The paper reinterprets the East India Company's state-building effort in late eighteenth-century Bengal by foregrounding the intertwined evolution of fiscal capacity and institutional reform. It argues that the Permanent Settlement of 1793 emerged not from a desire to follow Indian or English precedent, but from the Company's struggle to concentrate fiscal powers. A debate on the need to obtain information on taxpayers, which delayed the reform, reveals this struggle. Repeated failures in data collection pushed the state to anchor the reform in an expanding judicial system capable of producing actionable information. The Settlement strengthened revenue flows, enabling the financing of a centrally controlled army and contributing to Britain's wider imperial expansion. However, its long-term rigidity limited fiscal flexibility and impeded broader developmental outcomes.
This paper compares the experiences and conclusions of two imperial investigations into diasporic Chinese communities of the Asia-Pacific in the 1880s. These were the official investigations undertaken by the specially appointed Qing Commissioners Wang Ronghe and Yu Qiong, and the unofficial mission carried out by the British translator, orientalist, and diplomat Edward Harper Parker. At a crucial moment in the history of Chinese immigration, these two parties undertook almost simultaneous expeditions to investigate the conditions of the vast Chinese diaspora across Southeast Asia and Oceania. Both missions engaged with some of the most contentious issues surrounding Chinese migration of the era. In particular, I focus on their documentation of the brutal exploitation of trafficked Chinese workers on the tobacco plantations of Deli, in the Dutch East Indies, as well as the rising tide of white supremacist efforts to exclude Chinese migrants from British Australia. Arguing for bold new approaches to imperial engagement with Chinese diaspora, both parties faced significant resistance to their work. Using Chinese, British, Dutch, and Australian sources, this paper traces these journeys to reveal unexpected commonalities between two very different imperial systems, demonstrating the surprisingly global reach of the late Qing state. Moreover, it uses the materials created by these missions to paint in-depth portraits of two Chinese communities and situate the period's "Chinese Question" of migration to white settler colonies in its broader diasporic context.
The rise of "circular economy" discourse in the extractive industries has altered how researchers, laborers, activists, and consumers conceptualize movements of materials. To proponents, building a circular economy around rare earth elements (REE) production will "close the loop" around extraction, processing, design, manufacturing, and disposal practices to minimize and eventually eliminate all "waste" produced through technology development. Articulated through utopian imaginaries projecting environmental and technological futures far beyond mining, however, these conceptualizations of movement also carry far-ranging entailments for the movements of specific groups of people, including their place in future social and political orders and their capacity to plan for multi-generational futures. This article follows activists and university researchers brought into conflict through a REE processing facility in Malaysia, where research on commercial applications for post-processing wastes has been treated alternately as pathways to economic diversification and as threats to minoritized communities' welfare and senses of national belonging. Both groups correlate "responsible" waste management to mismanaged flows of people: prospective experts drawn overseas for more sophisticated work; children emigrating for university education or middle-class jobs after struggling to find positions in Malaysia. While explicitly offering future stability and a broadened ethics of responsible attention, the visions of circularity undergirding these debates effectively collapse the many forms of movement at stake in industrial transition into a promise of transcendence, obscuring the racialized patterns of exclusion and migration that invariably accompany the extractive industries.
This article examines how scientific research on lactose digestion from 1950 to 1980 became entangled in shifting discourses on race, heredity, and population. It traces how scientific framings of lactose digestion changed during this period-initially racialized as a disorder (lactase deficiency) affecting Black Americans, later reclassified as an ethnic trait, and ultimately reinterpreted as a biomarker of European ancestry. Drawing on medical research on "lactose science" and archival sources, this study explores how geneticists, medical researchers, and anthropologists jointly navigated the complexities of race and human variation in the postwar period. Using Peter Galison's concept of trading zones, the paper traces how ethnicity and population emerged as strategic alternatives to race, facilitating interdisciplinary collaboration while preserving racialized assumptions about biological difference. The paper argues that despite efforts to align with UNESCO's post-racial scientific agenda, research on lactose digestion came to produce a normative discourse around whiteness. In doing so, it raises a critical question: how did an ostensibly anti-racist science inadvertently revive older racial biologisms?
