Fārābī had an Arabic translation of Ptolemy’s Harmonics and was deeply immersed in it. The evidence is internal to Kitāb al-Mūsīqā al-kabīr. A passage can be found at the end of the first book of the madḫal in which Ptolemy is mentioned by name and his treatise on music also receives explicit mention. The puzzle is that, according to Fārābī, Ptolemy acknowledges directly in the Harmonics that he could not discriminate different patterns of attunement by ear, but Ptolemy nowhere makes any comment about his level of musicianship. The best way to understand Fārābī’s puzzling claim is as an inference from Ptolemy’s attempt to disprove Aristoxenus’ argument that the fourth is equal to two and a half tones. The paper argues that the inference is plausible, that Fārābī drew it and that he could not have drawn it without being intimately familiar with Ptolemy’s Harmonics.

Did women’s suffrage affect media sentiment toward voting rights and narratives about women more generally? I identify pro- and anti-suffrage language using publications that explicitly argued for or against early voting reform. I then measure media sentiment using language in newspapers and topic modeling to identify common themes about either suffrage or women. Difference-in-differences estimates show that newspaper coverage of suffrage increased when women won the vote but then declined below baseline. Newspaper sentiment moved in opposition to the status quo, with average sentiment becoming more anti-suffrage. Lastly, suffrage increased discussions of women in politics for several years.

This article examines the earliest known corpus of Chinese poetry written in the Spanish Philippines, preserved in Diego de Rueda y Mendoza’s Relación verdadera de las exequias funerales (1625), composed to commemorate the death of King Philip III. Among the numerous multilingual tributes collected in the manuscript, six poems were authored by members of the Sangley (Chinese) community in Manila—some Christianised, others gentile—marking a significant moment in the history of transcultural mourning, poetic diplomacy, and Chinese literary expression in a colonial Iberian setting. Three of the poems are written in classical Chinese and exhibit sophisticated Buddhist and literary references; the other three, composed in Spanish by Sangley authors, reflect a hybridised voice grounded in baroque rhetorical tradition. Rueda’s accompanying prose ‘translation’ of the Chinese poems reveals both a willingness to engage Chinese expression and a limited understanding of its linguistic and cultural nuances. This study offers a close reading of the Chinese poems, demonstrating how they employ imagery rich in Buddhist meaning, reflecting the Chinese cultural understanding of imperial rulership. It also compares these verses to their Spanish counterparts and Rueda’s summaries, revealing both overlap and erasure. The article argues that these poems, far from being mere colonial curiosities, testify to the complex cultural agency of Manila’s Chinese community and challenge dominant narratives of Hispanisation. Ultimately, the manuscript preserves a unique instance of literary and political negotiation that sheds light on the layered identities of early modern Chinese in the Philippines.

Some cadres receive promotions, whereas others do not. This study explores the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) personnel control over the central state-owned enterprise (SOE) leaders from the Hu era to the Xi era. An analysis of the résumés and careers of SOE leaders reveals that the CCP has established a dual-track system to manage enterprises with different functions. This system employs two types of incentives: promotion incentives for leaders of eldest-son enterprises associated with national security, and salary incentives for leaders of other enterprises. Through the dual-track system, the CCP aims to influence the career trajectories of SOE leaders and address conflicts of interest in the principal-agent relationship. This study also investigates the individual characteristics of SOE leaders, including their political qualifications, professional qualifications and ages. The results indicate a tendency towards specialization and institutionalization in central-enterprise leaders, even during the Xi era.

The “Concession to Avicenna,” also known as the seventh chapter of De substantia orbis, is one of Averroes’s several philosophical attempts to reconcile between the corporeality of the celestial bodies and their eternity. The “Concession” contains a brief and rare nod of approval to Avicenna, which prompted the title under which it circulated. The work, lost in Arabic, survives in Ṭodros Ṭodrosi’s Hebrew translation from 1340, from which Abraham de Balmes’s subsequent Latin translation was made in the early sixteenth century. The present contribution offers, for the first time, an edition of the text in Hebrew and its original Latin translation (before its editorial revision for the 1525 editio princeps), alongside an introduction, a philosophical analysis of the argument, an English translation, and a glossary.

This paper documents how the advent of the limited liability corporation contributed to the diffusion of steam technology during Sweden’s industrialization. Using longitudinal establishment-level data, we show that incorporation sharply raised the probability that industrial establishments adopted steam. Incorporation facilitated technology adoption partly by enabling smaller establishments to expand to a greater scale, where the use of steam became feasible. These results highlight that low barriers to incorporation may be an important lever for facilitating the diffusion of new technologies.

The World of Sugar, Ulbe Bosma’s compelling historical narrative on how sugar became a global commodity, and the accompanying introductory article in the International Review of Social History raise many fascinating points for further reflection and debate. In this commentary, I wish to highlight several points that resonate strongly with my own work at the Transnational Institute (TNI), a global think tank based in Amsterdam that connects social movements with academics and policymakers. These points of reflection are informed by TNI’s mission and practice of “scholar-activism”: the fact that we seek not only to interpret the world, but also to change it for the better, in particular for those exploited and oppressed classes and social groups. As my work principally involves collaboration with transnational agrarian movements, I pay particular attention to areas of Bosma’s analysis that carry implications for rural working people and for agrarian and environmental justice. This includes the role of sugar in the global land rush, the rise of sugar cane as a “flex crop and commodity”, and the ways in which “rural sugars” can be supported in peasant- and smallholder-based economies and livelihood strategies.

