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The Rongorongo is a system of writing, still undeciphered, from Easter Island in the Pacific. It consists of a corpus of twenty-six inscriptions, scattered around the world. This article presents the state-of-the art in the study of one of these inscriptions, Text D or the ‘Échancrée’ tablet housed in a museum in Rome, Italy. Through an integrated methodology based on photogrammetry and high-precision structured light scanning, a 3D model of the inscriptions is made available through a public 3D Viewer for the first time. The technique made use of the benefits of both methods of image acquisition: a very accurate, precise, high resolution, and metric reconstruction of the tablet geometry gained through the scanning process, and a high-quality texture achieved through photogrammetry. In addition, we present a new analysis of the text, through a close palaeographic examination of its signs, and corrections of previous hand drawings and transcriptions. The ultimate aim is to reach unbiased ‘readings’ of the signs through an integrated synergy of traditional palaeographic analysis and an advanced 3D model. These, applied to all the inscriptions, constitute the necessary stepping-stones for any decipherment attempt.

We use the effect of the Dissolution of the English Monasteries after 1535 to test the commercialization hypothesis about the roots of long-run English economic development. Before the Dissolution, monastic lands were relatively unencumbered by inefficient feudal land tenure but could not be sold. The Dissolution created a market for formerly monastic lands, which could now be more effectively commercialized relative to nonmonastic lands, where feudal tenure persisted until the twentieth century. We show that parishes affected by the Dissolution subsequently experienced a rise of the gentry and had more innovation and higher yield in agriculture, a greater share of the population working outside of agriculture, and ultimately higher levels of industrialization. Our results are consistent with explanations of the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions which emphasize the commercialization of society as a key precondition for taking advantage of technological change and new economic opportunities.

The experimental mindset strips down and mimics social constructs in a setting we can use to understand how institutions create or destroy economic value. We explore how to use the mindset to consider climate change mitigation, in which more investment in climate mitigation by the collective, the less costly for each party. Using the lab to capture Conference of the Parties declining-cost environment with a jigsaw puzzle to mimic real-time costs, we find decreasing ‘cost’ of commitment increases contribution but not reaching the public good threshold. Highlighting the economies of scale might be an effective way to elicit greater commitment.

This article unpacks the connections between empire, piety, and pilgrimage in the early modern western Indian Ocean world by examining the history of a reliquary shrine dedicated to a qadam, or footprint relic of the Prophet Muḥammad located in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. Classified by the Archeological Survey of India as the ‘Tomb of Mir Abu Turab’ (ASI Monument no. N-GJ-44), the site was a qadamgāh in the Mughal period and from the late-sixteenth to the early-eighteenth centuries functioned as a place of visitation (mazār) for pilgrims eager to see the naqsh-i qadam-i sharīf (the impression of the noble foot), whose white appearance stood in stark contrast against the black stone. By examining Persian historical narratives, including one authored by the man responsible for the relic’s arrival to South Asia, this article demonstrates how relics mediated Mughal imperium, devotion to the Prophet Muḥammad, and sayyid identity in early modern Gujarat.

This article examines the politics of solidarity with and among refugee women in Turkey’s southern borderlands. Drawing on ethnographic research in Hatay, we focus on Syrian- and Turkish-led women’s organizations, whose solidarity work contextually entangles organized acts of care and support with social hierarchies, tensions, and mutual distance. These gendered social spaces complicate the scholarly critiques of depoliticization in refugee assistance by governmental and civil society organizations, and the charity–solidarity distinction on which such critiques often rely. They require a rethinking of solidarity with refugee women beyond the terms of right-based political activism.

This essay explores the language of social protest in two geographic and diasporic locations in the Caribbean (Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic) with long and ongoing histories of colonialism and imperialism. We analyze social media and digital mobilizing to examine how, in the midst of social protest, linguistic and semiotic tools indexed historicity, contemporaneity, and futurity through relational strategies that are not just textual and discursive, but also historical, social, and political. Throughout this essay, we share examples of intertextual and interdiscursive strategies that marked particular moments of protest as articulations of historical precedents, imperial and colonial presents, and alternative futures. These examples reveal how collective identities (i.e. el pueblo) are mobilized in social protest to generate counternarratives that address structures and systems rather than locate social critiques in particular individuals and political parties. In shedding light on the intra-Caribbean solidarities that emerge over time, this analysis also points to a need to examine the erasures (Gal and Irvine 2019) performed through claims to unity and collective organizing.

This paper presents an intuitive way to represent Keynes’s theory of expectations and its implications for financial markets. Further to a suggestion by Ellsberg, a coherent expectational function for the valuation of assets under Keynesian uncertainty is derived. By following the thread that goes from the non-numerical probabilities of the Treatise on Probability to the expectations of the General Theory, this paper suggests that a function accounting for Keynesian expectations can be modelled by using a class of the so-called ε-contaminated probability priors, where the parameter ε is suggestive of the quality of information about the relevant odds.