Flows of Spanish American silver have long been bound up in narratives of early modernity, the growth of globalization, and the coming of capitalism. This article reconsiders these narratives through a trial held in seventeenth-century Ottoman Istanbul of imported lion dollar coins that were suspected of being false. The trial shows the different ways groups-both within and outside the state and transacting on different scales from local to interstate-sought to impose criteria of evaluation on coins as they crossed oceans and empires in an era of incomplete state power and growing interstate trade. The trial worked to align competing understandings of money and restored confidence through a performance of measurement. In reckoning with competing understandings of money before multiple monetary authorities, social relations, as much as the physical coins, were on trial. By moving past a traditional divide between thinking globally about money as a trade commodity and thinking comparatively about money as a creature of the state in distinct polities, the trial of the lion dollars shows how early modern money was made and remade through a process of global circulation and far-reaching interactions with competing authorities.
This essay explores what it means to reckon with imperial violence decades after the Japanese Empire's demise in 1945. Through legal, historical, and ethnographic analyses of civil lawsuits filed in courts across Japan since the 1990s by Chinese and South Korean victims seeking apologies and monetary compensation from the Japanese government and corporations involved in enslavement, I explore how the lawsuits exposed a politics of abandonment that left victims of imperial violence unredressable for decades. This evasion of imperial accountability, I argue, was etched into the legal, economic, and diplomatic structures of what I call the unmaking of empire-the entwined processes of de-imperialization and de-colonization. The move from empire to nation-state thus produced transitional injustice which calls for post-imperial reckoning: a double task of accounting for both the original imperial violence and the politics of abandonment after empire in perpetrator and victim nations. I show how new legal and moral landscapes for imperial reckoning are expanding the scope and agency of accountability, challenging accepted models of redress and raising the stakes for current generations to reckon with unaccounted-for pasts.
This article brings together two stories of 1970s Mexico that are often narrated separately: the story of the PRI's attempts to reform itself, specifically through the right to know, and the story of activists' mobilizations against disappearances. Epistemic struggles surrounding the right to know and disappearances created a shared discursive arena in which activists and state officials contested the nature of information, the authority to produce it, and the seemingly unbridgeable gap between evidence and the state's recognition of wrongdoing. Debates in the legislative and activist realms often occurred in parallel without necessarily intersecting. Nonetheless, they engaged similar questions: What would it mean to entrust the public and media with sensitive information? What strategies could move state actors to produce information and what effects would doing so have on public life? This article contends that the struggle over information and recognition became the central battlefield for negotiating state violence and opening in Mexico.
This article examines two Spanish museum exhibitions on the frigate Nuestra Se & ntilde;ora de las Mercedes to show how these exhibitions convert recovered colonial treasure into national patrimony and thereby stage imperial nostalgia. Using museum, media, and scholarly archives, I analyze how the displays recode coins and artifacts as inalienable heritage while bracketing the colonial relations-Andean extraction, coerced Indigenous labor, and slavery-that produced them. Set against Spain's court victory over Odyssey Marine Inc. and the post-2008 crisis, the exhibitions cast the state as cultural guardian against corporate plunder. Curatorial regimes aestheticize bullion, dematerialize monetary value, and reattach silver and gold to a redemptive national narrative. Drawing on Walter Benjamin's critique of cultural treasures, Marcel Mauss and Annette Weiner on inalienable possessions, and scholarship on the afterlives of empire, I theorize a navigational state that replaces conquest with heritage protection to secure continuity between imperial past and post-imperial present. The case clarifies the structural limits of decolonizing gestures within national museum forms.
This article argues that nostalgia forms a crucial part of the imaginary that drives frontier economies-not in contradiction but alongside the future-oriented imaginaries of speculation, anticipation, and appearances. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted across three key locales-Pianma, Mong La, and the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone-this study introduces the concept of "frontier nostalgia" to analyze how these spaces function as sites of both economic opportunity and memory. While aspirations for prosperity drive individuals to engage with these dynamic zones, their lived experiences are marked by significant historical residue, creating a poignant longing for past vibrancy-and particularly for a form of hypersociality that characterize(d) frontier spaces. By examining the lived realities of Chinese migrants, the paper argues that nostalgia is not merely a counterpoint to forward-looking anticipation. Instead, it complements future-making practices and imaginaries by highlighting the complex emotional landscapes that characterize frontier encounters, hence constituting particular frontier subjectivities. In Pianma, remnants of a timber boom evoke a sense of melancholic yearning for lost sociality; in Mong La, vibrant social interactions coexist with developmentalist dynamics; and in the burgeoning Golden Triangle SEZ, rapid transformation echoes and actively resemble past experiences. Ultimately, this comparative analysis emphasizes how nostalgia shapes both individual identities and collective memories within these transient spaces, shedding further light on the experience of life on the frontier.
