States of emergency are usually approached separately in social, political, and economic policy spheres while they are generally tied to a concrete time frame: security, disasters, and economic crises are portrayed as discrete emergencies occupying specific periods. This paper shows that seemingly different and sometimes contradictory processes of states of emergency often intertwine with each other despite their variegated domains, scales, reasonings, and political endeavors. Moreover, their legacies and origins are found in the broader history of articulation of new forms of governance and accumulation of wealth. The paper presents two cases in Turkey that differ in terms of the violence they entailed while both exploited the same emergency declaration against disasters and the new Law No. 6306 on land grabbing. The first is a series of spectacular incidents in the southeastern Kurdish city of Diyarbakır and the second is an ethnographic study from Eskişehir, a mundane setting in western Anatolia. The study develops a historical–relational framework to examine how emergency governance operates through dual, interwoven logics of ruling and capital accumulation. This allows us to move beyond ready-made, reductionist understandings of contemporary emergency governance. Discerning institutionalization of states of emergency also shows their fragility and blurs the line between spectacular and non-spectacular.

The debate between Hythlodaeus and an English lawyer before Cardinal Morton in Book One of Utopia (1516) contains many proposals for socio-economic reforms. These have typically been interpreted as innovative proposals to counteract the corruption of Christendom which surrounds them. However, when placed into their legislative context, it is apparent not only that these reforms echo closely many socio-economic reforms passed in England in the decades preceding Utopia, but that corollaries for almost all of them were passed when Morton, in whose presence the debate took place, was lord chancellor. Recognizing this forces a reassessment of this debate, showing Hythlodaeus’s flaws, and reframing the contribution of the English lawyer. This very reassessment, however, realigns the entire dialogue before Cardinal Morton, which it is possible to identify as a mirror to the wider text. It is a Utopia within Utopia, or, a mise en abyme. By closing examining the reflection, it appears that this provides a structural indication of how Utopia should be read.

The shuhūr sanah, also called the Shuhur era, was a solar calendar used in Deccan India in the pre-modern and early modern periods. Scholars have long assumed that the calendar was instituted in the early fourteenth century, sometime in 1344–1345 CE, although, to date, no primary evidence from the fourteenth century has been examined to substantiate this inaugural date or explain the circumstances that led to the genesis of the calendar. In the present article, I discuss a 1333–1334 CE Persian epigraph from Daulatabad that uses the phrase shuhūr sanah and argue that the calendar was instituted during a period of economic, administrative, and agricultural uncertainty in the reign of the Delhi Sultan Muhammad bin Tughluq (r. 1325–1351). In so doing, I re-date the inauguration of the calendar to a decade prior to what has been assumed thus far and posit a new theory about the calendar’s longevity in the Deccan. More broadly, I examine the historiography and the historical usage of the Shuhur era in the Persianate epigraphic corpus. The survey reveals how the Shuhur era was used to make public-facing pronouncements and also clarifies the limits of the calendar’s usage. The calendar was popular in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries; after this period, it was phased out by other calendrical systems preferred by the Mughal (1526–1857) and the Maratha (1674–1818) empires, who came to control the Deccan.

From the shores of the Black Sea to the banks of the Mississippi River, more than mere distance separated the nineteenth-century port cities of Odessa and New Orleans. Although these ports emerged in distinct political and geographical settings, a comparative analysis reveals striking parallels between these two southern metropolises, each positioned at the territorial edge of continental empires. This article aims to examine the common challenges these cities encountered in their development, the factors that divided their cosmopolitan populations and how socio-environmental vulnerabilities contributed to their urban fragmentation.

Examining the early post-colonial Beirut International Airport (BEY), we make two arguments. First, BEY had the potential to become the Middle East’s largest airport only because from the mid-1800s Beirut, which had a large maritime port, had been the Arab East’s global cultural, commercial, communications and transport hub, which created a path dependency. Second, BEY deepened Beirut’s regional-global role throughout the 1960s, making it an aero-city piggybacking on a port-city. We explore four dimensions. First, in urban planning, the government was exceptionally interventionist where BEY was concerned; second, BEY’s construction triggered sociopolitical conflicts; third, BEY intersected with Palestinian and Lebanese unskilled labour flows; and, finally, air-travel, including tourism, affected Beirut’s cityscape deeply yet unevenly.

A century ago, in summer 1925, the Great Syrian Revolt erupted in opposition to French mandate rule. In Saydnaya a village murder happened to coincide with the outbreak of the revolt. The young killer, in avenging his father’s earlier murder, became, first a fugitive, then an unlikely revolutionary hero, and eventually, during his long absence, a legendary figure, and repository for a number of mostly erroneous historical claims and memories. After ten years on the run, he surrendered and was defended by a famous nationalist lawyer. He was tried, jailed, and released. An American brother paid his legal bills and helped him emigrate to West Virginia. He never returned to Syria. This article is based on a French mandate archival court record, extensive interviews with eyewitnesses, American consular records, and finally, interviews and documents from surviving family in West Virginia. It offers a dizzying microhistory of rural Syria in upheaval, colonial myopia, sectarianism, revolution, international migration, and the immigrant experience in the United States. The article argues for the colonial origins of sectarian rule, but shows how a tool of colonial fragmentation changed and collided with revolution, colonial and postcolonial politics, migration, and memory in unpredictable ways.

Nineteenth-century Calcutta was a premium port city and the nerve-centre of the British Empire’s commercial activities in South Asia. In many ways it was presented as a promising mercantile global metropolis – a symbol of efficiency, infrastructure and urban modernization – celebrated in contemporary colonial accounts and literature.1 However, looking beyond, it is possible to locate other perspectives that challenge the colonial narrative. Reading both against the grain of colonial archives and closely examining Indian accounts, this article highlights the gaps in its smooth functioning, and uncovers local practices that challenged metropolitan blueprints. As seen here, it was possible for the everyday city to pose a serious challenge to European – purportedly universal, and therefore global – models of urbanization implemented by the colonial government. Calcutta here emerges as much a product of its own social, cultural and natural environment, as that of global modernization regimes unleashed by colonialism, the legacy of which can be seen even today.

The Cold War, as a historical period, ranged from 1947 to 1991. During this time when the United States and the Soviet Union confronted each other, this interstate rivalry was the stage on which both superpowers sought to bring the other to its knees. As Andreas Glaeser underscores, on both sides, Cold War politics was “an intentional effort to maintain or get an advantage in the balance of power while at the same time avoiding any direct military confrontation.” The United States was a liberal, capitalist state that espoused political democracy; the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was a communist state with a centralized economy that ignored political democracy. Both sought to create their own empires as part of their struggle. Empire building and decolonization both took place during these years. For generations, the rest of the world was faced with only three choices: to be on the side of the United States, to be on the side of the USSR, or to try to be nonaligned.

Summarizing the key findings of this special issue, our conclusion embeds them into the long-term history of cities extending to our present age. Some of the cities treated in our special issue have since turned into megacities marked by environmental hazards and extreme socio-economic inequalities. Their combination invites rethinking the interdependence of natural, built and social environments in urban contexts in the longue durée. Interweaving nine case-studies of cities in different world regions, our special issue demonstrates that a sustained environmental focus and the longue durée approach enriches current scholarship on port cities, and also nurtures discussion on the long-term consequences of the coastalization of the world population, thereby contributing to the fields of global and imperial history as a whole.