This article proposes the metaphor of “shadow” to examine two interrelated aspects of digital politics in India: online surveillance of politically inclined actors and datafied shadow texts aimed at managing front stage politics. The specificity of “shadow politics” emerges from ongoing transformations that are deeply interwoven with the digital, first with the data driven confidence around the “total certainty” of tracking and calibrating voter sentiments, and second, with the ideology of digital participation and related claims that data machines are merely tapping into people’s sovereign expressions online.

In this paper, the energy models of six hotels were compared. Food and beverage (F&B) service demands the highest amount of energy (over 50%), followed by the hot water system. A regression analysis revealed that, among 31 different characteristics, the revenue per available room, the pool volume, the number of diners and the mean number of guests per occupied room can explain the total energy demand of the studied hotels. The possibility of including photovoltaic solar energy could increase the renewable contribution of the energy mix by 8–30%, but this highly depends on the available surface for this installation in each hotel.

In recent years, there has been increasing interest in analytic philosophy that engages with non-Western philosophical traditions, including South Asian religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. However, thus far, there has been (to my knowledge) no engagement with Sikhism, despite its status as a major world religion with a rich philosophical tradition. This paper is an attempt to get a start at analytic philosophical engagement with Sikh philosophy. My focus is on Sikh ethics, and in particular on the theory of vice and virtue that can be gleaned from Sikh scripture. According to this theory, the five major vices have a unified source in the vice of haumai. Haumai is a kind of false conception of oneself as singularly important, and correspondingly, a false conception of the world as revolving around oneself, as a world of objects there for one’s use. Vice, then, comes down to the failure to recognize the importance of others. The corresponding picture of virtue is that virtue consists in a recognition of the importance of others, through the recognition of an ultimate reality on which all are One. After reconstructing the Sikh theory of vice and virtue, I conclude with some comparative remarks on Sikh and Western ethics.

Doubtless writing tongue-in-cheek to the Estates Committee of King’s College in 1938, Keynes remarked that it was safer to be a speculator than an investor. In the 1920s when first assuming responsibility for the College endowment, he had been a speculator, experiencing a remarkable conversion in the early 1930s to become a genuine long-term investor. Viewing the development of portfolio practice through Keynesian lenses, we demonstrate the essential continuity in conventional practice from Keynes’ time to the present day, the enduring characteristic being the treatment of uncertainty as if it were risk. Current practice is technically sophisticated, manifested in the reliance on benchmarks and risk controls to such an extent that we can refer to the fetish of benchmarking. In contrast, Keynes’ indirect, allusive, indeed elusive, approach embodies a unique insight—one that has been totally obscured by the conventional emphasis on ‘capital appreciation and depreciation generally’.

In the article, we propose a general theoretical framework to distinguish a set of possible options for integration between social sciences. Adopting the so-called ‘nation’ metaphor in order to investigate relationships between disciplines, the framework uses an analogy with Dani Rodrik’s ‘world political trilemma’ (whereby democracy—here self-determination of science—national sovereignty—here disciplines—and global economic integration—here disciplinary integration—are mutually incompatible) to distinguish three different roads to the realisation of the unity of social science (‘reductionism’, ‘integration’ and ‘complexity’). The framework is then applied to recent proposals for unifying the social sciences that have originated within the economics profession at a time of pervasive specialisation and increasing fragmentation. While discussing the origins, the feasibility and the desirability of disciplinary integration projects, we concentrate on the issue of pluralism in both social sciences and within economics and on the ‘structural’ conditions that would permit economics to participate in the development of a transdisciplinary behavioural science.

We construct a new series of GDP per capita for France for the period 1280–1850 using the demand-side approach. Our estimates point to a long-run stability of the French economy with a very gradual acceleration toward modern economic growth. In comparative perspective, our new estimates suggest that England and France were characterized by similar levels of economic performance until the second half of the seventeenth century. It is only after that period that the English economy “forges ahead” in a consistent way.

Evsey Domar investigated in the 1940s the implementation of growth stabilization policy under the assumption that policy makers and businessmen alike believed his theoretical growth model. Economic policy was supposed to work merely through the impact of its announcement on expectations. He claimed that confident expectations, generated by government’s assurance of future growth through fiscal policy, would induce private investment decisions in a scale that would bring about the required growth rate and by that justify the expectations, without putting the guarantee to test. Domar’s policy framework contrasts with the policy-ineffectiveness proposition of New Classical macroeconomics advanced in the 1970s. Domar’s stabilization plan is discussed in detail in the context of his growth model, together with similar ideas put forward by Roy Harrod, as the latter modified aspects of his original growth model, and critical reactions by Alvin Hansen.

