Abstract A novel genealogical approach to inheritance management uses probate inventories and tax records to trace intra-family dynamics and intergenerational patterns of wealth accumulation. When applied to a small sample of Swedish noble families from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, the methodology makes three key findings: (1) position in a family tree significantly affected individual wealth outcomes; (2) land was central to noble wealth well into the first phases of Sweden’s industrial development; and (3) real properties remained strongly gendered even after Sweden’s equal inheritance law of 1845. Although the size of the sample rules against general conclusions, the highly suggestive results invite further research.
Abstract The extent to which Kenya’s history (and that of other colonies) had been permanently relocated to Britain, never to return, came to light in 2009, when Mau Mau petitioners finally had their day in court. There they learned that thousands of files from thirty-seven erstwhile former dependencies still resided in Britain, not in the capitals or districts where they were created. Six years later, these migrated archives, or most of them, were opened to researchers, but only in London. The upshot is that Kenya has lost significant parts of its heritage, much of it forever. Linebaugh’s Curating the Colonial Past has done postcolonial historicity, the oft-neglected archival profession, and Africanists a great service by imaginatively showing how one national past is riddled with documentary holes.
Abstract The onomastic revolution—the adoption of names for newborns that departed from centuries-old traditions—is a proxy for a shift in mentality that began in Western countries during the eighteenth century. This change in naming practices cut across traditions that persisted for generations (vertical conformism) as well as within a single generation (horizonal conformism). Data from Italy, France, and the United States suggest that the onomastic revolution and the demographic transition, which were largely conterminous, have likely connections that are worthy of further detailed investigation.
Abstract In Natural Magic, Bergland claims that Emily Dickinson shared with Charles Darwin a “magical way of thinking” about the natural world, one that was “interactive and participatory.” This essay demonstrates that Dickinson, along with her contemporaries, participated in the vibrant, contentious culture of pre-Darwinian science provoked by the publication of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation in the 1840s, which challenged the narrow empiricism that dominated British and American science. Through Vestiges, Dickinson became acquainted with evolution and was presented with a provocative heuristic, a lens through which she could explore the largest possible questions about existence itself and literary form. Her implicit repudiation of outworn scientific practices enabled her to engage, as would Darwin, with “the invention of invention.”
Abstract By the time of his death in 323 b.c.e., Alexander the Great had been exposed to intense physical and emotional strain. Several combat-related injuries (particularly his near-fatal thoracis trauma) and various diseases, his substance abuse, and the likelihood that he was suffering from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (cte) and post-traumatic stress disorder (ptsd) surely would have taken their toll. In this context, his death was not so much an anomalous tragedy befalling a vital young ruler as it was the culmination of a brief adulthood rife with accumulated physical trauma, neurological damage, and psychological impairment.
Abstract Reconstruction of past diets poses significant challenges for historians and archaeologists alike. Archival records from Delft’s orphanage between 1650 and 1725 provide data regarding the number and weight of plant and animal food items purchased. Cesspit evidence offers complementary insights into diet based on the edible plant and animal species present in the fill as well as some insights into the health of the inhabitants based on parasite presence. Both disciplines have limitations when reconstructing past food consumption practices of the Delft orphans. Yet the individual biases can be mitigated when the results are compared and combined. The purchase lists of the orphanage show the amounts of (staple) foods purchased and, by extension, their relative importance in the diet. At the same time, bioarcheological research shows a variety of consumed plants that are not specifically listed in the archival sources. Zooarchaeological research provides insights into the age of the animals listed as being purchased for food by the orphanage and the parts of the animals used. The intersection of historical and bioarcheological evidence reveals that the diet of orphanage inhabitants was neither monotonous nor meager, though evidence of parasitic infections suggests some health challenges.
Abstract References to the Covenant Chain—a diplomatic confederation of English colonies and Native groups—are found throughout the historical record of eastern North America. Over the past three decades, however, Canadianist scholars have reinterpreted the Covenant Chain within a contemporary legal framework, allegedly aligned with Indigenous legal traditions and intended to have application in a judicial system where Indigenous rights and sovereignty are being tested. Rather than acknowledging the decades-long consensus view that the Covenant Chain is fundamentally and for all purposes an assembly of alliances, a recent claim is that it is a treaty—a “meta-treaty”—of compelling consequence. The Covenant Chain and certain cultural artifacts, including the two row wampum and the idea of kaswentha, are argued by some to undergird a line of reasoning in the formulation of legal traditions. Yet imperfections in the understanding of treaty-making, complicated by distortions of the Covenant Chain’s history and interpretation, presentism, and the specter of law office history, highlight the need to address legal traditions commensurate with sound ethnological and historical truth-telling.
Abstract Since the 1990s, the concept of sustainability has gained increasing attention in historical studies. Research has focused on the sustainable exploitation of environmental resources for economic purposes. This economic emphasis has often obscured ecological consequences, particularly on ecosystem balance and animal populations. This article describes the enduring forms of environmental management and commodification that developed in 1250–1500 in the Central Alps. Contrary to notions of sustainability as rooted in longstanding practices, evidence suggests that these practices were not traditional in character but emerged as a response to strong economic growth beginning around 1300 and resulting environmental pressure. The process of selecting resources useful to the economy, such as forests and pastures, had a considerable impact on the ecosystem. Most notably, the new forms of sustainability developed and adopted by Alpine societies were able to safeguard and optimize the use of natural resources, but they had significant consequences for the animal world, ranging from the development of genetic selection practices for cattle to the elimination of large carnivores.
