This article examines cross-border inheritance transfers between the United States, Germany, and Russia between the 1840s and the late 1980s. These transfers were not only characterized by private considerations and kinship networks but were also strongly intertwined with national and international political developments. This article argues that the history of transnational inheritance transfers since the 19th century can be subdivided into three distinct periods. The first period, from the mid-19th century to 1914, witnessed the gradual development and expansion of professional networks and legal agreements designed to facilitate cross-border estate transfers. By contrast, the second period, from World War I and the October Revolution of 1917 through the late 1960s, was a time of unprecedented global disruption. Unlike the half-century before World War I, governments and probate courts complicated, delayed, and prevented inheritance transfers across state borders due to military and ideological conflicts. During the third period, beginning in the 1960s, governments, international organizations, lawyers, and families resumed efforts to create structures that would legally protect and enable cross-border estate transfers in an increasingly globalized world.

By examining a protracted instance of workers’ militant action in the city of Kanpur in the 1930s, the article will examine the significance of the neighbourhood in workers’ lives and its interplay with urban politics that often led to public order crises for the government. It will argue that such crises revealed shortcomings in colonial urban governance and will show that urban proximity accentuated precarity and brought a diverse set of workers together to agitate for their rights and stake claims to political power in the city.

Languages in contact commonly leave an imprint on one other. The most straightforward of these imprints to identify is MAT-borrowing, which results in clearly identifiable lexical items of one language (the donor language) being used in utterances of another language (the recipient language). This stands in contrast with PAT-borrowing, which does not involve any such incorporation of “other language” material but rather results in the reshaping of existing structures of the recipient language on the model of the donor language. This type of language change is therefore arguably more “invisible” to speakers since no easily identifiable “other language” material is present.

This study presents a detailed examination of PAT-borrowing in Guernésiais, the Norman variety spoken in Guernsey (British Channel Islands), which is now at an advanced state of language shift. It also highlights a major difference between MAT- and PAT-borrowing, namely that, whereas MAT-borrowing can only be explained with reference to the dominant language, PAT-borrowing can on occasion admit an internal explanation.

This epilogue considers the approach and conception of this collection, highlighting key analytical strands in the essays while also suggesting possible avenues of further research. It spotlights the global nature of their analysis, which offers one structural framework – individual scientific personas and the often transnational networks which they inhabit – as a possible avenue to imagine a so-called global Space Age. The epilogue also investigates possible frames for further analyses, particularly regarding gender and translation. Men dominate the pantheon of space personas, which, I argue, is a function of the way popular discourses about space travel are still dominated not only by patriarchal and often misogynistic tropes, but also by how we define ‘technology’ itself as essentially a male domain of activity. More broadly, we need further investigation of multiple and gendered erasures involved in the creation of male space personas. Similarly, the kinds of tools, work and strategies the space personas deployed to translate their visions across different social, discursive, cultural and temporal domains require attention. In particular, one can imagine that the afterlife of these personas will be susceptible to change and alteration as their messages, reputations, and principal attachments are continually reshaped by historical change, popular culture, and academic currents.

Utilizing data on household consumption expenditure patterns and sectorial greenhouse gas emissions, we study the extent of inequality over Turkish households’ differentiated carbon footprint incidences. We harmonize the household budget survey data of the Turkish Statistical Institute (TURKSTAT) with production-based gas emissions data from EXIOBASE3 and investigate both the direct and indirect emissions across household-level income strata. Our calculations reveal that the households in the highest income decile alone are responsible for 19.4 percent of the overall (direct and indirect) emissions, whereas the bottom 10 percent of households are responsible for 4.3 percent. We also find that for direct emissions, the per-household average of the highest income decile exceeds that of the lowest income decile by a factor of 11.2. Notably, 87 percent of the indirect emissions budget for the poorest decile is linked to food and housing expenses, underscoring their susceptibility to climate policies. We confer that in designing the net-zero emission pathways to combat climate change, it would not suffice to study the technological transition of decarbonization solely and that the successful implementation of an indigenous environmental policy will ultimately depend upon the socio-economic factors of income distribution strata, indicators of consumption demand, and responsiveness of the individual households to react to price signals.

Credibility and intent are important but imprecise legal categories that need to be assessed in criminal trials as neither common nor civil legal systems provide decision-makers with clear rules on how to evaluate them in practice. In this article, drawing on ethnographic data from trials and deliberations in Italian courts and prosecution offices, we discuss the emotive-cognitive dynamics at play in judges’ and prosecutors’ evaluations of credibility and intent, focusing on cases of murder, intimate partner violence and rape. Using sociological concepts of epistemic emotions, empathy, frame and legal encoding, we show that legal professionals use different reflexive practices to either avoid settling on feelings of certainty or overcome doubts when evaluating credibility and intent. Empathy emerges as a multifaceted tool that can either generate certainty or be used deliberately to instigate or overcome doubts. We contribute to the growing body of literature addressing the emotional dynamics of legal decision-making.

Now mostly derided as a musical vandal, the cellist Friedrich Grützmacher (1832–1903) was seen during his lifetime as a noble and serious artist, highly respected as a performer and sought-after as a teacher. His numerous and heavily annotated performing editions – and in particular his pedagogical editions of older works – represent his attempt to preserve and disseminate a style of playing that was referred to at the time as ‘classical’ (classisch or klassisch). While the concept of classic works, as it developed in the nineteenth century, has been studied in depth by Lydia Goehr, William Weber and others, the related yet distinct concept of classical musicianship is relatively unexplored. This chapter traces the cultural resonances of the term ‘classisch’ as it was used in the German-speaking press over the course of Grützmacher’s lifetime, arguing that it represents a complement or parallel to the idea of classic works, with an independent connection to Romantic Idealism and Hellenism. The chapter then examines the performance practice implications of classical musicianship through the lens of Grützmacher’s editions, with a particular focus on a disciplined sense of tempo, a grand and tranquil physical presence, and a highly nuanced use of the bow in the service of musical character. Viewing classical musicianship in this way clears Grützmacher’s editions of the charge of vandalism by challenging us to reconsider the ideal relationship between composer and performer, as well as the fundamental purpose of an edition.