This article offers a reading of the coverage of the 2013–14 Ashes series by way of exploring the limits of classical reception. Focusing on the poetics of recusal (recusatio, praetritio) and their place in advertising memory sanctions as site of contested power, I suggest that although the coverage lacks explicit reference to classical material, it nevertheless can be read as classical by analogy, and as such ought to be treated as a case of classical reception.

In the early 21st century, the angel became a recurrent image within the visual economy of pop music stardom. By considering the case of Justin Bieber (whose angel invocations give expression to his struggles with celebrity, faith, and the pathology of Whiteness), the author reveals how biographical factors alone cannot account for the angel’s contemporary resonance. Instead, and drawing upon Walter Benjamin’s concept of wish image, the author argues that this invocational pattern reflects a general desire for a one-to-one correspondence between being and doing—here understood as a manifestation of the ur-historical longing for absolution. Because this desire is ambivalent, the angel has historically been invoked to symbolize wishes as divergent as fascism’s ideal gender relations and radical utopia’s equality. In this way, the angel’s current ubiquity alerts us to the role resonant myths often play in the elaboration of collective desires, while pointing toward their implications for emancipatory strategy.

What is a ritual chore? By analyzing the nineteenth-century American theorist of domesticity Catharine Beecher, this article argues that there is a form of gendered ritual that is submissive and unproductive. Unlike scholars such as Saba Mahmood and R. Marie Griffith who have argued for acknowledging the practical cultivation of virtue in conservative religious women’s piety, Beecher provides a model of gendered ritual that produced a flurry of activity rather than a self. Ritual chores, Beecher teaches us, do not result in self-mastery. The nineteenth-century middle-class Christian woman tended to her home by initiating the work of her servants; thus, her theory of domesticity was also a theory of ritual surrogacy, or the enactment of ritual at the behest of another. I argue that the dissatisfaction of the white-collar middle-manager and the nineteenth century northeastern housewife have much in common: both roles make the worker feel like their labor might in fact be pointless.

Shimizu Ikutarō (1907–1988) is one of the most controversial postwar Japanese intellectuals. His transition from the icon of the Anpo protests to an advocate of a nuclear Japan has been considered an intellectual conversion (tenkō). Instead of revisiting the notion of conversion, this study shows that his wartime thoughts—bottom-up nationalism in particular—continued to influence Shimizu’s postwar writings and activism on both conservative and liberal sides. Shimizu delineated his historical concept of how ordinary people in Meiji and Taisho Japan had contributed to the development of a modern society and called for the construction of a new system. Endorsing Japan’s wartime efforts, Shimizu strove to center nationalist energies by ordinary Japanese on his concept of a new Japan. However, Shimizu’s adherence to bottom-up movements in wartime and postwar Japan reflects his problematic interpretation of Japanese history. Neglecting Japan’s nationalistic path to colonial violence, his writings on the society and culture of wartime and postwar Japan affirm grass-root nationalism as Japan’s key to modern development. This line of thinking was later associated with anti-American nationalist movements in the 1950s. His notion of civil society movements soon encountered a highly nationalistic project of a nuclear Japan in the 1970s.

This study contributes to an expanding literature on historical African inequality, presenting five social tables and income inequality estimates for Uganda between 1925 and 1965. I find that income inequality was mostly stable and overall low compared to other African colonies. Decomposition reveals important underlying fault lines and shifts. Income gaps between the African majority and a tiny Asian and European income elite accounted for a large share of overall inequality. Over time, inequality among Africans increased. Income from self-provisioning was a major equalizer in Uganda’s economy, which was characterized by land abundance and widespread smallholder cultivation of labor-intensive export crops.

Expander is the core component of organic Rankine cycle (ORC) system. Taking R245fa as the organic working fluid, the miniaturization design of radial inflow turbine expander with theoretical maximum output power 20 kW and rotational speed of 30 000 r/min is carried out. The deflector and the moving impeller are simulated and designed. The ORC system with preheater and superheater is built for performance analysis of the designed turbine expander. The effects of temperature, pressure and rotational speed on the output power, temperature drop and efficiency of turbine expander are studied experimentally. The experimental results show that with the increase of the inlet temperature, the efficiency of the turbine expander has a minimum value, but the output power keeps increasing gradually. The analysis shows that the lowest efficiency is caused by the deterioration of expansion due to the rapid increase of flow rate. The turbine expander has the maximum efficiency of 0.886 at the inlet temperature 393.15 K and the inlet pressure 1.2 MPa. When the rotational speed increases from 12 000 r/min to 28 000 r/min, the temperature drop increases from 17.2 K to 32.7 K, and the output power increases from 7.04 kW to 17.3 kW. With the increase of rotational speed, the thermal power conversion capacity and temperature drop increase, so the output power increases. The system efficiency increases with the increase of turbine expander efficiency and has the same change rule.

