The rumors of Brazil’s mineral riches reaching London and Vienna in the first half of the nineteenth century, started by enslaved Africans mining clandestinely in unexplored regions and later through geological surveys by mining engineers from the Habsburg Empire, prompted aspirations to wealth which circulated fluidly in the transatlantic context. This article examines the distinct but convergent agencies of garimpeiros, enslaved miners and prospectors, and of Habsburgian mining engineers in the territorialization process of Minas Gerais during the nineteenth-century expansion of global capitalism. It analyses the degree of connectivity and cooperation across British and Habsburgian imperial spaces in Brazilian mining ventures, focusing on the case of the mining engineer Virgil von Helmreichen, who arrived in Minas Gerais in 1836, under contract to the British-financed Imperial Brazilian Mining Association. The Habsburgian expert elite of which Helmreichen was a part played a crucial role in the expansion of the commodity frontier in this region, providing proficient knowledge in mining and geology. This expert community collaborated with the logistics networks of British free-trade imperialism and the Brazilian slave system inherited from the colonial period. The territorialization of Minas Gerais shows the global dynamics at play between British interests in the discovery of new mines, the need to produce expert knowledge at the local level, and the Brazilian government’s desire to control the hinterland region and profit from its mineral wealth.

Contemporary debates on policing trace the rise of “law and order” populism and police militarization to colonial histories and imperial boomerang effects. In a time marked by the renewed imperative “to decolonize,” however, few studies examine what decolonizing policing did or could look like in practice. This article draws on oral history narratives of Jamaican police officers to recover their ideas about transforming the colonial Jamaica Constabulary Force in the 1970s. Born out of black power mobilizations and under a democratic socialist government (1972–1980), police decolonization was viewed as part of broader transformative effort to rid the country of colonial inheritances in economics, culture, and politics. Jamaican policemen, radicalized since the early twentieth century, then began revising their social mandate and ask who the police should serve and protect. Ultimately, due to internal contradictions and external pressures, the experiment failed, giving rise to police populism and increased violence against black men and women in the ghettos. The episode reveals how populism emerges out of a failure of emancipatory campaigns and how radical critique can turn into ideological justification. It also highlights the need to distinguish between diverse, contradictory, and overlapping demands to decolonize societies and institutions today.

Recent transitional justice scholarship has explored the role of emotions during periods of political transition. Scholars have taken negative emotions as both legitimate responses to past crimes and as supports to the pursuit of justice in the present. This paper argues that feelings circulate across a wide array of individuals, things, and processes that often sit apart from the formal, judicial spaces of transitional justice. To make this argument, I consider the Tunisian campaign Manich Msamah (I Do Not Forgive) and its articulation of an affect of unforgiveness in resistance to the proposed Economic and Financial Reconciliation Law. Formed in 2015, the campaign came about in response to the law and efforts, under the pretext of “reconciliation,” to return to public life figures from the repressive regime of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali. Drawing on affect theory, I argue that unforgiveness was stuck to particular individuals (figures from the old regime and circulated between a community of unforgiving activists), things (public spaces, posters, T-shirts and the ephemera of protest) and processes (accountability and substantive forms of justice). I argue that an affect of unforgiveness thus aided activists not only in their resistance to state-led reconciliation but also helped imagine alternative paths to justice in Tunisia.

This article constitutes a critique of abstraction as an analytic tool. The argument advances the idea that formalizing practices are indexical; that is, the way abstractions are realized necessarily incorporates features of the context in which they are produced. The expression formalizing practices refers to a series of actions or operations that make quantification, rationalization, and standardization possible. Entailed in all these procedures is an attempt to select and isolate features that exemplify a specific phenomenon or social process, or in the case of standardization, that stipulate its contours and dimensions. These features are presumed to be immanent from the start, but in fact, formal representations are carefully crafted, finely tuned instruments. In order to clarify these practices, I delineate three phases of their construction: the conceptual phrase, the choice of analytic strategy, and the specification of its formal representation. In other words, this approach suggests the value of examining formalizing projects as crucibles where cultural assumptions and practical reasoning are condensed into formulae. These ideas are explored in relation to the use of time and motion studies employed in early socialist Hungary to determine the new socialist wage system. While a decidedly local story, the implications of the analysis are much broader. The possibility of adopting this approach to the study of other formalizing practices, such as algorithmic systems and digital databases, is suggested. The analysis also raises questions about the commensurability of long-held concepts in social theory.