The history of the laws of war is an increasingly popular research field of international law. Claire Vergerio’s book War, States, and International Order: Alberico Gentili and the Foundational Myth of the Laws of War is a good-read in this regard. It provides a critical analysis of how 19th-century international lawyers misread and reinterpreted the writings of the 16th-century Italian jurist Alberico Gentili to establish the modern sovereign state as the sole legitimate subject of the laws of war. In this review essay, I offer a critical reading of War, States and International Order, positioning its intervention in the context of broader scholarly debates.

This article examines the development of colonial public culture in Batavia, the capital of the Dutch East Indies, over the second half of the nineteenth century, focusing on two moments of extended colonial ceremony: the city’s 250th anniversary in 1869 and the inauguration of Queen Wilhelmina in 1898. The analysis shows that over the course of the century, colonial ceremonial increasingly sought to assimilate facets of local cultural practices, while also expanding spatially into a more diverse set of neighbourhoods. Nevertheless, this new and superficially more representative order still maintained a strict internal hierarchy embedded in spatial and socio-cultural boundaries.

This article explores the social history of Sandakan and Jesselton (Kota Kinabalu) by studying how their urban environments were organized and navigated. Although the neighbourhood was not officially recognized as a category of space, it argues that analogous quarters existed within the towns during the early twentieth century. As the commercial capitals of British North Borneo, the towns contained migrant people of various ethnicities that formed separate communities. The socio-spatial boundaries of these quarters were nevertheless permeable, enabling cross-communal interactions. Life in Sandakan and Jesselton was characterized by a contingency and complexity suitable for comparison with larger colonial cities.

This essay takes as its point of departure the so-called ‘Verdi A’, 432Hz. From the late 1860s through to the 1880s, the opera composer was intensely preoccupied with the question of tuning, weighing in several times on the matter of where A should sit. Verdi was concerned for the strain that high tunings should place on singers’ voices. He advocated on multiple occasions for global acceptance of an A well below 440, and sent Arrigo Boito to argue in favour of A=432 at the Congresso dei Musicisti Italiani, held in Milan on 16–21 June 1881. In the 1880s, Italy remained one of the only nations in Europe that had not adopted equal temperament wholesale for fixed-tone instruments; as in the case of its spoken languages during this same period, and the locations of its A, temperament varied by region, with the southern part of the peninsula clinging to meantones. This article argues that ‘Verdi tuning’ represents the end point of a number of longer shifts in the conceptualization of musical sound, particularly in the Italian context: from temperament to tuning (accordatura); from relative conceptions of musical pitch to an absolute one; from local and regional variations towards a standardized system; from an older notion of all-encompassing nature to a presumed separation between nature and culture. Tracing this history through the Italian long nineteenth century will involve concentrating on what this article calls music-adjacent sound: that is, interrogative play with musical pitch; sound experiments from musical materials and operatic voices; instrument tuning by ear; listening for overtones; legislating preferred ratios and (eventually) frequencies for musical use; and constructing a theory of music that draws together these means of sounding. Music-adjacent sound is where the conditions for music-making were and still are established. This article argues that an attention to these sonic and nearly musical moments can demonstrate how listening and the musical imagination were cultivated outside the boundaries of any work or performance.

In this article, I argue that the musical landscape in Panama during the nineteenth century was much more active, diverse and globally connected than previously observed by authors of traditionally accepted music historiography of the country. Particularly, I discuss the heightened activity in the second half of the century through primary sources concerning violinist Miguel Iturrado (d. 1879). I further argue that the violin culture fostered by Iturrado and his contemporaries became a solid platform for cultural exchange which allowed for the development of early-twentieth-century music production in Panama. I conclude that the flourishing of numerous fin-de-siècle concert violinists, as well as the advent of the violinist-composers of dance music now known as the Azuero School in the first third of twentieth-century Panama, are directly related to Iturrado’s –and his colleagues’– musical and cultural achievements.

This article reappraises the early intellectual formation of the medieval “lex mercatoria” thesis: the idea that the international merchants of medieval Europe (or perhaps beyond) enjoyed a universal, autonomous, and customary body of commercial law created and administered by themselves. The debate over its existence, raging for at least 120 years, shows no signs of slowing, in part because the idea is of undoubted usefulness to both proponents (so-called “mercatorists”) and critics. The article offers a new account of the origins of this idea and looks to disaggregate different mercatorist conceptions. Revising the conventional genealogy that traces the theory through the work of Berthold Goldman to the nineteenth-century German scholar Levin Goldschmidt, who is much misunderstood in Anglophone scholarship, it argues that the idea’s powerful re-emergence in the second half of the twentieth century was mediated through two distinct channels, one centred around the British-German jurist Clive Schmitthoff and the other around the British historian William Mitchell. The latter yoked Goldschmidt’s emphasis on the medieval merchant class as a source of legal innovation to a thoroughly Anglophone concept: the “law merchant”. Critics, however, have engaged primarily with Schmitthoff’s conception, whose “strong” mercatorist argument was not only unusually forthright but reoriented the debate to focus on commercial law’s supposed autonomy from the law of territorial states, an even less plausible proposition in historical terms.