Fire is a material and social process that is different in different periods and places. This article examines the fires set during the largest, and last, uprising of the enslaved in Jamaica, which occurred in the island's western parishes after Christmas 1831. It argues that different sorts of fire were central to processes of production and everyday life under plantation slavery, and examines what the burnings of 1831–32 reveal about the fight against enslavement in the early nineteenth century. A close reading of the records of the trials that followed the uprising details the methods used to burn plantations; the decisions over what to burn and what to save; and the contested social and political relations involved in encouraging or extinguishing the flames. This demonstrates that fire was a material means of creative destruction for the rebels that turned the everyday practices of commodity production and coerced social reproduction against the plantation infrastructure; that destroying buildings by fire both denied and made claims on the land, and sought to remake the Jamaican landscape for other forms of inhabitation; and that the collectivities forged through fire were inevitably shaped by both shared endeavors and tensions within and between groups of plantation inhabitants facing an uncertain future. Overall, it seeks to understand the use of fire in the 1831–32 uprising to fight for freedom as part of a “politics of habitation.”

Although the Lower Kasai was identified by Jan Vansina as a likely center for highly complex societies, he failed to recognize that sixteenth-century sources had mentioned the Empire of Mwene Muji as a large polity in that region. Studying the well known and recently discovered literature on West Central Africa, as well as a critical study of oral tradition, shows considerable evidence for the antiquity and existence of Mwene Muji.

A rise in the number of moral individuals in a group can hurt the morality of the group’s collective action. In this paper, we characterize strategic environments and models of morality where this is true solely because, after all, individual morals are private information.

This article explores the socio-ecological impacts of Fascist hydropower extraction in the Alpine valleys of Italy, focusing on the Toce river basin during the interwar period. It investigates the conflicts between local communities and hydropower initiatives by private energy companies under Fascism, thereby revealing the regime's communication strategies rooted in its political ecology. By analysing newspaper articles, propaganda outlets and communal archival documents, the study uncovers statal and local perspectives on infrastructure development and its enduring consequences. How the political ecology of Fascism in a high-altitude hydropower construction site became an expression of Fascist modernity will thereby be shown. Despite objections from valley inhabitants, Fascist hydropower projects persisted, perpetuating socio-ecological inequalities after 1945. Even postwar efforts for compensation failed to address the long-lasting impacts on mountain communities. This research reveals the intersection of political ecology and modernist infrastructure development in Mussolini's Italy, and thus also highlights the legacies of Fascist resource extraction policies on the country's peripheral Alpine regions.

Italy's prison overcrowding became world news in early March 2020, when the COVID-19 outbreak sparked riots in prisons across the country, causing the death of 13 inmates. As a crisis narrative, the COVID-19 pandemic made visible the deep, ongoing crisis of Italy's prison system and disclosed new conditions for critical thought on the restorative potential of the penitentiary system. This article first describes the impact of COVID-19 on Adriano Sofri's ‘no prison’ writings, starting from his column in Il Foglio on the prison uprisings in March that followed the announcement of the anti-COVID measures; it subsequently analyses the Italian response to the pandemic from an internal, practitioner-led perspective. By offering both a dialectic and an immanent perspective, it aims to develop new ways of understanding the detention system and enhance the social credibility of the penitentiary system in Italy beyond the constraints of COVID and the emergency logic.

Laws seeking to resolve war-related problems face a significant dilemma. While the legal establishment in a war-affected country drafts laws based on normative approaches suited to peacetime and stable settings, the civilian population pursues crises livelihoods that are markedly unsuited to compliance with or use of such laws. What emerges are socio-legal instabilities that aggravate instead of resolve wartime problems. With a socio-legal examination of Ukraine’s wartime housing Compensation Law, this article describes six sets of instabilities that compromise the utility of the law and aggravate or create additional problems: (1) the case-by-case approach, (2) administrative and institutional capacities, (3) legal vs. available evidence, (4) the timeframe for claims submission and awareness raising, (5) excluded segments of civil society and (6) prohibitions on selling properties. Approaches from international best practice that may be able to attend to these instabilities are then suggested.

This article presents the results of AMS radiocarbon dating, stable isotope analysis, and FRUITS dietary modelling to investigate dietary variability among sixty individuals buried at Varna in the mid-fifth millennium bc. The principal pattern was the isotopic clustering of some forty-three per cent of the population, which suggests a ‘Varna core diet’, with the remainder showing a wider variety of isotopic profiles. While there is a slight trend for heightened meat and fish consumption among male individuals compared to female and undetermined individuals, the authors found no clear correlation between dietary variation and the well-attested differentiation in material culture in the graves. Three children had isotopic profile and estimated diets unmatched by any of the adults in the sample. Two scenarios, dubbed ‘regional’ and ‘local’, are presented to explain such dietary variability at Varna.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the terrain of the diplomatic and security landscape of Southern Africa shifted dramatically. South Africa declared various Bantustans “independent,” but they were not recognized by other countries. Small regional states like Lesotho increasingly took more combative diplomatic stances, aided by Cold War connections and, in this case, a local border dispute. This article examines a proposed ski resort that South Africa wanted to build in the QwaQwa Bantustan on Lesotho's border starting in 1975. Because of Lesotho's diplomatic and military escalation, the Khoptjoane resort was never built, but the lengthy dispute contributed to the sidelining of the apartheid regime's diplomats in favor of its securocrats. Thus, we argue the failed ski resort contributed to the atmosphere in which Pretoria greenlit the Maseru Massacre of 1982, presaging the apartheid regime's increased 1980s willingness to use its military superiority against township residents and Southern African neighbors alike.

In the past, Vietnam was impacted by numerous epidemics, particularly during the Nguyễn Dynasty from 1802 to 1883. Based on data from the Đại Nam Thực Lục (1961) (The Veritable Records of the Great South), this article investigates the frequency and nature of these epidemics, identifies the types of common diseases at that time, and explores the underlying causes of these outbreaks. The study further examines the Nguyễn Dynasty's strategies for managing these health crises. During these outbreaks, the dynasty faced significant challenges, with frequent epidemics leading to high death rates, widespread social disruption, and economic decline. The dynasty's primary preventive measures, heavily reliant on spiritual practices like prayer, highlight the limited medical understanding at the time and the constraints of its socio-political framework. However, there was a progressive shift towards the incorporation of Western medical innovations, particularly in the vaccine approach to treat diseases like smallpox. This transition not only marked a critical evolution in the local healthcare approach but also set the stage for more systematic medical advancements in Vietnam during the colonial period (1884–1945).

In 1912, the Italian parliament approved the extension of male suffrage, making it ‘almost’ universal. This process of revising representation transformed the very idea of the relationship between citizens and the state and shaped a profoundly different Italy. The aim of this article is to trace both the process leading to the approval of universal suffrage and its impact on the party system. With a compilation and analysis of data developed from scratch for the elections of 1909 and 1913, it was possible to analyse the main dimensions of the two rounds in a disaggregated manner. Three aspects make 1913 a year of transition. First, the degree of competition in the electoral process, especially in the South, increased considerably. Second, the decline of liberal formations was not transformed into defeat, thanks only to the Catholic vote. Third, the birth of the Popular Party and the failure to create a mass party of conservatives were causes of the imbalance in the party structure.