Corrections officials, prison staff and many people incarcerated have long believed that hope derived from a realistic possibility of release is essential to maintain order and safety in the prison. Criminological research consistently finds, however, that people without foreseeable or realistic prospects for release nevertheless do hope. Yet while findings of hope in criminological literature are robust, they remain undeveloped. This article draws from hope studies in other disciplines to advance a model of types of hope, which is then used to analyse evidence of hope in prior criminological literature on life sentences and long prison terms. The article distinguishes hopes derived from legal opportunities and escapist fantasies from deeper hopes grounded in despair, highlighting hope as a site for further research.

The development and application of enhanced geothermal system and hydrothermal system are constrained due to high cost and high risk of induced seismicity or heavily reliance on hot water reservoir. Deep borehole heat exchanger (DBHE) technology is independent of hot water reservoir and hydraulic fracturing; however, the poor thermal conductivity of rocks limits its performance improvement. To deal with these problems, a novel technology for acquiring geothermal energy using DBHE with horizontal branch wells (DBHE-HBW) is proposed here. It is found that DBHE-HBW has better performance than DBHE and, under the condition of nearly equal total cross-sectional area of well tube, the smaller the horizontal well tube diameter, the greater the thermal output and the shorter the payback period of DBHE-HBW. Therefore, DBHE-HBW can be recommended for large-scale application in building heating sector.

This paper is based on a spectral–controllability analysis of the Sraffian price system and develops a relevant reconstruction of the theory of value. It shows that (i) the hitherto competing theories of value correspond to specific complex plane locations of the eigenvalues of the vertically integrated technical coefficients matrix; and (ii) the real-world economies cannot be coherently analyzed in terms of the traditional theory of value (classical, Marxian, Austrian, and neoclassical), despite the fact that they are characterized by rather low degrees and relatively low numerical ranks of price controllability. Hence, on the one hand, the Sraffian theory of value is not only the most general to date, but also empirically relevant. On the other hand, the real-world economies constitute almost uncontrollable systems, and this explains, in turn, the specific shape features of the empirical price–wage–profit rate curves that are at the heart of the capital theory debate.

In present paper, thermodynamic analysis and techno-economic assessment of an organic Rankine cycle (ORC) coupled with solar parabolic trough collector (PTC) are investigated. The thermodynamic and economic models, based on the principles of thermodynamics and heat transfer, as well as dynamic economic analysis, are developed for the components of the combined system. By performing a parametric study, the effects of outlet temperature (TPTC,out) and temperature difference between inlet and outlet of PTC (ΔT) and pinch point temperature difference of heat exchangers on the thermo-economic performance are evaluated. Moreover, under reasonable thermodynamic boundary conditions, the optimal operational parameters are obtained via a Pareto frontier solution. It is indicated that the improving TPTC,out is beneficial to the thermo-economic performance. Among the fluid candidates, toluene yields the best energy, exergetic and economic performance. There exists an optimal ΔT at which the thermal and exergy efficiency achieve the maximum. The optimal ΔT is 19–26°C for the screened working fluids. The pinch point temperature difference of evaporator has different impact on the system performance compared with that of condenser. The evaporator pinch point temperature difference has slight influence on the economic performance when it is larger than 10°C. While there is optimized condenser pinch point temperature difference (7–8°C), the economic performance is the optimal. The PTC and heat exchanger are the main source of total investment cost, account for more than 75%. The Pareto frontier solutions can provide a design guide for the decision maker.

A Hindu samādhi is a shrine that marks the final resting-place of a realised guru’s body and reflects the traditional understanding that the realised sage’s perfected body should not be cremated but rather should be preserved as a localised instantiation of sacred power. While some scholars speculate that the Hindu samādhi shrine tradition is borrowed from the Sufi dargāh (tomb-shrine) tradition, I argue that the Hindu samādhi burial practice has pre-dargāh roots resonant with the Buddhist stūpa and relic worship tradition. This article charts the development of this samādhi burial practice in regard to three important considerations: the act of taking samādhi, burying the body, and marking the burial site. It is this long-established burial practice that eventually blossoms into a full-fledged worship tradition in part by coming into contact with the Sufi dargāh tradition.

