This paper explores the complex role penicillin played in the relations between Britain, the USA and the USSR between the Second World War and the beginning of the Cold War through the lens of science diplomacy and the category of negotiation. In the post-war years the Soviets tried to acquire know-how on large-scale penicillin production from Britain and the USA. While the USA refused to collaborate, the British strategy was more complex. The British government allowed the Oxford team, which had discovered the antibacterial properties of penicillin, to disclose all the technology and know-how concerning large-scale penicillin production of which they were aware to the Soviets, while simultaneously trying to slow down penicillin research and production in the Soviet Union by controlling the export of certain industrial machinery, Podbielniak extractors, to Eastern Europe. By contrast, the USA put a stop to scientific and technological collaboration with the Soviets, but were less strict about the export of industrial machinery. The different strategies generated tensions between Britain and the USA, and ultimately mirrored both the British fear of an American disengagement from Europe and the American will to protect the interests of their national industry.

In Spanish America, the enslavement of Africans was just one of several widespread forms of bonded labour. This article explains the different forms of colonial obligations that limited the freedom of the Indigenous population. It compares the situation in the viceroyalties of New Spain (Mexico) and Peru, with a special focus on two types of dependent labourer: the laboríos in New Spain and the yanaconas in Peru. Although the origin of both categorizations was different, they were functionally comparable. Both generally worked in mines, haciendas, cattle farms, and in textile or sugar mills. It has been argued that by migrating to their workplace, they cut ties with their communities of origin – a hypothesis that was often, but not always, true. This article shows that both categorizations could be temporary as well as permanent and hereditary. On occasion, people could change to other, “neighbouring” categorizations, such as “sedentary” Indigenous people living in Indigenous communities or free mulattos – the latter being more frequent in New Spain. To explain these phenomena and highlight the agency of the colonial population, we examine petitions as a strategy to change fiscal categorization in order to gain greater freedom. Examples from Cajamarca in northern Peru and Michoacán in western Mexico are presented; both regions lay outside the traditional mining centres in relation to which bonded labour has been most often analysed in the respective viceroyalties. We argue that developments towards the end of the colonial period differed between the regions.

James Croxall Palmer served during the United States Exploring Expedition of 1838–1842 as assistant surgeon aboard the Peacock from late February to mid-April 1839 when it sailed with the pilot boat Flying-Fish on a difficult and treacherous high-latitude foray west of the Antarctic Peninsula. The papers of the Flying-Fish were lost with the destruction of the Peacock at the mouth of the Columbia River in July 1841, thus the book Palmer authored in 1843 under the title Thulia (a pseudonym for the Flying-Fish) became both the sole surviving firsthand account of the excursion and the first Antarctic poetry. A quarter century later, Palmer revisited, revised, and expanded Thulia, publishing it as Antarctic Mariner’s Song in 1868. Palmer’s own proof copies of Antarctic Mariner’s Song were retained by his descendants but were otherwise unknown until they recently surfaced. The proofs with Palmer’s numerous annotations contribute to the expedition’s history. A presentation and discussion constitute this report.

Historians and archaeologists have extensively studied the history of health and illness in medieval England. Despite uncovering evidence of many diseases, especially fatal ones, questions remain about the impact of infirmity on people’s lives. How often were people unable to work because of illness? Were there seasonal patterns to such absences and did some people suffer recurring bouts of sickness? It has long been recognized that sick customary tenants could, in theory, be excused from performing their labor services (known as “works”) but few examples of this practice have been found. This article presents new evidence of infirmity on the manors of Ramsey Abbey. The monks excused sick tenants from performing their labor services for up to a year and a day, and sixty-two manorial accounts offer new insights into 229 cases of infirmity among their customary tenants in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. These accounts reveal a variety of experiences, from acute illnesses that lasted just two days, to chronic and debilitating infirmities that could result in a year’s absence. Five weeks of autumn accounted for a high number of absences, perhaps reflecting the demands of the harvest, but also the possibility of workplace accidents or even fraudulent claims of infirmity.

This paper investigates the intersection of the Japanese gramophone industry and Chinese folk storytelling performances during the Second Sino-Japanese War, centering on a 1941 recording project conducted in Japanese-occupied Chōsen. While the project aimed to promote East Asian cultural synthesis in line with Japan’s expansionist agenda, it also captured marginalized local subgenres that had been overlooked even by Chinese companies. The article explores the political motivations behind the project, shaped by the shifting propaganda objectives of the Japanese colonial authorities and their complex interactions with private gramophone companies, Chinese performers, and local audiences. Moving beyond the conventional colonial narrative focused on Japan’s formal colonies, it instead examines Japan’s engagement with the would-be colonized Huabei Plain through a bottom-up lens. The paper argues that cultural production under Japanese imperial expansion was marked by contingency and disorganization, especially in regions not yet formally colonized. Ultimately, this reveals the fractures within Japan’s colonial vision – a result chaotically shaped by the inconsistencies of imperial cultural policy, the disadvantaged position of private gramophone companies under wartime constraints, the ambiguous collaboration of Chinese performers, and the resilience of local cultural connoisseurship.

