This article argues that medieval Arabic texts that were published in colonial northern Africa constitute as much a part of the history of colonialism and its legacy as that of the medieval centuries in which they were written. Using the publication history of a medieval Ibadi text and its French translations, I demonstrate how texts like it were edited, translated, and published not only for academic purposes, but also as contributions to the production of ‘useful’ colonial knowledge in Algeria. I begin with the first translation, published in 1878 alongside other ethnographic and historical studies funded by the colonial state. I then turn to the second translation, serially published between 1960–2 as its editors abandoned the country at the violent end of the colonial period. Finally, I address the Arabic editions published after independence, which recast it within a nationalist framework. Overall, I argue for the importance of addressing the colonial pasts of medieval texts in northern Africa.

The conflict referred to variously as the ‘Shifta War’ or ‘gaf Daba’ took place in northeastern Kenya from 1963–8. In the hopes of containing the ‘shifta’, or guerillas, fighting against it, the Kenyan state implemented a policy of forced settlement or ‘manyattazation’. This article explores the temporal, spatial, and gendered implications of ‘manyattazation’ and its antecedents. It indicates that changes in spatial organization transformed the economic and cultural realms of northeastern Kenyans in ways that resonate into the present. Government ‘manyattas’ began primarily as trading centers, became virtual prisons during the war, and continue to be sites of conflict over the meaning of home. This article posits a local history of altered migration in which state progress is paradoxically linked to poverty and stasis, through temporal discourse.

This article argues that on the borderland between eastern DRC and Rwanda, the past and its representations have been constantly manipulated. The cataclysmic events in both Rwanda and Congo since the 1990s have widened the gap between partial and politicized historical discourse and careful historical analysis. The failure to pay attention to the multiple layers in the production of historical narratives risks reproducing a politicized social present that ‘naturalizes’ differences and antagonisms between different groups by giving them more time-depth. This is a danger both for insiders and outsiders looking in. The answer is to focus on the historical trajectories that shape historical narratives, and to ‘bring history back in’.

Drawing from both fictional and non-fictional sources, this article traces the way history was conceptualised in twentieth-century Ethiopia by secular educated elites, charting the changing power relations between Ethiopia's hegemonic historiographical paradigm and the alternative historical visions that challenged this ‘Great Tradition’ over the course of the century. While the Great Tradition extols Ethiopia's past and future glories, the counter-histories focused instead on the country's failure to develop and democratise. Against the interpretation that the counter-histories supplanted the Great Tradition in the late 1960s, the article examines them in terms of complementarity. The intellectual interventions of young student radicals in the late 1960s constitute a break, but not a drastic paradigm shift from the past. The Great Tradition had already been called into question by older generations of intellectuals, even if they proved unable or unwilling to translate their disillusionment into political action.

This article explores colonial development policy on the margins of British East Africa. It argues that much like current development practice in the region, increased colonial interventionism in the years after 1940 was motivated by security interests as well as environmental and economic considerations. Rural interventions were used as a mechanism to ‘rein in’ what were perceived to be subversive populations, as well as contain potential security threats. The article therefore throws new light on the nature of colonial rural development, as well as the connections between past and present development practice.

In recognition of the intrinsic links between climate change and human rights, many have argued that human rights should play a leading role in guiding state responses to climate change. A group whose human rights will inevitably be affected by climate action (or inaction) today are the members of future generations. Yet, despite their particular vulnerability, future generations so far have gone largely unnoticed in human rights analyses. An adequate response to climate change requires that we recognize and address the human rights consequences for future generations, and consider the legal, practical and theoretical questions involved. This article attempts to answer these questions with a particular focus on the Paris Agreement. It argues that the recognition of state obligations towards future generations is compatible with human rights theory, and that these obligations must be balanced against the duties owed to current generations. The article concludes with a number of suggestions for how this balance could be pursued.

In this article, we discuss the development of the concept of a ‘law’ (of nature) in the work of the Dutch natural philosopher and experimenter Petrus van Musschenbroek (1692–1761). Since Van Musschenbroek is commonly described as one of the first ‘Newtonians’ on the Continent in the secondary literature, we focus more specifically on its relation to Newton's views on this issue. Although he was certainly indebted to Newton for his thinking on laws (of nature), Van Musschenbroek's views can be seen to diverge from Newton's on crucial points. We show, moreover, how his thinking on laws of nature was shaped by both international and local factors. We start with a brief discussion of Newton's concept of ‘laws of nature’ in order to set the stage for Van Musschenbroek's. We then document the development of Van Musschenbroek's views on laws of nature in chronological order. We demonstrate how his thinking on laws of nature was tied to institutional, theological and scientific factors. We conclude by pointing to the broader significance of this case study for our understanding of the development of the concept ‘law of nature’ during the eighteenth century.