This article examines how intra-clan rivalry among Kazakh elites shaped cross-border movement and political alignment on the Ili frontier between 1862 and 1871. Focusing on the Atban clan, it analyses elections, petitions, taxation, administrative service and disputes over office during the Muslim uprising in the Qing northwest. It argues that the Chuguchak Protocol of 1864 formally delimited the frontier but did not stabilise everyday practices of mobility, allegiance and subjecthood. Kazakh elites were not passive objects of Russian or Qing policy: they used competing jurisdictions and imperial institutions to pursue authority, protection and advantage within intra-clan political struggles.
This study focuses on the life and medical activity of Apostol Arsaki (1792?-1874) in Wallachia during the first half of the nineteenth century, a period marked by social unrest, wars, revolutions, epidemics, modernisation and social reforms. Born in a village in Epirus (present-day Albania), Arsaki migrated as a child with his family to Bucharest, pursued medical studies in Vienna and Halle, and subsequently returned to the Wallachian capital, where he practiced medicine for twenty years before choosing to enter high-level politics. The study is based primarily on archival sources (property records, diplomas, correspondence, medical reports, and so on), adopts a microhistorical approach, and seeks to highlight the key role played by Dr. Arsaki as an immigrant in the process of medical reform in Wallachia. The main objective of the research is to make a relevant contribution to the understanding of the particularly important role played by 'foreigners' (and migrants more generally) in the modernisation of Romanian society - a society that developed in a borderland context and was shaped by the cultural influence and occupation policies of three empires: Ottoman, Habsburg and Russian.
This article argues that Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londoners devises a subjective mode of representation, focusing on West Indian men struggling to settle in 1950s London, to critique and counteract the universalising logic behind racism and discrimination against West Indian and African immigrants in Britain. It analyses how the novel's emphasis on racial, cultural, gender, geographical and linguistic differences contests universal narratives about the displaced individual. It then examines the novel's androcentric worldview as part of its critique of racist essentialism, revealing a bind in which it must rely on gender essentialism to sustain that critique.
Between 1880 and 1914, human mobility across the globe accelerated rapidly thanks to improved means of transport and communication and the creation of new opportunities in terms of employment, training, leisure time or the search for more politically tolerant locations. These circumstances led the political authorities in Switzerland to pay particular attention to the control of migrants, whether students, workers or ordinary travellers. Based on a case study of Lausanne, capital of the Swiss canton of Vaud, this article aims to gain a better understanding of how this city dealt with these issues in terms of police surveillance and the role played by hotel reception facilities. The lack of knowledge about new arrivals at the city's hotels, their social and cultural origins, their political and ideological convictions, and their standard of living, gave rise to concerns that flowed through all levels of society. These concerns led to the introduction of mechanisms for identifying people deemed suspicious.
The systematic registration of hotel visitors was not a legal requirement in British commercial accommodation before World War I. During the conflict, the state mandated the formal collection of information on all visitors under a regime that progressively defined distinctions between British subjects, friendly aliens, and enemy aliens. Important elements of the regime endured after the conflict. Drawing on government records and the local press, this analysis traces the development of the documentary architecture of post-war surveillance, with a focus on the register as a tool of record-keeping. It shows how that regime was enacted, sometimes haltingly and unevenly, as actors struggled to become acculturated to unfamiliar peacetime practices.
