An Approach to Industrial Development, among other books. This introduction provides an overview of the discussion so far, and a few additional observations from a historian who has also tried his hand at Sino-European comparisons.

This article examines the jurisprudence of the Swedish Supreme Court during WW2 in disputes between exiled Jewish business owners and the Nazi-appointed administrators of their companies over the rights to the enterprises’ assets in Sweden. Contrary to assertions in previous scholarship, this article argues that the judgments of the Supreme Court were dictated neither by moral indignation in the face of the treatment of Jews in the Third Reich, nor by political considerations in a time of war. Instead, they were based on principles of private international law that predated, and outlived, the Third Reich. The outcome of the cases hinged upon whether the claim to Swedish assets arose before or after the date when the enterprise was placed under forced administration. If before, the claims of the Jewish owners were in principle successful; if after, they were not. This reasoning was well in line with both previous and subsequent case law on confiscations effected abroad. The article therefore concludes that the Swedish Supreme Court's judgments on Jewish assets in Sweden should be viewed not as outflows of extrajudicial considerations, but rather as failures to recognize political or ethical responsibility.

We are living in an age of political turbulence, social division, and resistance. The resistance that formed in reaction to the election of Donald Trump styles itself a force to defend constitutional rights, democratic norms, and the rule of law in the United States. Perhaps the New Republic best explained its advent: the Resistance had been born of partisan—that is, Democratic—fury after “liberalism had been dealt its most stunning and consequential defeat in American history.” “For the first time in decades, liberalism has been infused with a sense of energy and purpose,” with millions of people devoted to a singular cause: resisting Trump.

Traditional frontier literature identifies a positive correlation between land availability and fertility. A common explanation is that the demand for child labour is higher in newly established frontier regions compared to older, more densely populated farming regions. In this paper, we contribute to the debate by analysing the relationship between household composition and land availability in a closing frontier region, i.e. the Graaff-Reinet district in South Africa’s Cape Colony from 1798–1828. We show that the number of children in farming households increased with frontier closure, while the presence of non-family labourers decreased over time. Contrasting with the classic interpretation, we explain this by acknowledging that the demand for family labour was not a function of its marginal productivity and that farmers reacted differently to diminishing land availability depending on their wealth. Poorer households, which made up the majority of this frontier population, responded to shrinking land availability by employing relatively more family labour, while the wealthiest group invested in strengthening market access.

TRANSLATED ABSTRACTS FRENCH – GERMAN – SPANISH

Jeanne Cilliers et Erik Green. L’hypothèse sur la disponibilité de terres et la main d’œuvre dans une économie de colons: richesse, main d’œuvre et composition du ménage à la frontière sud-africaine.

La littérature traditionnelle de la frontière identifie une corrélation positive entre la disponibilité de terres et la fertilité. Une explication courante est que la demande de travail des enfants est supérieure dans les régions frontalières nouvellement établies, par comparaison avec d’anciennes régions agricoles plus densément peuplées. Dans cet article, nous contribuons au débat en analysant la relation entre la composition du ménage et la disponibilité de terres dans une région frontalière en train de fermer, le district de Graaff-Reinert dans la Colonie du Cap en Afrique du Sud, entre 1798 et 1828. Les auteurs montrent que le nombre des enfants dans les ménages agricoles augmenta avec la fermeture des frontières, tandis que la présence d’ouvriers agricoles non familiaux déclina au fil des ans. Contrairement à l’interprétation classique, nous expliquons ce phénomène en reconnaissant que la demande de travailleurs familiaux ne dépendit pas de sa productivité marginale, et que les exploitants agricoles réagirent différemment selon leur richesse à la disponibilité de terres diminuante. Les foyers plus pauvres, qui constituaient la majorité de cette population frontalière, répondirent à la disponibilité de terres déclinante en employant relativement plus de main d’œuvre familiale, tandis que le groupe le plus riche investit dans le renforcement de l’accès au marché.

Traduction: Christine Plard