The filling of the lagoons and creeks that framed the city and island of Lagos changed the relationship between people, power, land and the water at the turn of the nineteenth century. As elites in the city negotiated power with British colonial administrators, ordinary Lagosians pushed back against the measures that threatened to displace them and rewrite cultural space through the demands and logics of ‘slum clearance’ and anti-malarial campaigns. This article examines how these struggles over water, land and urban space were the catalysts for cultural change.

This survey argues that urban historians should be engaging with the climate crisis as a driver of urgent research and the environmental humanities as a vibrant and growing gathering of different disciplines and approaches. This will enable urban historians to help address the most pressing issues of the twenty-first century. The survey identifies three areas in which urban-environmental historians might go further than existing work in the field: ambitious thinking; radical critique; and engagement with play or experimentation. Each of these is explored through existing scholarship, with reflections on the implications for the practice of urban history.

The steam-driven transport revolution of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries dramatically altered the geography of globalization, fuelling rapid urbanization at an unprecedented scale in port cities across the globe. Whereas global historians have primarily studied port cities because of their function in globe-spanning networks, this special issue explores the intersection of global and urban history from a socio-environmental perspective. Crucially, the contributions to this issue underline that the creation of port cities, and their social histories, must be understood in relation to local landscapes, both built and natural, and their transformations over time.

Excrements are slippery objects of historical inquiry. They are seldom nominated, often tiptoed around. Excreta are only apparently trifling matters, yet they bear the traces of events that could not be otherwise observed. They demand consideration of the mundane and seemingly apolitical dimension of everyday life. They show up in archival trickles that, if followed up seriously, point to what political and economic histories may have swiped out of plain view. Excrements in 1859–69 Port Said convey that the Suez Canal Company may not have been at all that concerned or effective in its management of public hygiene in the encampments and towns sprouting along the canal. The Egyptian government was similarly unimpactful, but tried to tackle some of the issues confronting booming towns in Egypt and elsewhere: planning flaws, ‘miasmatic effluvia’, desertic and acquatic dumpsters and a seemingly ever-growing volume of and proximity to trash.

A city must stand on stable ground for it to be a place of residence, sociability and peace. If so, the following is an exploration of how a city came to be in a wetland, with marshy ground, with an overflowing river, with stormy seas and with lowland liable to flooding. A wetland, the key ecology in what follows, was not easily urbanized. Indeed, in the late modern moment, taken in what follows simply as a shorthand to refer to the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, earth was dug, water was channelled, a river estuary was changed, reefs were affected, harbours were built and sea flow appeared to change. Yet, the manipulation of terrain of various kinds did not create a space which was a smooth site of connection and meeting for colonists and colonized. Rather, nature obstructed these fluid experiments of engineering in various ways. Simultaneously, the people who congregated at these sites forged new ways of considering their status in the ‘new imperial’ colony. The colonial reorganization of nature ran parallel with colonial attempts at arranging people; yet, both nature and people did not yield automatically to the hand of this new regime of modelling and segmenting environments in and around the sea and land.

Between the 1770s and the 1870s, there were no fewer than eight attempts to establish colonial footholds along the coasts of Sabah, the northern quarter of Borneo. This article charts the history of these abortive settlements and, in doing so, subverts established narratives of colonialism and urbanization that usually centre on the British North Borneo Company from the 1880s. It argues that these settlements should be regarded as part of a persistent but sporadic struggle to colonize and control the shores of Sabah. Their repeated frustrations and failures reveal the ways in which coastlines imposed constraints on thalassocracies.

Between the mid-seventeenth and the late-eighteenth centuries thousands of enslaved people were brought to the British Isles. Many were enslaved, and they were publicly bought and sold, marked by brands, collars and manacles, and some were sent from Britain into plantation slavery. Slavery did not, hoverer, flourish in Britain. By the time of Somerset v Stewart (1772) and Knight v Wedderburn (1778) the large majority of people of color in Britain were free, many of them self-liberated. Despite the best efforts of enslavers to maintain their property rights in people, the enslaved regularly escaped. Newspaper “runaway advertisements” were invented in London during the second half of the seventeenth century, and between the 1650s and 1770s they reveal the development of the freedom seeker in the public sphere. The Somerset and Knight decisions did little to change slavery in the British Isles but rather confirmed a change that was all but complete. The most significant impact of the decisions was in the colonies, where planters interpreted the courts’ actions as evidence of a growing imperial threat to the institution of slavery

Batteries are identified as a key product value chain, not only for the transition to climate neutrality but also for the European Union’s (EU) transition towards a circular economy (CE). Therefore, the EU has the ambition to create an ecosystem for sustainable batteries that follows a CE approach. As part of this effort, the EU has reviewed and revised the legislation governing the life cycle of batteries: EU chemicals, product and waste legislation. A recent example is the adoption of the Batteries Regulation, which is the first comprehensive legal framework focusing on the entire life cycle of a specific product. The Regulation removes many barriers and introduces incentives to support the transition towards a more circular battery value chain, as identified in this article through both literature and stakeholder interviews in the Netherlands. Compared to the Batteries Directive, the Batteries Regulation appears to better align with and contribute more effectively to CE objectives. Yet, this article also identifies some remaining challenges and suggestions for improvement. Close attention should be paid to the implementation of the Batteries Regulation and its encouragement of higher value retention strategies, as well as to the interaction within the legal framework on batteries as a whole to prevent adverse effects and to exploit synergies in pursuance of CE objectives.