This essay examines a scene of late Ottoman parliamentary politics characterized by verbal disruption, raucous applause, and strident indignation: in short, clamor. Centered on the brief period in late 1918 following the empire's exit from World War I but prior to the rise of the Turkish nationalist movement, the essay focuses on a moment shaped by remarkable uncertainty about how to narrate the political present-what aspects of the historical past remained relevant to defining a possible political future? It looks at the efforts of a Greek Orthodox deputy of parliament, Emmanouil Emmanouilidis, to rebuke the promise of the nearly century-long process of reform (& imath;slahat). As part of this effort, he also historicized the interruption of his own speech, identifying the traces of his own frailty of voice in the stenographic records from prior parliamentary sessions. Attention to noise requires a careful unpacking of seemingly contingent moments of communicative misfire, places where denotational discourse is disrupted and therefore unheard, or what speech act theorists have referred to as infelicities. I offer a critical reimagining of the concept of infelicity, attentive to Emmanouilidis' own preoccupation with the historical weight assumed by the fact of being persistently drowned out by his colleagues. I contend that Emmanouilidis was challenging regnant assumptions about the historical unfolding of freedom in Ottoman political life. The essay argues for the importance of interrogating the labile and contested character of historical temporality at the end of empire.
This article examines how Iranian intellectuals negotiated Western science and technology under semi-colonial sovereignty: a formally independent state constrained by unequal power. I argue that these negotiations operated through translation not only as linguistic transfer but as a recursive set of practices-adoption, reworking, and refusal-through which intellectuals repositioned science within Iranian political life as its authority shifted from universal reason to militarized power to developmental urgency. Using Frantz Fanon as a comparative framework, I identify four overlapping modes: (1) nineteenth-century epistemic translation, when science was framed as a route to reform; (2) early twentieth-century regulation of the "performative translator," when translation became a site of linguistic, epistemic, and gendered policing; (3) mid-century emancipatory translation, shaped by the global militarization of science; and (4) iterative remembrance in the 1970s, when translation became a practice of insurgent authorship through cycles of forgetting and reactivation. The paper's central paradox is that later thinkers strategically inhabited the position long maligned as the "performative translator"-the Europhile dandy or fokoli, later refigured and pathologized as the gharbzadeh (West-struck)-to claim new forms of insurgent authorship, even as such projects risked forging new orthodoxies. Tracing the genealogy of the fokoli, I show how debates over performative translation organized conflicts over method, authority, and epistemic nationalism. Ultimately, I argue that the reappropriation of the fokoli's maligned position reveals decolonization not as a clean rupture but as an ongoing metabolization of inherited materials. The article contributes to decolonial thought, translation studies, and the global intellectual history of science by reframing semi-colonial modernity as a struggle over epistemic authority conducted through the labor of translation.
Following the proclamation of constitutionalism on 23 July 1908, villagers throughout the Ottoman Empire occupied and reclaimed & ccedil;iftlik (plantation) lands from which they had previously been dispossessed. This article approaches the Ottoman 1908 Revolution as part of the "global wave of constitutional revolutions" by shifting the historiographical focus of the 1908 revolution from urban to agrarian spaces. It investigates a series of land occupations that emerged across the Ottoman & ccedil;iftlik geography, conceptualizing them as the "constitutionalism of the dispossessed." I argue that this constitutionalism of the dispossessed was a response to what I call the "order of dispossession" that emerged in the late nineteenth century: a class project of & ccedil;iftlik owners reacting to global economic, imperial fiscal, and local ecological crises that aimed to subordinate labor to the circuits of global capital. Furthermore, this article discusses the failure of the constitutionalism of the dispossessed in the face of a social counter-revolution by & ccedil;iftlik owners, which culminated in the codification of imperial property law. It demonstrates that the post-revolutionary government-having been concerned with the credibility of the empire in European credit markets for new loans to sustain the empire in fiscal crisis-desired the restoration of the order that the & ccedil;iftlik owners insisted upon, and which the circuits of global capital required. This article ultimately offers a fresh and radical history of the Ottoman 1908 revolution and counter-revolution, suggesting a novel perspective to understand the modes of protest of the dispossessed in response to the imperatives of global capital.