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, a frequent claim among speakers of local Chinese languages (called fangyan in Chinese) is that their native languages preserve the language of antiquity better than the Beijing-based national language, Mandarin. This paper explores the origin of these claims and probes their significance in the making of the Han ethnoracial collective identity. I argue that claims of linguistic proximity to the imagined ancient origins of Chinese civilization represent a form of “hegemonic Han-ness”—an idealized form of the Han collective identity that was both internally hegemonic, in that it was meant to supersede other expressions of Han-ness, and externally hegemonic, in that it was meant to uphold the superiority of the Han people over other ethnoracial groups. From Zhang Taiyan, whose work provided a model for drawing linguistic connections between contemporary local languages and the language spoken at the dawn of Chinese civilization, to local gazetteer authors, who used linguistic data to prove their mother tongues directly had preserved the language of antiquity without being adulterated by the languages of non-Han peoples, this paper explores how various groups drew upon the cultural power of an idealized Han-centered past to challenge the authority afforded to the national language by the state.

La Verge de Montserrat is a statue of the Virgin Mary and her son found in Catalonia in the eleventh century in which both characters are depicted as “Black.” This female figure occupies a particular position in current Catalonia since she is considered the patron saint of the country and constitutes one of the symbolic cornerstones of Catalan nationalism. Through the concept of “iconic path,” this article tracks the formation and evolution of this image in Catalonia from its inception until the present day, bringing special attention to the roles and significances that it has acquired within the context of the current pro-independence movement. We also draw a comparison between the “lives” of this image in Catalonia and its development in other countries, namely Puerto Rico, Equatorial Guinea and Sardinia. In each of these places, the image of the goddess has been reinterpreted according to local viewpoints. Yet these conceptualizations are not fixed or homogeneous, but radically dynamic and problematic. The iconic paths of images diverge and converge across time giving birth to new creative exercises. Through this approach, our aim is to propose a relational and processual model for the study of religious images, and images in general, as historical objects.

Sovereignty always relies on a double movement of violence and care. It requires the power to exercise violence as well as the capacity to care, to protect, and to nourish. In the footsteps of Foucault and Agamben, numerous scholars have rediscovered the same paradox in philosophical and legal texts. Anthropologists writing about informal and practical sovereignty pay attention to violence, but sometimes ignore the importance of care for the exercise of sovereignty. Against such tendencies to focus on texts and on violence, this article deals with sovereignty as care. The concrete examples are the relationships of care between commanders, soldiers, and villagers in the Wa State of Myanmar, a de-facto state governed by an insurgent army. In the absence of an effective government bureaucracy, popular sovereignty in this military state relies on a particular logic of personal relations, in which care is central. Subordinates have to care about leaders, whereas leaders are supposed to care for subordinates. Care provides the balance and foil for the exercise of violence, and both are necessary for the exercise of sovereignty. The combination of violence and care in personal relations is scaled up to create “the people” as the subject and object of sovereignty. The article describes the logic of personal relations that allows for the exercise of popular sovereignty in the Wa State and elsewhere.

This article explores the history of “Islamic Society” (al-Mujtamaʿ al-Islāmī), a concept whose widespread usage is paralleled by shallow understandings of its origins. Scholars of premodern Islamic history often use this term to describe the ideas and practices of Muslim communities under Islamic political rule, while historians of the Muslim Brotherhood highlight this leading Islamist movement’s commitment to forming such a collective yet treat the concept as sui generis. This article, in turn, draws on a wide array of Islamic print media published by leading Islamic movements and state institutions in Egypt between 1898 and 1981 to tell a story of how this concept became intellectually viable and politically meaningful in the context of transition from colonial to postcolonial rule in the mid-twentieth century. Building on histories of religious nationalism which trace how religious nationalist visions produce novel understandings of religious identity rather than replicating prior models, the article explores the ways in which identity is linked to particular projects of religious practice. In doing so, it casts light on how religious nationalist projects seek to structure social life through calls to continuity with the past even as they adopt the core assumptions of the nation-state project. Specifically, it argues that, as Muslim thinkers, activists, and scholars navigated the transition from colonial to postcolonial rule, they turned to this concept to articulate dueling conceptions of religious change through state power and social mobilization alike.

