Rome’s mid-republican period is back in the centre of attention. Roman money and coinage, however, are largely absent from the debate. As this field has seen important developments in recent years, this paper surveys recent research in order to explore how numismatic sources can contribute to our understanding of this formative period in Roman history. First, we present an overview of these new developments, which we then contextualise in the framework of the Roman economy, Roman state formation and the development of a distinct Roman identity. We argue for a development from coinage irregularly commissioned by individual Roman magistrates to a regular Roman state coinage; from haphazard production often outside Rome to large-scale and more regular coordinated production clearly institutionalised within the Roman state, with a distinct Roman appearance. We propose to recognise two principal moments of acceleration in this process: around 240 and, above all, 210 b.c.e., and show how these insights relate to broader debates on mid-republican Rome.

The extraction of salt from seawater is one of the most direct ways of exploiting the marine environment. In the historic period, the production of salt formed an important component of the global economy. In temperate locations such as Ireland, archaeological evidence of extracting salt from seawater comprises a range of expressions and locations dictated by the energy resource required. This article presents the results of the first archaeological excavations of a saltworks complex in Ireland, at two sites that produced salt from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Partial excavation of a seventeenth-century complex at Ballyreagh Lower revealed a crude structure that was not capable of supplying all of the area’s needs. By contrast, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century pan site at Broughanlea shows a step-change in scale, efficiency, and infrastructure that reflects new economic networks in a country predominantly relying on agricultural produce.

The production and circulation of common wares during the late antique period in North Africa has been largely overlooked by past scholarship, despite their potential to shed light on late antique production, workshop organisation and regional ceramic economies. This paper provides the first detailed study of a distinctive type of late antique, wheelmade common ware, the so-called African ‘painted ware’ (APW). It first presents a critical overview of the distribution of painted wares and their typology, decoration and chronology based on existing publications. It then develops a typology of vessel shapes, but also decoration patterns based on a large, well-preserved assemblage of painted ceramics recently excavated by the DAI, INP and UCL at the archaeological sites of Bulla Regia and Chimtou in the Medjerda valley, Tunisia. To understand the composition, technology and provenance of the wares, petrographic and chemical analysis was conducted on 57 painted sherds from the two sites. The results suggest the existence of a production centre in the Medjerda Valley, with potters using local calcareous clay tempered with sand, while the decoration was obtained using iron-based pigments. Comparison with published painted wares at other sites contributes to an initial insight into regional distribution patterns of the painted ware.

Over the last two decades, since scholarly writing on India witnessed an “urban turn,” numerous historians have analyzed the role of the improvement trust in the redevelopment of Indian cities in the twentieth century, most specifically those of Bombay, Calcutta, and Delhi. This paper revisits and reassesses some of their key arguments to suggest that rather than studying the “failures” of the individual trusts to foster sanitary built environments, we should pay attention to the contingent workings of the city trusts that were constitutively designed for such failures. Using a comparative analysis of the Bombay and Calcutta improvement trusts, this paper offers a retelling of the history of twentieth-century Indian urbanism through the inauguration of an “improvement regime.” It posits that a structural analysis of the trust’s legal and financial framework opens innovative ways of reading “improvement” as a new, twentieth-century language, technology, and rationality of urban governance. The improvement trust devised the art of spatiotemporal management to secure the city’s built environment—rather than its residents—against future uncertainties. The paper takes us through various episodes in the career of the improvement trust—its introduction of technocratic rule, partnership with private investors, speculation in the urban land market, and finally emergence as the city’s leading rentier—in short, the “new developments” that we associate with neoliberal urbanism today. Rather than mapping these developments as neoliberal inventions, this paper invites readers to view them as the slow and (dis)continuous unraveling of a century-old improvement regime.