This essay explores the formation of the Syria-Turkey border by examining the mobility of contraband merchants and couriers. Contraband commerce can be viewed as not only a technique of mobility but a technology of sovereignty. I parse out these linkages from within the semantic domain of ka & ccedil;ak (contraband; literally "fugitive") repurposed in the hands of contraband merchants, investigative journalists, and state officials. At important historical junctures, contraband commerce between modern Turkey and Syria came to link regimes of value and territorialization, border delineation and land dispossession, and economic informality and political treason. Analyzing the paradoxically uneven distribution of physical mobility and transborder transactions among the inhabitants of the border as a central tenet of territorialization, I suggest conceptualizing the border as a palimpsest of sovereignty. This essay contends that such an approach recuperates the historicity and dynamism of arrested mobilities and their role in the spatial production of borders, and of other contingent forms they give to sovereignty over geography and history.
This article reveals late Ottoman (1876-1908) debates over agrarian policy in the empire's Arab provinces that set the parameters for a fully articulated discourse of national economy emerging after the constitutional revolution of 1908. Debates between imperial officials, regional capitalists and foreign consular agents produced protectionist restrictions on the newly constructed agrarian land market, especially in an extended geography encompassing Palestine and the Hijaz Railway. Ottoman officials viewed the Arab provinces both as an untapped resource and as a possible alternative base in the event of Anatolia's occupation. Restrictions on the land market constructed Muslim cultivators as ideal landholders and non-Muslim subjects, both Christian and Jewish, as potentially suspect and unfit for landholding. Protectionist and exclusionary agrarian policies responded to a wider context of imperial capitalism in which Ottoman officials occupied a subordinate, but still sovereign, position. These policies had an unrecognized legacy in the colonial and postcolonial Middle East, creating a durable state domain that aimed to shield large swaths of land as territory from foreign investment and occupation. The much-discussed work of Frederick List on national economy focused on practices of import substitution and tariffs with empirical examples culled mainly from the United States and Germany. In the Ottoman Empire, in contrast, agrarian policy played a crucial role in practices of national economy because of the urgent prerogative to maintain territorial sovereignty in the face of imminent colonial expansion. The article suggests a reappraisal of the contributions of Ottoman policy debates to the broader history of capitalism.
Working closely with a detailed 1582 register of the free Afro-Peruvian population of Cusco, Peru, this article explores how the strategic representations of individual registrants reflect the intersectional impact of unfree labor practices and increasing racial marginalization in the early colonial Andes. The growing population of free Afro-Peruvian men and women navigated practices and policies that promoted racial inequalities and coerced labor based on race, class, and gender. The 1582 registry reflects municipal attempts to subject Cusco's free Afro-Peruvians to ordinances that acknowledged the relative independence of skilled workers (oficiales), while requiring others to reside and serve in the homes of Spanish masters (amos). Analyzing entries for the nearly 150 people registered reveals ways that intersectional status and identity affected the experience of registration and the strategies for providing personal information to the Spanish notary. The declarations and omissions contained in the document highlight personal choices that people made to preserve their independence and that of their families. The social and economic independence displayed by many oficiales contrasts with the silence of individuals who lived and worked in the households of wealthy and powerful Spaniards, navigating unequal and enmeshed relationships. The range of individual experiences and statuses evident in the 1582 registry helps explain why the restrictive goal of the proceeding failed in the following years, as well as why a free Afro-Peruvian community did not flourish in Cusco during the later colonial period.
Public rituals of buffalo sacrifice have a prominent place in the political history of eastern India. They were productive activities in agrarian livelihoods, stages for intercommunal politics, unifying spectacles for regional kings, and justifications for colonial military interventions. While their historical scale is much reduced today, in parts of southern Odisha, they remain important political events. Drawing on historical research and long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Odisha's Kandhamal Hills, this article examines how public rituals of sacrifice form a site of commensuration: a space where interlocal relations of mutuality and difference are temporarily made visible, and where value is defined in the presence of diverse audiences. By focusing on one specific ritual event, I show how these "sacrificial publics" are structured around the tensions of sovereignty (togetherness and transgression) and have long been spaces where different kinds of sovereign power have become legible. Historicizing an enduring sacrificial politics at India's upland margins, I outline a distinctly anthropological concept of sovereignty-one that reflects the ways human relationships are made commensurable in lasting political formations, sustained through interlocal and intercommunal patterns of recognition.