This essay explores the intersecting socio-material and ethical demands that engineers confront in adapting sea defenses to climate change in Guyana. It focuses on the tensions in climate adaptation that create the possibilities for theorizing innovation as a key theme of counter-modernities in the Anthropocene. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, oral histories, and archival research, I show that engineers’ decision-making regarding whether or not to innovate sea defenses is a fraught process dependent upon processes of erosion and the ontological (in)stability of specific infrastructures known as groynes. To cope, engineers produce what I call “innovation narratives” to describe how obstacles to climate adaptation are created by combinations of neocolonial empire, shapeshifting ecologies, inconsistent maintenance programs, and fiscal debt. At the same time, their efforts signal an emerging global politics of credibility that is reinforced by desires for more inclusive forms of governance rather than brute power or capitalization.

This article examines how and why anti-colonial activists in Nyasaland, now Malawi, seized on modernization theory to make their case for national independence in the early 1960s. As far as British officials were concerned, Nyasaland’s small size, large population, and agrarian character meant that it stood little chance of joining the modern, industrialized world. The Malawi Congress Party, however, saw their country differently, as a future “Central African Denmark.” This article argues that Congress’s Danish vision was part of an anti-colonial challenge to the industry-first development strategies that dominated early international development thinking. Congress thinkers, far from rejecting the modernization idea, flipped the framework from industry to agriculture, helping to open new possibilities for small, agrarian territories on the empire’s margins. The article concludes by showing how this agrarian counter-current in development thinking subsequently shaped the international community’s turn to market-friendly, agriculture-centered policies in the 1970s, though in ways that eclipsed the original anti-colonial vision.

In the nineteenth century, Qajar Iran was beset by both internal and external threats to its cohesion. In considering Qajar responses to this condition of threat, scholars have largely emphasized the rise of nationalism and a traumatic encounter with Europe. In this article, instead, I use the two Khuzestan travel narratives of royal engineer Najm al-Molk to draw out an alternative thread of reform discourse based on comparisons and connections with the Ottoman Empire. In his safarnamehs, Najm al-Molk joined the style and preoccupations of modern engineering to existing Persianate discourses on rule to elaborate the concept of abadi, a social, political, and material condition encompassing land, people, and state. His advocacy for making Khuzestan abadan was aimed at integrating the region more fully into the Qajar domains. In thinking about what constituted abadi and why it was missing in Khuzestan, the engineer’s major reference point was Ottoman Basra. Traveling around the Basra-Khuzestan borderlands helped Najm al-Molk frame the Ottoman Empire as an example for the Qajar future and a factor in producing the Qajar present. The article both analyzes and follows Najm al-Molk’s use of comparison in order to draw out a broader imperial comparison between late imperial rule in the Ottoman and Qajar lands. I argue that taking seriously Najm al-Molk’s view that the Qajars and Ottomans were comparable can help us use their peripheries to understand late Qajar history outside the national frame of “Iran.”

This paper draws on archival research to trace the techniques used by scientists and government officials involved with palm oil at the turn of the twentieth century. For them, mundane practices of “carefulness” were paramount as they worked on collecting, identifying, marketing, and improving the oil palm. But they also applied this so-called care to people: care of the oil palm was thought to presuppose care of the “native,” providing a correction for what were seen as “careless” local manners of cultivation. Colonial techniques of care thus sought to encompass both plants and peoples within contemporary liberal rhetorics of efficiency and moral improvement. This embodies how scientific and political care can interlink through their undersides of control, exploitation, and domination, which remain obscured by narratives of care themselves. Examining these links between commodity histories and scientific techniques is therefore essential for understanding environmental and social concerns regarding oil palm plantations today. An awareness of the afterlives of colonial discourses might encourage a more critical “care” in response to these issues today, challenging taken-for-granted notions of the benefits of corporate care.

This article investigates the international genre of “retro” and how it is used in Hungary to re-matter the nation’s modern past, repositioning the country within a twentieth-century European history where it was never cut off by an “Iron Curtain” from the modern West. It does this by selecting for modern consumer goods and popular culture from both East and West that fit international criteria for retro. For both young and old, retro “matters” the past in a way that affirms contemporary market sensibilities, infusing it with value through assertions of market equivalence in the past and new value as commodities in the present. If Hungarian Retro works as a form of nostalgia for some, it is for an era of perceived national prestige, value, and economic sovereignty relative to the demoralized present. While distinct from right-wing nationalist politics, Hungarian Retro nonetheless shares in the project of erasing a stigmatized state socialism from national history. This article builds on scholarship on the role of the material in producing the nation in everyday life. It contributes a perspective that brings together: (a) the domestication of international commercial and popular trends; (b) the global hierarchy of prestige based on national exports and imports; and (c) the constitution of value in citizens via the qualities of consumer goods both produced and consumed.

