Over the course of the 18th–early 20th centuries, a curious narrative emerged in Central Asia wherein the Turko-Persian monarch Nadir Shah Afshar was converted from Shiʿism to Sunnism by a group of Islamic scholars outside of Bukhara. While this legend was rooted in Nadir Shah's theological ambitions to bring Shiʿism back into the Sunni fold as a fifth school of canonical law, the memory of that event in the subsequent two centuries was intimately tied to the establishment of several scholarly dynasties, which managed to perpetuate themselves all the way to the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. This article engages the memory of this mythological conversion to explore sharpening conceptions of sectarian divisions and the role of genealogy in projecting spiritual authority. Most broadly, it argues that—far from a passing depredation—the Afsharid Empire profoundly shaped the geopolitical and social landscape of Persianate Asia.

During the Second World War and its immediate aftermath the Soviet All-Union Society for Cultural Ties Abroad (VOKS) engaged in an aggressive campaign of cultural outreach in Iran to promote socialist modernity amongst Iranian leftists. Iran represented VOKS’ first serious expansion outside Europe and one which the Soviet Union was uniquely poised to exploit. VOKS tapped into the Soviet Union's orientalist scholarly establishment inherited from the Russian Empire to advance the argument that not only were Iran and the Soviet Union geographically contiguous, they were both inheritors of the same Persianate cultural legacy—ironically a legacy that the Soviet Union had actively displaced in favor of Turkic national SSRs. Meanwhile, Iranian leftists were not passive receivers of Soviet propaganda. They exploited VOKS resources to found the Iranian Society for Cultural Relations with the USSR and establish regional branches throughout the country. In particular, Iranian intellectuals fixated on Soviet Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan as evidence of the abundant possibilities for a specifically Persianate articulation of socialist modernity. This article uses both Russian archival sources and Persian-language periodicals and interview transcripts to explore this unique confluence of Soviet and Iranian ambitions.

GaInNAsSb quantum wells with GaNAs barriers, grown via molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) on 100–oriented GaAs substrates at varying temperatures, were analyzed using photoluminescence (PL), high-resolution x-ray diffraction (XRD), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), and energy-dispersive spectrometry (EDS). Samples grown at 420 °C, 440 °C, and 470 °C were analyzed, as were two pieces of the 440 °C growth temperature sample that had been annealed at 740 °C and 820 °C.These measurements showed that the decrease in PL with higher growth temperatures was due to the onset of 3D growth and the nucleation of dislocations.The degradation associated with overannealing was likely due to dislocation nucleation.The poor PL associated with low growth temperatures was due to another mechanism, most likely arsenic anti-site defects.EDS measurements showed greater composition uniformity with lower growth temperatures, as expected, and also showed that there was no ordered indium-rich or indium-poor phase separation at any temperature.Phase separation upon annealing was not observed.

A new general approach for rapid performance screening of polymer compositions is provided. Multiple compositions are generated as one-dimensional libraries in a micro-extruder with step or gradient composition changes in < 1 min. To accelerate testing, an environmental stress is applied to only local regions, followed by high-sensitivity spatially resolved characterization. Applying the methodology to weathering of arrays of polymeric compositions provided a 20X faster ranking of polymer/UV absorber compositions that was equivalent to traditional weathering methods.

In the light of lively and widespread interest in developing-country technology it is not surprising that the search for what is ‘appropriate’ should be bedevilled by semantic confusion. This is, nevertheless, a nuisance which imposes on those who participate in the search and related discussion a tiresome obligation to try to make more than usually clear the meaning of the terms they use. In this regard, it comes naturally to economists to take as ‘appropriate’ that technology (set of inputs and processes) which would minimise the cost of production of a given volume of a given good in any particular location. This minimum cost can, of course, be calculated either at market or social prices, and the application of the latter — if they accurately reflected the real opportunity costs to the economy of the various factor inputs — would for many identify the optimum technology.

No question is currently more topical in development studies than that of employment. This strong concern, which has been linked to income distribution and continuing poverty, as well as more-or-less open unemployment1, is relatively recent in origin. It has generated a number of missions to developing countries by the I.L.O., seen the design (by the same international organisation) of a world employment programme, and given rise to much academic writing. One mildly puzzling feature is that many policies have been prescribed on very limited data.

The current widespread concern with economic growth has stimulated much quantitative study of the economic history of now-developed countries, including Canada. Population change has been an important part of the Canadian record and considerable attention has been given to international migration. Unfortunately, in the period now of greatest interest–say between Confederation and the eve of the First World War–insufficient attention was paid in Canada and other countries to the problems of keeping accurate and comprehensive records of migration. As a result serious doubts must attach to any migration statistics which still survive from this period. These doubts must extend to the Canadian official figures, even though immigrant statistics go back to 1852, are ostensibly complete in that the annual series is thereafter unbroken, and ostensibly genuine in that immigrants are defined as “those who have never been in Canada before and who declare their intention to live there permanently.” In fact, the Canadian official record of migration in the second half of the nineteenth century suffers from at least three serious defects: the immigration figures are lacking in internal consistency; the unguarded propinquity of the United States created more problems in counting migrant heads than Canadian (or American) authorities could solve; and there are no data at all on emigration.

Partly because there is at present so much concern with problems of economic growth and partly because much has already been done to account for the years before the First World War, interest is now quickening in the process and magnitude of capital formation in Canada between Confederation and the end of the nineteenth century. An important part of Canadian capital formation has been in housing, and a historical series on housing investment, covering the years 1926–1941, was presented in an official publication prepared by Firestone and Urquhart in 1945. This series was superseded by revised estimates (which still form the basis for the historical figures in the National Accounts) made by Firestone in 1951; Buckley, partly on the basis of Firestone's later estimates, produced a series going back to 1896; and Firestone has recently returned to the problem. A consistent series from Confederation to the turn of the century is, however, still lacking.

The main purpose of this paper is to derive and present annual estimates of residential capital formation for the years 1871–1921. It is in three parts: the first presents annual estimates of the number of dwellings completed; the second considers the problem of securing annual average values and presents the final estimates of residential capital formation; and the third compares the new estimates with those published earlier, discusses the estimates and their limitations, and makes suggestions for their improvement. An effort has been made to present the material in such a way that the reader could go a long way towards reproducing the results. Inadequate data invite endless ingenuity: but unbridled wit can sometimes be dangerous and an effort has been made to keep the paper within the bounds of the plausible.