What explains the contested conditions for migrant worker citizenship under socialism? Migration scholarship often elides socialist contexts, tracing migrant deservingness to the neoliberal rise of labor-based conditionality for legal status across Western states in the late twentieth century. However, a broader historiography suggests that socialist states, despite their institutional differences, conditioned migrant inclusion on labor performance throughout the twentieth century. To explain how this form of civic conditionality operated under socialism, this paper draws on the case of migrant "limit" worker management in Moscow from the early 1960s to 1987. Using archival materials, I show that state-owned enterprises operated as migration intermediaries, establishing and enforcing a labor-based conditionality for local citizenship even as the state pursued additional civic aims. I find that civic campaigns initiated in the early 1960s provided an ideological framework and material base for enterprises to govern migrant workers at their dormitories. Managers and officials at the dormitory redirected resources intended for social activism and cultural tutelage toward ensuring baseline productivity and compliance. Enterprise managers and union officials additionally substituted the material conditions at the dormitory for the assessments of individual migrants' moral and productive status. This paper extends the literature on migrant deservingness to a socialist context, showing how conditionality for civic inclusion develops beyond the neoliberal shifts in contemporary citizenship.
In January 1972, Egypt's university campuses were shut down by a wave of student protest, after President Anwar Sadat appeared to be abandoning plans for a military response to the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. The uprising, culminating in hundreds of arrests, marked the first significant mobilization against Sadat's new regime and drew widespread public sympathy. Drawing on life history interviews, memoirs, press archives, lawyers' records, and student publications, this article examines how solidarity with the Palestinian cause shaped the political formation of the Egyptian student movement and catalyzed its emergence. It argues that the students engaged in profoundly affective solidarity practices with Palestine, first in affirmation of longstanding Egyptian nationalist frameworks of opposition to Zionism, and further in contestation of wider political relations under Sadat. Whilst transnational solidarity features prominently in global histories of decolonization, it has rarely been used to interrogate Egyptian popular politics in the 1970s. By foregrounding Egyptians' evolving affective solidarities with Palestine, this article challenges dominant narratives around the decline of Arab nationalism after 1967 and the rise of Islamism in its place. In doing so, the article reveals the complex dynamics of Egyptian-Palestinian relations over time, within a broader landscape of Arab and global anticolonial struggles.
Widowers make occasional appearances in Icelandic sagas of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and-even though Old Norse did not even have a word for them-they exhibit some distinctive behavioral patterns. This article uses the framework of bereavement studies to examine the interplay of gender, affect, and small-scale politics in the wake of the loss of a wife. It proposes two archetypes of dysfunctional bereaved husband, observable in the medieval Norse world which the sagas describe (ca. 800-1300): the widower on the warpath and the widower on the bridal path. Both followed cultural scripts for widowers' conduct, but did so imperfectly, in a manner that exposes their society's constructions of masculinity, its prescriptive family codes, and the clandestine channels linking private emotional turmoil with public socio-political disruption. My typology of maladjusted Norse widowers offers heuristic tools for further study of bereaved husbands in other periods and places, as well as for comparison with bereaved wives and with men in other life-stages.
This comparative article examines the iterative interactions between the French conception of guerre contre-revolutionnaire and the (re-)legitimation of modern torture techniques from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries. Based on a threefold argument, and drawing on multilingual historical sources and museal artifacts, it argues that the ideological campaign against the "revolutionary war" was a specifically military-intellectual approach to dealing with real or imagined subversive enemies. This dispositif promoted torture as a method of obtaining information and intimidating victims. First, this article shows how torture and the corresponding knowledge production can be traced back to colonial Indochina. There, archaic techniques were peculiarly blended, often with other experiences and indigenous practices. Later, leading military officers believed that the resulting doctrine of counterrevolutionary warfare was successful largely because of the use of methods of torture that left no trace. This key feature facilitated the export of its techniques to other regions. Therefore, in a second step, this article shows how this intertwined knowledge system was applied to the Algerian War, where it was widely employed and exploited. Subsequently, the fear of the spread of global communism facilitated the emergence of torture as a covert science of the Cold War. Third, this essay demonstrates how leading French theorists globalized their teachings by influencing their South American counterparts through their cross-continental interactions from the 1960s onward. Since the end of the Cold War, traces of this savoir-faire have remained potent, culminating in their influence on U.S. American counterinsurgency doctrine.