This article traces the genealogy of a Jewish-owned botánica located in East Harlem in the 1930s and 1940s. Botánicas are understood to manifest an intricate, transatlantic religious, spiritual, and healing world, offering herbal products, sacramental goods, ritual implements, and counseling to Italian, Latinx, Black, and Caribbean practitioners of folk Catholicism, herbalism, hoodoo, Vodou, Santería, Espiritismo, Curanderismo, Òrìṣà worship and other ethnomedical and spiritual systems. Yet this botánica was owned by an Eastern Mediterranean Jew from the Ottoman/Italian island of Rhodes, and it integrated Sephardic and Mediterranean histories and sources of inspiration. Extraordinarily, this history stands for a greater whole. Jews were pioneering spiritual merchants in the United States. Restoring their history requires journeying globally, beginning with Ottomans’ fidelity to herbalism; tracing émigré Sephardic Jews’ uneven dialogue with Black African men and women in colonial Central and Southern Africa; and delving into the commercial, spiritual, and racial interplay furthered by Jewish-owned pharmacies and botánicas in New York City, Baltimore, Atlanta, Memphis, Charleston, Chicago, and Los Angeles and by Jewish spiritual merchants and their Caribbean, Latinx, and Black patrons. All this introduces an unexpected Jewish and Mediterranean history to the botánica, and an unexpectedly multifarious spiritual, mercantile, and racial dimension to Jewish history.

This essay addresses the revival of culturalist assumptions in historical archival studies and suggests an alternative framework. Rather than provenance, it privileges textual circulation; rather than civilizational divides between supposedly distinct “European” and “Islamic” archivalities, it highlights mutability and commensurability as defining elements of a broadly shared, if inherently dynamic, internally complex, and transactionally defined early modern archivality. We first show how the historiography on early modern archives has inadvertently perpetuated a myopic Eurocentric view of the centralized archive as a key aspect of European archivality. We analyze how the construct “Islamic archivality,” when proffered as a comparative counterpoint to such European archivality, not only promotes an outdated understanding of “Islam” (and, indeed “Europe”) as a discrete, transhistorical phenomenon, but rests on a limited set of mostly pre-Ottoman, medieval examples. By positing “Islam” as fundamentally premodern, this historiography sidesteps significant shared late antique genealogies of textual practices and mobilities across a vast early modern region that traverses modern continental/civilizational configurations. In lieu of the prevalent comparative mode, which juxtaposes civilizational blocs and then selectively contrasts specific archival institutions and practices, we suggest concentrating on intersections and circulations of documents and practices across ethnolinguistic, territorial, and juridical boundaries. Drawing on examples from our research in Ottoman diplomatic archives, we challenge scholars of early modern archivality to move beyond fixed notions of “European,” and “non-European,” “centralized” and “decentralized” archives, and “original” and “copy,” as primary indices of comparison, and attend to the social life of documents and their mutability through circulation.

In the 1690s, Ottoman bureaucrats reformed the sprawling postal system, a vital communications infrastructure that undergirded imperial power. Despite the expanding monitoring capacity that resulted, a constant shortage of horses regularly left couriers stranded for days and delayed official correspondence. This essay investigates this paradox and draws on a series of fifty-one Ottoman imperial decrees and reports from 1690 to 1833 to make three arguments. It first shows how bureaucrats perceived and tried to fix the problem by rationing horse usage and strengthening enforcement of rules. Second, it reveals that a range of official and non-official actors were diverting horses toward profit-making ventures in what I call a “shadow economy.” Third, it explains why Ottoman bureaucrats were unable to recognize the existence of this shadow economy. Like contemporary administrators in Qing China who found it hard to synthesize intelligence from different frontiers, Ottoman bureaucrats treated multiple reports of missing horses as discrete, unconnected events rather than connected evidence of a competing market demand for horses. Compounding this problem of a blinkered informational order, profound economic and social changes meant that bureaucrats in the capital were slow to realize that long-held official entitlements regarding horse usage for personal uses were aiding the growth of the shadow economy. I conclude by considering some social consequences of commercial forces in Ottoman society and contemporary France, and the stakes of this study with respect to the rise of anonymity in market exchanges, a property of capitalism.