Kenneth W. Warren’s What Was African American Literature? (2011) compelled literary historians to question deeply held assumptions about periodization and racial authorship. While critics have taken issue with Warren aligning African American literature with Jim Crow segregation, none has examined his account of what came after this conjuncture: namely, the market’s wholesale cooptation of Black writing. By following the career of African American popular novelist Omar Tyree, this essay shows how corporate publishers in the 1990s and 2000s redefined African American literature as a sales category, one that combined a steady stream of recognized authors with a mad dash for amateur talent. Tyree had been part of the first wave of self-published authors to be picked up by major New York houses. However, as soon as he was made to conform to the industry’s demands, Tyree was eclipsed by Black women writers who developed the hard-boiled romance genre known as urban fiction. As Tyree saw his literary fortunes fade, corporate publishing became increasingly reliant on Black book entrepreneurs to sustain the category of African American literature, thereby turning racial authorship into a vehicle for realizing profits.

This essay draws upon Gwendolyn Brooks’ 49-year correspondence (1944–93) with her editor Elizabeth Lawrence to trace the “publishing knowledges” that Brooks gleaned during her mid-20th-century career with the US firm Harpers & Brothers. First and foremost, their correspondence richly details Brooks’s growth as an experimental poet with a mainstream commercial firm. The aesthetic sociality of their editorial debates fostered also allowed them to explore personal and political intimacies; in this dimension, their correspondence (both the letters’ contents and epistolary form) sheds light on how Brooks and Lawrence navigated the shoals of race, gender, and liberalism in the notoriously patriarchal corporate culture of mid-20th-century US publishing. Finally, the arc of Brooks’s relationship with Lawrence at Harper’s charts is how US publishing transformed from its corporate to conglomerated forms. Taken together, these epistolary threads not only weave African American poetry into the literary history of an era-defining institutional realignment but also they demonstrate how Brooks’ and Lawrence’s cross-racial solidarity and commitment to an anti-corporate poetics comprise a continuum between Brooks’s career in mainstream US publishing and her later years in the Black independent press in the late 1960s. [P]ublishing at Harper’s was a shrewd, tactical choice [that] . . serve[d] Brooks’s evolving ideologies about art and politics.

The essays collected in “Literature and Publishing, 1945–2020” consider the ways the conglomerated global publishing industry has incorporated and commodified varied genres and target publics. The essays employ intensive archival, ethnographic, and computational methods, and they dive into often-neglected genres, in order to fill in this familiar narrative outline with vivid detail, complicating it and at times discovering countervailing trends that persist within conglomerate publishing’s pursuit of short-term economic profit. While the contributors tend to emphasize the dominance of an increasingly homogenizing corporate aesthetic inimical to experiment, they also acknowledge the potential for individual writers, editors, and agents to intervene in the market, shifting and diversifying the field and preserving literary values, even as they attend to the fiscal bottom line. This commentary stresses the variability of genre, publishers’ persistent search for novelty, and conglomerates’ desire to compete for prestige with small but influential independent presses in order to explain the continued efflorescence of a dazzling diversity of contemporary literary production within a field that continues to consolidate dramatically at its top end, and whose retail side is dominated by a single behemoth.

Risk, Uncertainty and Profit was published in 1921, but started as the doctoral thesis ‘A Theory of Business Profit,’ defended in 1916. The first half of the paper examines the changes in organization and argument that Knight undertook between completing the thesis defense and the book’s publication five years later. The reorganization helped Knight focus attention on uncertainty as the most important aspect of economic life standing between the worlds of perfect and imperfect competition, and to explore more of its implications for both price theory and entrepreneurial judgment. The second half of the paper carries the story forward by examining the reception Risk, Uncertainty and Profit received from 1921 until Knight’s retirement in the early 1950s. The study of its reception uses a database of citations of Knight’s book in economics journals found through a JSTOR search. While Knight’s book is remembered today mostly for its introduction of uncertainty, in the economics literature the book’s treatment of basic price theory is more frequently cited, especially in the leading economics journals of the interwar period. The citation data indicates that the role of Risk, Uncertainty and Profit in economics education at the London School of Economics and the University of Chicago extended and expanded the book’s impact.

The present article reports on the design, modeling and parametric optimization of a thermoelectric cooling system for electronics applications. An analytical model based on energy equilibrium is developed for cooling a microprocessor using a thermoelectric module with an air-cooled finned heat sink. The proposed analytical model is validated by experimental measurements and by comparison with detailed 3D numerical simulations. Estimation of effective material properties of the thermoelectric module using manufacturer-reported performance characteristics is found to reduce the uncertainty in the calculation of module input power as compared to experimental measurements. A parametric optimization of the thermoelectric module and heat sink is carried out to maximize the coefficient of performance (COP) and achieve the required cooling capacity of the microprocessor. The effectiveness of the proposed methodology is demonstrated for cooling current high power microprocessors. At a constant input current, the cooling capacity and COP of the thermoelectric cooling system increase with increasing thermoelectric module geometric ratio. Furthermore, at a constant geometric ratio, the cooling power increases with increasing input current to reach a maximum value and then decreases. The present study highlights the importance of designing and fabricating high-performance thermoelectric cooler modules with optimum parameters for cooling specific electronic components. The results indicate that the cooling capacity can be increased by ~70% using thermoelectric modules with optimized parameters as compared to using non-optimized commercially available thermoelectric modules.

