This article investigates geosocial patterns of marriage strategies among the leadership of Hasidism, arguably the most prominent socio-religious movement of modern Jewry, known for its unique network of charismatic leaders organized in hereditary dynasties. The article’s core premise is that grasping the network structure of the Hasidic movement’s dynasties, which has been under-researched, is crucial to understanding the movement’s social and cultural dynamics. The study employs social network analysis (SNA) and spatial analysis to examine marital unions among these leaders (2,375 cases), from the early stages of the movement in the eighteenth century until the early twenty-first century. The article explains, for the first time, how Hasidic dynasties expanded, eroded, and negotiated their status within the network of other dynasties. More specifically, we analyze the position of the dynasties within a wider context of social and spatial interconnection patterns, the significance of endogamy, the impact of territorial factors on marriage preferences, and the creation of dynastic clusters. A significant conclusion of this article is that, rather than a set of unrelated dynasties, Hasidic leadership gradually became a web of interconnected families with explicable patterns of organization. These findings can help explain historical processes in Hasidism, such as its persistence through historical crises. It can also illuminate leadership processes in other religions in which, as in Hasidism, the social structure of charismatic leadership is based on clans.

Forty years into Botswana’s AIDS epidemic, amidst persistently low rates of marriage across southern Africa, an unexpected uptick in weddings appears to be afoot. Young people orphaned in the worst years of the epidemic are crafting creative paths to marriage where—and perhaps because—their parents could not. Taking the lead of a pastor’s assertion that the wife is mother of her husband, I suggest these conjugal creativities turn on an understanding of marriage as an intergenerational relationship. Casting marriage in intergenerational terms is an act of ethical (re)imagination that creates experimental possibilities for reworking personhood, pasts, and futures in ways that respond closely to the specific crises and loss the AIDS epidemic brought to Botswana. This experimentation is highly unpredictable and may reproduce the crisis and loss to which it responds; the multivalences of marriage-as-motherhood can be sources of failure and violence, as well as innovation and life. But it also recuperates and reorients intergenerational relationships, retrospectively and prospectively, regenerating persons and relations, in time. While different crises might invite different sorts of ethical re-imagination, marriage gives us a novel perspective on how people live with, and through, times of crisis. And marriage emerges as a crucial if often overlooked practice by which social change is not only managed but sought and produced.

Scholars have long recognized the importance of so-called “Ghent” systems of unemployment insurance for working-class strength and therefore national capitalist development. While only three European countries currently maintain “pure” Ghent systems, nearly a dozen did so during the first half of the last century. This article investigates the discontinuation of these systems in two paradigmatic cases, Belgium and the Netherlands. By focusing on the irreconcilable nature of trade union goals regarding the delivery, range, and funding of unemployment insurance, the analysis explains how the discontinuation of Ghent in these two countries could occur under distinctly union-friendly governments and with the explicit consent of their trade union movements. By showing that both the Belgian and Dutch trade union movements displayed great uncertainty regarding the organizational costs and benefits of assuming responsibility for benefit delivery, the article also explains why Belgium subsequently created a semi-Ghent system that continued to significantly boost union membership, while the Netherlands did not.

This article explores the Brazilian aftermath of Japan’s unsuccessful bid to include racial equality as a principle in the League of Nations charter in 1919. While U.S. and Japan specialists have written about the proposal, its little-known fallout in Brazil contains key insights about racial ideology and the contested meanings of racial equality in the aftermath of World War I. The Brazilian side of the story, which overlapped with a contentious presidential campaign, is significant for three reasons. First, the proposal’s impact on that campaign and among Black intellectuals illuminates a previously overlooked path—what I call the “Pacific route”—that identifies Japan as one unlikely site of genesis for Brazil’s vaunted mythology of “racial democracy.” Second, debates about the proposal anchor our understanding of that mythology in the early twentieth century, pushing back the timeline often associated with “racial democracy” and revealing an early moment when Black intellectuals staked claim to the idea. Third, while Whites in the United States and the British Empire rejected the proposal and opposed Asian immigration in openly racist terms, in Brazil opponents sought to square their position with an inchoate national ethos of racial harmony. The failed proposal offered an opportunity to do so and helped cast Japanese immigrants as uniquely possessing race, in contrast to Brazilians, who had melded into a raceless nation. The Pacific route therefore holds lessons about Brazilian history and the global trajectory of the idea of racial equality.