Europe’s first mining boom began in the later twelfth century CE (~850 YBP), amid favorable climatic, political and demographic conditions. Despite its seemingly simple technologies and modest energy regimes, manual mining triggered a cascade of processes. These included altering ecologies and landscapes; stimulating migration; creating privileged occupational communities; prompting debates regarding the harms and benefits of ore extraction; and generating insights about humans’ place in nature more broadly. Nevertheless, the entangled biogeochemical, social and cultural legacies of manual mining remain largely obscure, certainly as compared with its economic, political and even scientific impacts. There are both conceptual and methodological reasons for this neglect. Yet, as this article argues, by combining approaches across history, archaeology and the paleo-sciences, it is possible to acquire a fresh perspective. Evidence from several European mining districts, drawing on written sources, physical remains and their examination at the micro-, landscape- and regional levels, attest communities’ complex experiences of and approaches to the outcomes of non-mechanised mining. Interdisciplinary historical accounts of the era’s extraction are thus uniquely poised, first, to recast a “pre-industrial” industry as having long-term and often adverse consequences; and, secondly, to recover earlier societies’ ambivalence towards mining. Finally, an interdisciplinary approach to earlier mining history responds to calls for recontextualising the Anthropocene from a chronological standpoint within Europe, augmenting its more common critiques from beyond that region and in the aftermath of industrialization.
Wenkai He’s Public Interest and State Legitimation: Early Modern England, Japan, and China reconsiders Tilly’s “war makes the state” thesis through a comparative study of early modern polities. Drawing on extensive scholarship and primary source materials in Chinese, Japanese, and English, He argues that the stability of England, Tokugawa Japan, and Qing China rested less on fiscal-military strength than on ideologies of benevolent rule and public welfare. Through analysis of petitioning, welfare provision, and crisis management, He shows that state legitimacy depended in large part on public interest rather than on war-making. The book reframes state formation as a process grounded in welfare and legitimacy, offering a major contribution to understanding early modern governance.
Variation in the height and weight of food smugglers during World War II is examined in relation to socioeconomic and environmental factors acting both during the war and earlier in life—during fetal development, infancy, childhood, and adolescence. Height might have reflected long-term effects of conditions during critical periods of development. During the war, access to food through the illegal market shaped the weight status of food smugglers. Knowledge of the German language may have contributed to “success in the smuggling business,” and, consequently, may have made life easier during the Nazi occupation.
A balanced panel of 192 observations across sixteen Italian regions reveals that socioeconomic modernization—characterized by rising gdp per capita, improved life expectancy, and declining illiteracy rates—was the primary driver of fertility reduction. Regional disparities were marked, with northern regions experiencing earlier and steeper declines than those in southern regions. Cultural factors, particularly proximity to French cultural networks, accelerated the diffusion of modern reproductive behaviors. The findings highlight the interaction between cultural and economic variables in demographic transitions and underscore the importance of interdisciplinary approaches to understanding both historical and contemporary demographic changes.
Urban spaces are often considered nurseries of consumer developments. Focusing on eighteenth-century London, the cradle of the famed nascent consumer society, we employ newspaper advertisements of forthcoming auction sales to map changes in the domestic material culture of the city’s “polite society.” Over the course of the century, British-made products replaced Asian luxuries among the most distinct positional goods promoted in these advertisements, and new social distinctions emerged around objects related to leisure, gardening, music, and domestic sociability and conviviality. Overall, however, narrowing consumer inequalities outweighed these renewed differentiations in the social distribution of positional goods, suggesting a convergence of domestic material culture between London’s elite and upper middling sorts.
The origins and early diffusion of the Justinianic Plague likely involved the Hephthalite and Alkhan Huns as an essential conduit for the bacterium’s dispersal from Central Asia. Written and dna evidence together support this route of transmission. The plague is an enzootic bacterial disease, and dna suggests that the animal reservoirs hosting the lineage that gave rise to the pandemic lived near the Tianshan mountains. Written sources from the Roman Empire describe the plague’s appearance via the Red Sea, which suggests importation across the Indian Ocean. Connections emerge between the Hephthalite military campaigns both to the north and to the south, the presence of plague-bearing animals like camels and marmots, and routes of ancient trade. Several Buddhist sources echoing the situation in the last period of Hephthalite domination in India (c. 540 c.e.) report mass deaths, allegedly from massacres, which, according to associated details, can be reinterpreted as an epidemic. The proposed journey of the plague involved two major stages, first from Central Asia to India and then across maritime routes to Africa and the Red Sea. This hypothesis aligns with the available sources, offering a plausible model that is most consistent with written and genetic evidence.
Thanks to the metrological hegemony of the metric system, decimalization is now synonymous with quantitative precision, efficient calculation, and objective understandability. But a historicization of decimalization with respect to measurements reminds us that such objectivity cannot be taken for granted. Using decimal fractions explicitly required that people set aside traditional measurements for money, land, commodities, and time. Two centuries before the development of the metric system, the application of decimalization explicitly encouraged anticustomary approaches to measurement. Drawing interdisciplinarily on mathematical history, metrological history, and quantitative epistemology, with Stuart England as a case study, this article shows that quantitatively minded people rapidly adopted decimal fractions for measurements because they had explicitly advantageous exactness and ease of calculation.