In this article, we examine the making of research infrastructures for digital research. In line with many scholars in this field, we understand research infrastructures as deeply relational and adaptive systems that are embedded in research practice. Our aim was to identify the relevant context factors, actor constellations, organizational settings, and strategies which contribute to the evolution of a basic service into an actual infrastructure. To this end, we conducted thirty-three case studies of non-commercial and commercial research services along the research life cycle. By examining how these services emerge, we hope to gain a better understanding of the conditions and strategies to transform a service into an infrastructure. We are able to identify competitive disadvantages for publicly financed infrastructure projects with regard to the mode of implementation and the resources invested in development and marketing. We suggest that the results of this study are of practical relevance, especially for individuals, communities, and organizations wanting to create research infrastructures, as well as for funders and policy makers wanting to support innovative and sustainable infrastructures.

When the same person is described as a 'Capitalist Revolutionary' and a ‘Bourgeois Marxist’, you know that there is a tug of war going on between opposing ideologies to claim the ideas of that person: in this case, John Maynard Keynes. James Crotty, in his recent book, Keynes against Capitalism, joins the game. Crotty takes issue with the conventional interpretation: that Keynes was trying to save capitalism. Instead, he argues that from the mid-1920s until his death in 1946, Keynes consistently argued for replacing capitalism with ‘liberal socialism’. Crotty also maintains that The General Theory was designed to provide the theoretical foundation in support of his case against capitalism, in favour of liberal socialism. We contend that these labels, however clear they might have been to Keynes, are now laden with all sorts of interpretive baggage, and that Keynes’s thinking was rather too subtle and complex to be comfortably described by them. To make this case, we examine the social purpose that Keynes’s theoretical and policy work was designed to achieve and the means by which he thought it could best be achieved, as his thinking developed in the context of the rapidly changing times through which he lived.

This article delivers an original analysis of an Austrian controversy between Rothbard and Kirzner about the relationship between entrepreneurship and capital ownership: in real-world markets, must the entrepreneur be a capitalist or not? The two authors were opposed to each other on that issue. Here, we will take a new look at existing literature by proposing a review of the key terms used in the debate. The thesis we defend here is that Rothbard and Kirzner were suffering from a mutual conceptual misunderstanding. Thus, taking an original view aims to steer the debate to a positive outcome and to reconsider the Austrian relationship between entrepreneurship, ownership and exploitation of capital.

In this article the effects of cartelization on firms’ efficiency are investigated using the example of an early twentieth century coal-mining cartel in Upper Silesia: the Upper Silesian Coal Convention. Established in 1898, the cartel comprised various types of private, as well as state-owned, mining enterprises. Using a microeconomic dataset based on firm-level data of the Upper Silesian mines, I focus on the cartel’s effect on efficiency. The cartel did not significantly reduce technical efficiency among mines. This finding confirms previous research on cartels’ effects on efficiency.

This study provides new estimates on welfare ratios for London, Amsterdam, Paris, Strasbourg, Munich, and Leipzig for 1600–1850. I use a linear programming model to compute the basket that minimizes the food cost subject to nutrient requirements. For a balanced nutrition, I take into consideration that people should ingest not only calories and proteins, but also fat, iron, and some basic vitamins. The results suggest that living standards in Western Europe were lower than previously thought. However, like previous studies, this article suggests that welfare ratios in London were higher than in other European cities.

When and how does a state become a part of the international refugee regime, and how does a state’s role within the regime change over time? Using South Korea as a case study, this article highlights the significance of Cold War politics as a main cause of the expansion of the international refugee regime. South Korea was first entered into the international refugee regime during the US-led Korean War. And it was due to the neocolonial relationship between South Korea and the US that South Korea participated in the Vietnam War, and consequently, South Korea received its first internationally recognized refugees. Pressure from the US largely explains the burden-sharing role that South Korea played during the Indochinese refugee crisis. However, repositioning itself as a subempire in Asia and seeking enhanced international stature, South Korea signed the 1951 UN Refugee Convention, finally becoming an official member of the international refugee regime.

This article investigates the striking ambivalence of people who left reintegrated Sarajevo en masse after the Bosnian war and have still retained a connection to the city. While ex-Sarajevans identifying as Serbs have cultivated a strong emotional relationship to their place of origin and have maintained various temporal, material, and political linkages with the city, they have completely ruled out the idea of returning physically. By addressing their ambivalent relationship with their place of origin, this study posits that ex-Sarajevans do not embrace the idea of returning to a ‘point fixed in space’, but rather harbour a utopian dream of returning to a ‘point fixed in time’. Rather, it argues that instead of mourning the place itself, ex-Sarajevans truly miss the previous forms of sociability, which no longer exist in the post-war milieu.