Certain fundamentals of the geopolitical frame of inter-state relations in East Asia remain as set around 70-years ago in the wake of the cataclysmic Second World War and subsequent San Francisco Treaty (1951), when the US was undisputed master of the world, China divided and excluded, Korea divided and at war, and Japan occupied. The economic underpinnings of that system, however, are now rudely shaken. The United States, in 1950, with about half of global GDP, is now 16 per cent (in “purchasing power parity” or PPP terms) while China, already (2016) 18 per cent, has grown by an astounding fifteen times in the two decades from 1995. Chinese GDP, one-quarter that of Japan's in 1991, trebled (or even quadrupled) it in 2018. Late in 2020 the IMF declared that China had become the world's biggest economy, $24.2 trillion to the US's $20.8 trillion, with the gap widening. The alliance system as a design to preserve US hegemony looks increasingly incongruous in a period of mounting US-China conflict.

The decade following the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923 witnessed a proliferation of writings by officials, academics, businessmen, and journalists on the economic consequences of the disaster. This abundance of contemporary analysis stands in strong contrast to the relative scarcity of subsequent scholarly studies of many aspects of the disaster's economic impact. In this article, I suggest that part of the reason for this relative lacuna lies in broader trends within economics and economic history scholarship. In particular, a focus on quantitative analysis and macro-level indicators has led to the conclusion that over the longer term, the Kantō earthquake, like similar disasters elsewhere, did not matter that much for the development of the country's economy. I also show that although recent advances in economic theory, especially in the economics of disasters, can strengthen historians' analyses of the economic consequences of the 1923 disaster, many of these ‘new’ conceptual frameworks were foreshadowed by contemporary commentators seeking to analyze the impact of the disaster on the economic life of the nation. Ikeuchi Yukichika's book Shinsai Keizai Shigan, published in December 1923, is a particularly good example of how, just like recent disaster economists, Japanese contemporaries viewed the analysis of markets as the key to understanding both the economic impact of the disaster and how best to rebuild Japan's economy.

This article looks at three recent Japanese mass market works about poverty, arguing that each is representative of a different mode of depicting economic disparity and want in contemporary Japan – individualization, nationalization, and generalization. These modes of representation contribute to a comparatively low level of awareness of poverty as a major social problem as well as political inaction. Following Raymond Williams' interrogation of social “keywords” as well as critical discourse analysis to identify the interplay of absences and presences in these accounts, this article will argue that even empathic approaches toward poverty can obscure its complex interconnections, disparities such as its disproportionate impact on Japanese women, and block the thinking of social and economic alternatives.

This article begins by critiquing Kathryn Tanner’s Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism on two fronts. It suggests that her presentation of ‘Financially Dominated Capitalism’ (FDC) is problematically one-dimensional, and it takes issue with her theological construal of time. The article then argues for an alternative temporal vision which both makes better sense of Christian experience and finds resonance with economic policy proposals that undercut FDC.

Much existing social commentary and scholarship around the regulation of the European digital economy is focused on how societies could better regulate that economy and its associated harms. Such analyses often portray a problematically viewed order as ungoverned, or not effectively governed, by law. Instead, I argue for more (re)descriptive analyses on how our pre-existing legal structures powerfully create order in the European digital economy. I explain why we should explore the productive connections between pre-existing European legal arrangements and socio-technical order, and discuss what such exploration could entail. The article covers three complementary ways in which legal arrangements are productively connected to sociotechnical order: as tools of ordering to address problems and promote values; as tools that can also enable projects unintended and unforeseen by policymakers; and as constitutive of technologies and other forms of order. It provides concrete examples of these productive connections from various contemporary struggles within the governance of the European digital economy. I argue that focusing on the analysis of productive connections may shed light on how pre-existing legal arrangements are baked into and shaped by the European socio-technical order. As the current order of the European digital economy is characterised by massive inequalities, these analyses can also direct our attention to how our pre-existing legal arrangements can produce and reproduce inequalities and oppression. Analyses of pre-existing legal arrangements might produce different attributions of responsibility and possibilities of contestation than analyses of legal deficiency.

Insights from Social Network Analysis reveal that the structure of the social network surrounding international courts is important for these courts’ ability to secure compliance with their judgments and by this to initiate social change. International courts like the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) invest growing resources in shaping their networks, recognising that these networks are necessary tools that can help them to influence society. This paper will focus on the ways social network analysis can facilitate a better understanding of the ECtHR. The paper explains how certain characteristics of the network surrounding the ECtHR determine the ultimate social impact of the court.