The scholarly and popular commonsense about corruption in the Philippines is that the country has always been corrupt. Seventy-eight years of corruption as an independent state (1946–2024) may as well have been a thousand. Lay and scholarly accounts explain this continuity with respect to traditional values and premature democratization. In both accounts, corruption is all but genetic to Philippine culture or politics. To be sure, continuity is self-evident if we are looking only at corruption scandals—but scandals have been accompanied by anti-corruption movements, broadly speaking. The two have gone hand-in-hand historically, suggesting that we need to understand them together. Taking them together, that is, focusing on their dialectic, produces, as I will show, a history of change. Specifically, how Filipinos relate to corruption has changed. They have become less tolerant of it in general and learned to embrace an anti-corruption model of politics. How scholars and policymakers conceive of corruption has changed. They have come to adopt a view of corruption as a generic social problem, effectively disembedding it from society. These developments have enabled a more intolerant approach such that, today, the greater danger lies in an anti-corruption “fundamentalism” leading to the rejection of politics altogether. Viewed as a whole, the history of corruption/anti-corruption has been a popular struggle over what politics should look like, and thus we might read their dialectic as driving the progress of political modernization from below.

What does empire look like from spaces where multiple imperial projects converge? Through analysis of Molla Nasraddin, a pioneering satirical magazine from the early twentieth-century Caucasus, I reveal local engagements with empire that defy traditional binaries of center versus periphery, indigenous versus foreign, and resistance versus accommodation. While critical scholarship has powerfully demonstrated how imperial power shapes local life—from technologies of rule to cultural categories and patterns of inequality—such analysis is typically conducted through the lens of a single empire. In the Caucasus, where Russian, Ottoman, and Iranian empires overlapped, Molla Nasraddin developed a distinctive blend of visual satire, character types, and multilingual wordplay that functioned as a form of satirical pedagogy, cultivating what I term “inter-imperial literacy”: the capacity to recognize deep connections between neighboring imperial worlds while maintaining critical distance from each. Through sustained correspondence with readers across three empires during their near-simultaneous revolutionary upheavals (1905–1908), the magazine gave voice to a public defined not by fixed identities but by their capacity for protean transformations across imperial boundaries. While nation-states would eventually redraw the Caucasus, Molla Nasraddin provides a window into a moment when historical borderlands—not imperial centers—offered the most penetrating insights into the workings of empire. In these spaces, elements adopted from competing empires become creative resources for local expression, while apparent cultural alignments conceal critical distance, enabling views of empire at once intimate and askance.

This article explores the peculiarity of struggles over memory in Soviet-era planned cities in the Russian Far East. It focuses on the contested history of Permskoe, a village founded by peasant settlers from European Russia in 1860, which was later subsumed by Komsomolsk-na-Amure, an urban industrial center constructed in the Stalinist period in the 1930s. Built with the participation of Young Communist League volunteers recruited from across the Soviet Union, the city was held up as a symbol of the triumph of socialist modernization throughout the twentieth century. But following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, the city suffered a dramatic reversal of fortunes, with a massive outflow of residents and resources leading to an economic crisis that also occasioned a crisis of identity. One manifestation of this crisis is an initiative seeking to recalculate the city’s age based on the date of Permskoe’s founding. This proposal has been denounced by many residents as an attempt to erase the city’s Soviet history and to downplay the role of communist volunteers in the city’s construction. Drawing on the debates which erupted around this periodization controversy, I argue that the collapse of the Soviet imaginary of linear progress and inability to articulate a new frontier myth resulted in “asynchronous belonging,” characterized by radical polarization around memory and irreconcilable allegiances to different moments in local history.

This paper traces how geological surveys and prospecting across two centuries shaped Afghanistan’s enduring characterization as a mineral-rich “El Dorado.” By investigating the shift in survey methods from comprehensive terrestrial to aerial reconnaissance, I show how geological knowledge production served purposes far beyond imperial resource identification and extraction. Drawing from historical and ethnographic research, including insights from a current emerald mine operator, I uncover how precious stones’ physical properties and circulating narratives about hidden riches propelled—and continue to propel—a vast network of individuals into mining enterprises: from state authorities and local powerbrokers to foreign geologists, mineral collectors, and international aid organizations. The result is the creation of new narratives about extractable wealth that interweave scientific practices and global market dynamics to transcend conventional periodization such as pre-Soviet, Soviet, and United States. These narratives have emerged from and reinforced asymmetrical relationships in both labor and expertise, ultimately positioning Afghan participants precariously within global mineral markets, made riskier still in times of conflict.

Most scholars hold a skeptical view of the war elephant of ancient India. I show that the skepticism of present-day historians derives from ancient Rome, at the end of the Republic and the beginning of the Empire, when the Romans, having defeated the elephant-deploying powers of the Hellenistic period, ended the use of war elephants in its growing empire for all time. Late Roman war elephant skepticism was taken up by Quintus Curtius Rufus, who embraced it and strengthened it rhetorically in speeches he devised and put into Alexander’s mouth, in his history of Alexander. In this way Roman skepticism about the value of the Indian war elephant was attributed to Alexander, two centuries previous to its formation among the Romans. In modern times the late Roman view that elephants have a tendency to panic and become a greater danger to their own side was turned into a settled truth about elephant physiology, but it does not accord with the evidence offered.