U.S. income inequality has varied inversely with union density over the past 100 years. But moving beyond this aggregate relationship has proven difficult, in part because of limited microdata on union membership prior to 1973. We develop a new source of microdata on union membership dating back to 1936, survey data primarily from Gallup (N ≈ 980,000), to examine the long-run relationship between unions and inequality. We document dramatic changes in the demographics of union members: when density was at its mid-century peak, union households were much less educated and more nonwhite than other households, whereas pre-World War II and today they are more similar to nonunion households on these dimensions. However, despite large changes in composition and density since 1936, the household union premium holds relatively steady between 10 and 20 log points. We use our data to examine the effect of unions on income inequality. Using distributional decompositions, time series regressions, state-year regressions, as well as a new instrumental-variable strategy based on the 1935 legalization of unions and the World War II–era War Labor Board, we find consistent evidence that unions reduce inequality, explaining a significant share of the dramatic fall in inequality between the mid-1930s and late 1940s.

The full analysis of the text of a contract, asiento, between Philip II of Spain and a Genoese merchant–banker details how in this pre-modern composite state, merchant–bankers acted as agents of the Crown who gathered many scattered sources of income to the Crown and transformed them into large and regular cash flows, mesadas, for the army. Because of the uncertain availability of these sources, the contract provided flexibility to both parties and legal assistance to the banker who reported to accountants for audit and, if necessary, the charge of an interest at about 1 percent per month.

Past investigations have identified phase change emulsions (PCMEs) as potential working fluids that could be used to reduce energy consumption in heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems. But how PCME behaves in a fin-and-tube heat exchanger, which is commonly found in HVAC system, is still unclear. The paper focused on theoretical studies of thermal performance of a novel PCME PCE-10 in a fin-and-tube heat exchanger. The research analyzed heat transfer and flow behavior in fin-and-tube heat exchangers and the results showed that PCE-10 has several performance advantages as a cold storage medium, which provides a basic basis for the design of a new type of practical cold storage device.

Before 1932, Britain’s essentially free-trade policy left barely any scope for reciprocating the preferential tariffs that the Dominions applied to Britain’s exports. Thus, Britain attempted to reciprocate by means of a “soft” trade policy aimed at increasing Britain’s imports from the empire through wide-reaching publicity coordinated by the Empire Marketing Board (EMB). This article, the first econometric assessment of the EMB, argues that there was not a differential increase in the volume of those imports advertised by the EMB. Principal arguments for this failure are that British consumers were frequently unaware of the geographic origin of many commodities and that they tended to identify company brand more than country of origin.

We analyze the development and performance of the British equity market during the era when it reigned supreme as the largest in the world. Using an extensive monthly dataset of thousands of companies, we identify the major peaks and troughs in the market and find a relationship with the timing of economic cycles. We also show that the equity risk premium was modest and, contrary to previous research, domestic and foreign stocks earned similar returns for much of the period. We also document the early dominance of the transport and finance sectors and the subsequent emergence of many new industries.

Maternity is an extremely important aspect of self-determination regardless of the culture of origin. In the case of refugee women (functioning without the support of close relatives, the family, and their own society with its cultural norms), it additionally plays a crucial role in the construction of self-image. Women are often taken care of their children, which largely determines their adaptation strategies focused primarily on providing offspring with safety, development conditions, and stability. No less important it is also for their self-perception and self-determination, which are to a large extent conditioned by the gender roles in their culture of origin. In the article, I discuss the most common dilemmas of mothers-refugees among whom I conduct research since 2014 (coming from former Soviet Republics: Chechnya, Dagestan, Tajikistan) and I analyse their impact on the upbringing of offspring. At the beginning of the article, I present the basic terminological issues related to socialization and enculturation. These processes are considered to be one of the most important and difficult challenges faced by refugee women living in Poland. In the following part, I analyse the relationship between the self-assessment of the parental and educational activities effectiveness made refugee mothers and their adaptation attitudes and acculturation strategies.

The Black Death is claimed to have caused the European Marriage Pattern in England by raising pastoral wages and thus delaying female marriage. We show that this argument does not hold. There is no consensus that late female marriage emerged in rural England after the Black Death. Women wanting to do pastoral work in medieval England did not have to remain unmarried, so improved pastoral opportunities did not necessitate later marriage. Nor does the quantitative relationship between pastoralism and female marriage age in England provide support for this argument. Fertility restriction was not exogenously triggered by the Black Death.