This article tracks how a trope of middle-class household thrift, grounded on the autarchic Aristotelian oikos, has long fueled derogatory discourses in Britain aimed at low-income urban residents who practice quite different forms of thrift. Since the 1970s this trope has migrated across scales, proving a potent metaphor for national economic policy and planetary care alike, and morally and economically justifying both neoliberal welfare retraction compounded by austerity policies and national responses to excessive resource extraction and waste production. Both austerity and formal recycling schemes shift responsibility onto consumer citizens, regardless of capacity. Further, this model of thrift eclipses the thriftiness of low-income urban households, which emerges at the nexus of kin and waged labor, sharing, welfare, debt, conserving material resources through remaking and repair and, crucially, the fundamental need for decency expressed through kin care. Through a historicized ethnography of a London social housing estate and its residents, this paper excavates what happens as these different forms and scales of household thrift coexist, change over time, and clash. Ultimately, neoliberal policy centered on an inimical idiom of thrift delegitimizes and disentitles low-income urban households and undermines their ability to enact livelihood practices of sustainability and projects of dignity across generations.

How were monarchy, gender, and nationalism entwined? Through contextualized comparisons of selected case studies (two generations of royal women in four countries: Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, and Serbia/Yugoslavia), this article explores, in gendered terms, the instrumentalization of nursing as an evolving relationship between state building, warfare, welfare, and voluntary organizations. It argues that certain queens’ interventions in nursing successfully contributed to the “naturalization” of the ruling foreign dynasties in the Balkans and to the militarization of charity. Through such “soft power” they mobilized nursing in different ways to carve out an autonomous space and visibility in wartime as queen-nurses and in peacetime as queen-benefactors. In both cases, royal women personified the “curing” and “caring” dimensions of the modernizing state. Queens’ honorific leadership clearly linked the monarchy and the philanthropic sector but also discreetly expanded the power of the nationalizing state. Queens skillfully promoted a gendered culture of sacrifice, by representing women as caring “by nature,” and thus reinforced neo-traditionalist patriarchal regimes and weakened women’s effectiveness in pursuing their political and economic demands.

The rich body of literature on the cultural legacies of East Germany has privileged white German perspectives on material culture at the expense of non-white and non-European encounters with socialist things. In shifting the spatial lens to the global South, and to the foreign students and workers who lived for extended periods in East Germany, I trouble the implicit whiteness in the study of GDR cultural memory. Popular identification with GDR goods extended beyond the borders of Germany to newly decolonized countries that were the beneficiaries of the GDR’s solidarity policies. Using the example of Vietnam, I challenge formulations of Ostalgie as a site of white German memory production only, highlighting consumption of East German products by racialized foreign Others. In examining the objects that Vietnamese migrants amassed and transported back to Vietnam, and their subsequent use and circulation through today, I offer a different take on the temporal and spatial relationship between people and commodities, one that assigns value and agency to imported socialist things. In contrast to reunified Germany, where socialist-era goods were deemed disposable and obsolete, in Vietnam, East German products did not lose their utility and associations with modernity. The essay argues for a more inclusive exploration of memory and approach to Ostalgie that takes seriously the alternative logics of time, space, and materiality that informed the circuits of consumption, trade, and meaning of GDR things.

In 2011, lawyers for the Chevron Corporation filed a civil suit against an aqueous geochemist under federal racketeering and corruption laws. They claimed that the geochemist and her colleagues had ghostwritten significant portions of a report attributed to a court-appointed expert in Ecuador, although the accusation was subsequently withdrawn. The original case addressed the environmental impact of Chevron’s operations in lowland Ecuador, the subject of a $9 billion judgment against the oil company. This article treats legal transcripts and depositions as examples of life writing to examine the contribution of experts to environmental litigation. It adds to recent scholarship on the instability of scientific authorship by comparing different forms of ghostwriting. Whereas the pharmaceutical industry employs ghostwriters to conceal the potentially harmful consequences of its products, the scientists contributing to the case against Chevron sought to make the company’s environmental impacts visible. The company undermined confidence in the legal proceedings in Ecuador by criticizing the experts for the plaintiffs rather than their data, preventing people whose lives and livelihoods have been affected by oil contamination from collecting the judgment against Chevron. This corporate strategy may have a chilling effect on the willingness of environmental scientists and other expert witnesses to provide evidence against powerful corporations. There is a need for better accounting of scientific research undertaken in support of environmental litigation, especially given the high stakes of legal contests like this one, in which corporate fortunes, human lives, and the fate of the environment are contingent on their technical expertise.