The erection of the Berlin Wall in November 1961 gave the separation between the West and the Eastern Bloc, and particularly between the two Germanies, an enduring symbol. It also concretized the division of the Berlin Phonogram Archive, which had been separated by the Second World War, in a seemingly unsurmountable way. But while the wall made cross-border academic collaborations considerably more difficult, it did not prevent them entirely. This article relies on previously unexplored primary sources to relate and contextualize the extraordinary story of how two ethnomusicologists were able to bring together a large part of the cylinder collections of the Berlin Phonogram Archive, even as the geopolitical situation surrounding them grew ever more tense. From 1966 to 1967, Kurt Reinhard, then head of the Berlin Phonogram Archive and the Ethnomusicology Department of the Ethnological Museum in West Berlin, and Erich Stockmann, an academic employee of the Academy of Sciences in East Berlin and caretaker of the archival recordings returned by the Soviets, succeeded in exchanging and copying over 5,000 cylinder recordings and their documentation despite a litany of political and financial difficulties. Their collaboration illuminates a little-known aspect of the history of this foundational archive, while raising important questions about ethnomusicology’s political history and the roles the Cold War and Second World War played in the discipline’s formation.

This paper examines the life trajectories, social contexts and living conditions of women of uncertain status in post-slavery, colonial-era Tabora, with a focus on those involved in the production and consumption of beer. It thereby searches insights into the aftermath of slavery in this region, particularly for women. It reflects on the persistent social unease surrounding slavery and its aftermath, and on the way it shapes and limits sources, arguing that a focus on post-slavery is nevertheless productive. Set in context, brewers’ life stories provide a vivid illustration of a competitive urban environment, the chances for self-emancipation that it offered, and the concomitant challenges and dangers. They thereby also enable fresh insight into the social history of alcohol and of urban women in colonial Africa. We find evidence of more successful brewing careers than existing studies would predict, but also of very stark vulnerability and persistent quests for safety in family networks. This spread of outcomes highlights the contingent nature of emancipation and the endlessly varied ways in which social constraints and personal motivations combined in individual lives.

In 1911, Italy invaded the region now known as Libya, then part of the Ottoman Empire, as part of a larger Italian colonizing foray into northern Africa. Many scholars have pointed out in recent years how intense the sonic environments of war can be, and the Italo-Turkish War of 1911–12 was no exception. Not only was the war itself full of sound and sonic media such as gramophones and telephones, the narration of the war, including most (in)famously that of Futurist author F.T. Marinetti, focused from the outset on the sonic intensities of the conflict. In addition, the war became a site for the cultivation of sonic media: Guglielmo Marconi not only deployed his radio technology for the Italian cause, he personally travelled to Libya to test and refine radio in the unique geographies there. In this article, I consider these Italian-centric narratives of war alongside accounts of the sonic experiences of the Arab and Ottoman Turkish forces in their resistance to the Italian occupation, considering the sonic techniques deployed both for and against Italian colonialism. I focus on three particular sonic techniques of that resistance: first, ‘counterlistening’, or ways of listening that subvert empire’s auralities; second, ululation (mostly by women) on the battlefield and beyond; and third, jihad, especially its sonic articulations as a set of declarations, battle cries, religious chanting, and even poetry. For both sides, sound played a much greater role in the war than just being a by-product of activity; these sonic techniques both shaped the war and were shaped by it, producing new forms of sonic experience that played important roles in constituting the colonial and anticolonial in Libya.

Eighteenth-century Stockholm saw a rise in illegitimate births. Yet, premarital sex was illegal, and the early modern household offered few private spaces. Where did unmarried people meet for courtship, intimacy and sex in the early modern city? In this article, we explore the spaces used for illicit sex through a database containing baptismal records of illegitimate children in eighteenth-century Stockholm. We use these records to map the locations where and approximate times when mothers stated their children were conceived. We find that shared households and workplaces were the most common meeting places for couples, that sexual activity took place towards the city centre and not on its outskirts and that urban households in the eighteenth century appear to have been characterized by a porousness and openness that allowed for the creation of pockets of privacy. Lastly, we find little evidence for any organized sex trade in the sources.