This paper explores vicarious responsibility and circumstantial luck from a first-person perspective, drawing on ethnographic research on parenting in Reform Era China. The paper focuses on how informants drew boundaries between what they could and could not control in raising a child who might thrive in a hypercompetitive society. In doing so, the paper engages the question, “What kind of moral agent do we want?” by proposing that we also ask, “What kind of moral agent do we find?” In contrast to the hypothetical figure of a walled-off agent who must be convinced of the duty to take on responsibilities in a circumstance of moral luck, empirical research finds instead a vulnerable agent who has taken on ‘too much’.

In 1935, the United States introduced the old-age assistance (OAA) program, a means-tested program to help the elderly poor. The OAA improved retirement conditions and aimed to enable older persons to live independently. We use the transition from early elderly plans to OAA and the large differences in payments and eligibility across states to show that OAA reduced mortality by between 30 and 39 percent among those older than 65 years. This finding, based on an event study design, is robust to a range of specifications, a range of fixed effects, placebo tests, and a border-pair policy discontinuity design using county-level data. The largest mortality reductions came from drops in communicable and infectious diseases, such as influenza and nephritis, and mostly affected white citizens. DS is funded by a Wellcome Trust and European Research Council Investigator Award (ERC HRES 313590).

Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Tamil-speaking South India, this article presents one Hindu invitation ritual to return dead relatives known as pūvāṭaikkāri to the world of the living and install them as household deities. This two-day ceremony demonstrates that prevailing scholarly perceptions of death and what follows it in Hindu traditions have constrained our ability to appreciate other models for ritual relationships between the living and the dead. These vernacular rituals call the dead back into the world, convince them to possess a human host, and persuade them to be permanently installed in the family’s domestic shrine so they may protect and sustain living kin. Rather than aiming to irrevocably separate the dead from the living, these rites are instead oriented toward eventual conjunction with the dead and therefore reveal a fundamentally different picture than that articulated in the majority of Hinduism’s sacred texts and scholarly accounts.

While Langston Hughes is typically read as a staunch supporter of solidarity defined by descent, I suggest that his 1961 poem Ask Your Mama pursues a form of sociality that privileges race but is not exclusively determined by it, instead exploring possibilities for cosmopolitan exchange. As the negotiation of alterity and the reexamination of inherited attachments—cultural, racial, or national—cosmopolitanism is a crucial although understudied radical strain of thought in this moment, and one we can hear sounded in Hughes’s jazz poem. Hughes’s column for the Chicago Defender displays traces of a cosmopolitan ethos leading up to the composition of Ask Your Mama, traces that coincide with the transnational values inspired by jazz’s increasingly international circulation. Drawing on the surge in music’s postwar commercial and state-sanctioned circulation, Hughes’s poem becomes a unification of his own impulse to expand affiliations across national and ethno-racial lines and the discourses around jazz and other vernacular music. Ask Your Mama combines generic forms and overlays scales of exchange that exceed any neatly defined geographic origin or cultural category. Analyzing these combinations of poetry and music, I show how networks of alternative meanings are produced that reconfigure relations between geographic distance, community, and identity, the comingling of disparate cultures and national affiliations formalized in the interstices of music and poetic verse. Ultimately, Hughes demonstrates how, amid the overlapping seizures and resignifications of black cultural production at mid-century, jazz music could be reclaimed and repurposed to transform poetry’s structure and rearticulate the boundaries of ethno-racial solidarity.

Hagiography is a scholarly category that has been used primarily to group textual sources that represent the lives of Christian saints. This article contends that the utility of hagiography and hagiographical far exceeds this commonplace usage, in terms of both the ways they entail broadly enacted cultural dynamics and their applicability beyond conventional disciplinary expectations of what constitutes representations of saints (or even religious content). The article provides a retheorization along two analytic vectors: (1) framing hagiography in terms of a field of many interconnected media rather than identifying it with texts alone, and (2) studying it in terms of the psychosocial processes (imagination, representation, and appropriation) that generate and mobilize understandings of holiness in the world rather than limiting it to the products that instantiate but do not exhaust these processes.

I explore the relationship between Hurston as ethnographer and Kossola as subject in Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo,” posthumously published in 2018 but extant since 1931. Barracoon reveals how Hurston wrestles with her dual identity as fiction writer and cultural anthropologist as it crafts a narrative of slavery and liberation around conjured memory and the ethnographic relationship. The essay considers how Hurston harnesses her rhetorical powers to convince Kossola to share recollections of his life “in Affica soil,” and examines how the themes of loss and recovery emerge in Hurston’s recording of Kossola’s narrative of capture, enslavement, and free life in Africatown, the construction of an archive of transatlantic slavery, and the extraliterary narrative of Alice Walker’s reclamation of Hurston’s own voice into the canon.