The authors examine the 1910, 1920, 1930, and 1940 US censuses to identify demographic characteristics of children who resided in public and private institutions for minors, with special attention to patterns of racial segregation and exclusion. The article focuses on public and private institutions founded exclusively to serve children and youth and also on correctional institutions for children and adults. The authors found racial segregation in private institutions, underrepresentation of children of color in both private and public institutions, and overrepresentation of boys of color in correctional institutions for minors and adults. They also identified a historical pattern, with few exceptions, of excluding girls of color from all types of public and private institutions.

This paper examines the impact of weather conditions on wheat production in the Florence and Siena regions in the early modern age, emphasizing the need to contextualize this influence within historical, geographical, and economic frameworks. Our quantitative findings suggest that, on average, hotter and wetter spring and summer weather conditions were beneficial for wheat yields in early modern Tuscany, though this relationship holds true only within a certain optimal range; otherwise, extreme conditions are detrimental. However, the boundaries between optimal and non-optimal conditions vary based on the historical, economic, and geographical context, ultimately determining the level of agricultural productivity. Specifically, we argue that two macro causes – primary production factors and the degree of market volatility – play a crucial role in shaping the effects of weather on agricultural outcomes. First, soil conditions, technology (broadly defined), and capital-labour ratios are the most significant determinants of agricultural productivity. Second, competitive and integrated markets, when supported by countercyclical institutions – in our case, the annona system – can mitigate the negative consequences of adverse weather by reducing the resulting volatility. Where such institutions are weak or absent, speculation (i.e., hoarding), driven by price expectations under high volatility, may arise and amplify disruptions.

Unlike in other contexts and regions in India, servants/slaves in Goan homes (in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries) received inordinate attention from European non-Portuguese travellers. They provided disturbing descriptions of Goan households and the violence inflicted on the subalterns. Slave ownership in the Portuguese empire was both an economic imperative and a problem for moral theology in Europe and overseas. Although slavery was not at the centre of the debate, it contributed to the construction of the ‘Black Legend’ of Portuguese colonialism in Asia. It nourished the complaint regarding moral dissoluteness due to the mixing of population and economic corruption of the Portuguese imperial institutions. The argument was that the Portuguese intermarried and consequently started closely resembling gentiles, some of whom they first enslaved. By looking into three types of archival documents, I discuss slavery/servitude in Goan households: 1) in the legal and moral framework for the ‘just’ slave society debated by ecclesiastics, 2) as it was seen and represented by foreign travellers, 3) and in the seventeenth-century history rewriting of elite Goan Christian theologians obsessed with the purity of blood of their ancestors.

This article explores the evolution and shifting interpretations of the dissolution of the Kingdom of Hungary and the creation of its successor states as reflected in the historiographies of Central European nations. It analyses the complex interaction between politics and the socio-cultural milieu, on the one hand, and historiography, on the other. A palpable tension exists between the national narratives and the efforts to construct a commonly accepted story. Inspired by the entangled history approach, the paper identifies common features within these historiographies, which exist despite ostensibly distinct points of departure. Additionally, major interpretative trends in the area up to the present day are characterised, and the impact of the socio-cultural turn and the recent centenary of the First World War critically assessed. The article argues for the practicality of moderate national narratives, which should take into consideration recent developments in the discipline and can help bridge the divide between nation-states on sensitive issues.

Nineteenth-century sanitary and burial reform were motivated by public health concerns and transformed the Victorian landscape with two forms of new infrastructure: sewers and out-of-town cemeteries. However, the history of burial reform ‘always sat awkwardly’ (in the words of Julie Rugg) with that of sanitary reform. In this article, we re-examine the campaigning career of George Alfred Walker (1807–84), a surgeon-apothecary who made public health the core of his argument for burial reform, to demonstrate that burial and sanitary reform were deeply intertwined via sanitary science, politics and science communication. We argue that Walker represented city graveyards as a nuisance similar to poor sewerage, utilising Thomas Southwood Smith’s heterodox fever theory to make his argument amenable to Edwin Chadwick’s goals and solutions: infrastructure ahead of poor relief. Walker’s solutions gave the medical profession positive reasons to support sanitary reform, as they proffered much-needed employment via burial reform. At the same time, his extremely active and varied campaigning throughout the 1840s took inspiration and strategy from the broader sanitation movement. By providing a comprehensive account of his campaigning for the first time, we show that sanitary reform politics was central to changing British burial management as a contested scientific theory was utilised to fit political ends.

In 1804, an elder courtier named Ban’deyri Hasan Manikufaanu (1745–1807) chronicled the sea voyage of the sovereign of the Maldives, Sultan Muhammad Mueenuddeen I (r. 1799–1835). The purpose of the voyage was to visit the islands of Ari Atoll. Manikufaanu crafted 171 verses according to the rules of a Maldivian genre of poetry called raivaru. The work is known as Dhivehi Arumaadhu Raivaru (‘Raivaru that chronicled the journey of the Maldivian royal fleet’). In this article, I demonstrate how the verses provide a lens into early nineteenth-century Maldivian boat construction, court music, navigational routes, regnal travel, royal ensigns, sailing, and seamanship, all of which have not been sufficiently explored in Indian Ocean studies. In contrast to scholarship on travelogues that emphasises Muslim men’s experiences of heterotopia when they travelled across the Indian Ocean on steamships to maritime ports, this article centres on a provincial journey of a royal fleet of sailing ships taken by the sultan of the Maldives and other noblemen to visit Maldivian commonfolk who lived on islands that formed part of an atoll in the middle of the Indian Ocean.