How do people form durable cognitive and affective bonds to state territories? How do these place attachments become rigid? I argue that territorial attachments rest on what social epistemologists call structural ignorance — background knowledge and cognitive mechanisms that filter out discomforting narratives to preserve a dominant view. As the state structures ignorance and as people reproduce it, certain knowledges — the nation’s artificialness and the past presence/ongoing oppression of non-core groups inhabiting the state’s territory — cannot be known, lest people’s cognitive environment and sense of self be disrupted. As structured ignorance becomes entrenched, territorial attachments rigidify. I shed light on the territorializing practices-structured ignorance-rigid attachments mechanism through the case of Azerbaijan and Nagorno-Karabakh. Through discourse analysis and practice tracing, I find that as the Azerbaijani state structured ignorance during the Soviet era about the symbolic significance of Nagorno-Karabakh and the erasure of ethnic Armenians, territorial attachments grew. I then show how the 1988–1994 war over Nagorno-Karabakh and practices leading to the 2020 War entrenched the structure and rigidified attachments. Uncovering the structure of ignorance and the attachments it prescribes reveals new ramifications of nation-building and one of the facets of intractable conflicts.

In the newly fluid territory between jazz, rock, performance art, and the avant-garde in the late 1960s, members of the Groupe de recherches musicales (GRM) in Paris initiated experiments in improvised electronic music. This article focuses on two iterations of a group centred on Alain Savouret, Pierre Boeswillwald, and Christian Clozier, who were either students on the GRM’s 1968 course at the Paris Conservatoire or researchers at the GRM. The article follows the group’s development from a practice of ‘live musique concrète’ with hand-built electroacoustic devices, tape effects, and synthesizers to a pluralist improvisation that engaged collaborators from free jazz and European and non-European folk traditions. This history results in two lines of argument: the first concerns the relationship between new electronic instruments and new modes of performance around 1970, while the second concerns the promise of electronic music as the site of a cross-cultural fusion of genres and traditions.

We present research from Visual World eye tracking to show that, contrary standard assumptions in the formal semantics literature, the English past tense does not reliably trigger entailments of completion on accomplishments in neutral contexts. We contrast it with the perfect construction in English (both present and past tense versions) which does reliably draw attention to the result state; furthermore, we tested the simple past in more narrative contexts (using adverbial clauses to create a narrative sequence) and found that this did not induce a stronger resultative interpretation. We discuss the formal proposals for analysis of these tense/aspect forms in the language, and the consequences this new data has for theories of the tense/aspect system of English.

This article compares paid parental leave policies across nineteen Latin American jurisdictions, examining their effectiveness in promoting equality in caregiving. Despite notable expansions in social protection, and constitutional recognition of shared parental responsibilities in countries like Ecuador and Mexico, the region has not kept pace with global trends towards equitable leave entitlements. While most countries offer paid maternity leave, paternity leave remains minimal or symbolic, with two nations – Cuba and Honduras – offering none. A persistent gender imbalance remains in leave allocation, where fathers’ entitlements are often secondary or tokenistic. Drawing on a new dataset as of January 2025, the article evaluates how current policies support or hinder the equal sharing of childcare responsibilities while emphasising the importance of legal reform to drive social change. By centring fatherhood in policy discourse, the article calls for more inclusive and equitable reforms to ensure that all parents can participate meaningfully in childcare.

This article examines the ways in which sexual and reproductive health themes appear in the Birmingham Black Oral History Project. As a community Black oral history project, it did not set out to collect memories of sexual or reproductive health. Despite that, the collection offers rich insights into the underexplored place of sexual and reproductive health within Black British histories. The article argues that archived oral history interviews should be “reused” as part of that historiographical exploration. It analyses the ways in which dominant interest in questions of “illegitimacy”—interest that had colonial roots—led to memories of sex education, courtship, and access to abortion in mid-twentieth-century Jamaica. Through a case study analysis of one interviewee—Carlton Duncan, father to the first “Black test tube twins”—the article concludes by arguing that being attentive to interviewee composure makes more visible the availability of narratives and cultural discourses through which interviewees could narrate or shape their sexual and reproductive health histories. As a whole, the article offers a new lens on postcolonial British history by analyzing the racist stereotyping that endured across the postwar period, especially in relation to Black sexuality and fertility.