During the period of the Republic of China, a heated debate emerged among Chinese intellectuals concerning whether China should first educate peasants into citizens or help them feed themselves. Some agriculturalists, such as P. W. Tsou, argued that the first essential goal should be to apply technology and increase agricultural production to improve farmers’ lives. In 1945, Tsou proposed the Agricultural Engineering Program for China to the International Harvester Company. This programme provided Harvester Fellowships to sponsor twenty Chinese students to study agricultural engineering in the US. In addition, this programme instituted the Committee on Agricultural Engineering, led by J. Brownlee Davidson, to direct teaching, research, and promulgation of agricultural engineering in China. The talent cultivated through this programme chose to remain in mainland China following the Revolution of 1949. They became the first generation of agricultural engineers in the People’s Republic of China.

The inherent complexity of early medieval rural society is now widely recognised by scholars; this is in no small part thanks to the transformative effect that archaeology has had on our understanding of many aspects of peasant life. Yet it is only in the last twenty years that an archaeology of peasant society of early medieval Christian Iberia has emerged to challenge the supremacy of deeply entrenched historiographical motifs, explored in detail herein, which underplay peasant agency, confine peasants to familiar contextual paradigms (poverty, risk-aversion, resistance), and treat the peasantry as an undifferentiated mass of largely passive ‘recipients’ of History. This article focuses upon a case study – early medieval northern Iberia – to show that, far from an auxiliary discipline used to bolster or reject interpretations founded upon documentary analysis, archaeology now underpins our efforts to understand complex aspects of the society and economy of the early medieval countryside.

This article explores the history of “Islamic Society” (al-Mujtamaʿ al-Islāmī), a concept whose widespread usage is paralleled by shallow understandings of its origins. Scholars of premodern Islamic history often use this term to describe the ideas and practices of Muslim communities under Islamic political rule, while historians of the Muslim Brotherhood highlight this leading Islamist movement’s commitment to forming such a collective yet treat the concept as sui generis. This article, in turn, draws on a wide array of Islamic print media published by leading Islamic movements and state institutions in Egypt between 1898 and 1981 to tell a story of how this concept became intellectually viable and politically meaningful in the context of transition from colonial to postcolonial rule in the mid-twentieth century. Building on histories of religious nationalism which trace how religious nationalist visions produce novel understandings of religious identity rather than replicating prior models, the article explores the ways in which identity is linked to particular projects of religious practice. In doing so, it casts light on how religious nationalist projects seek to structure social life through calls to continuity with the past even as they adopt the core assumptions of the nation-state project. Specifically, it argues that, as Muslim thinkers, activists, and scholars navigated the transition from colonial to postcolonial rule, they turned to this concept to articulate dueling conceptions of religious change through state power and social mobilization alike.

This essay explores the intersecting socio-material and ethical demands that engineers confront in adapting sea defenses to climate change in Guyana. It focuses on the tensions in climate adaptation that create the possibilities for theorizing innovation as a key theme of counter-modernities in the Anthropocene. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, oral histories, and archival research, I show that engineers’ decision-making regarding whether or not to innovate sea defenses is a fraught process dependent upon processes of erosion and the ontological (in)stability of specific infrastructures known as groynes. To cope, engineers produce what I call “innovation narratives” to describe how obstacles to climate adaptation are created by combinations of neocolonial empire, shapeshifting ecologies, inconsistent maintenance programs, and fiscal debt. At the same time, their efforts signal an emerging global politics of credibility that is reinforced by desires for more inclusive forms of governance rather than brute power or capitalization.

This paper draws on archival research to trace the techniques used by scientists and government officials involved with palm oil at the turn of the twentieth century. For them, mundane practices of “carefulness” were paramount as they worked on collecting, identifying, marketing, and improving the oil palm. But they also applied this so-called care to people: care of the oil palm was thought to presuppose care of the “native,” providing a correction for what were seen as “careless” local manners of cultivation. Colonial techniques of care thus sought to encompass both plants and peoples within contemporary liberal rhetorics of efficiency and moral improvement. This embodies how scientific and political care can interlink through their undersides of control, exploitation, and domination, which remain obscured by narratives of care themselves. Examining these links between commodity histories and scientific techniques is therefore essential for understanding environmental and social concerns regarding oil palm plantations today. An awareness of the afterlives of colonial discourses might encourage a more critical “care” in response to these issues today, challenging taken-for-granted notions of the benefits of corporate care.

In the nineteenth century, Qajar Iran was beset by both internal and external threats to its cohesion. In considering Qajar responses to this condition of threat, scholars have largely emphasized the rise of nationalism and a traumatic encounter with Europe. In this article, instead, I use the two Khuzestan travel narratives of royal engineer Najm al-Molk to draw out an alternative thread of reform discourse based on comparisons and connections with the Ottoman Empire. In his safarnamehs, Najm al-Molk joined the style and preoccupations of modern engineering to existing Persianate discourses on rule to elaborate the concept of abadi, a social, political, and material condition encompassing land, people, and state. His advocacy for making Khuzestan abadan was aimed at integrating the region more fully into the Qajar domains. In thinking about what constituted abadi and why it was missing in Khuzestan, the engineer’s major reference point was Ottoman Basra. Traveling around the Basra-Khuzestan borderlands helped Najm al-Molk frame the Ottoman Empire as an example for the Qajar future and a factor in producing the Qajar present. The article both analyzes and follows Najm al-Molk’s use of comparison in order to draw out a broader imperial comparison between late imperial rule in the Ottoman and Qajar lands. I argue that taking seriously Najm al-Molk’s view that the Qajars and Ottomans were comparable can help us use their peripheries to understand late Qajar history outside the national frame of “Iran.”

Influenced by proposals (spanning back to the Kaiser Reich) to hinder the urban-rural divide, Hessian Social Democrats introduced the Hessenplan in 1951 to rebuild the war-torn cities, reconstruct state infrastructure, and integrate displaced persons. A key component of this plan was the establishment of rural community centres, which provided modern amenities and leisure activities, attempted to reduce the hardship of the rural lifestyle through the mechanisation of labour, as well as reinforced democratic principles – all in an attempt to hinder the rural exodus. Branded ‘Castles of Peace’, the rural community centres also represented an environment and a tool for political transformation through democratic re-education. They provided an opportunity to help balance the social, cultural, and economic inequalities between urban and rural communities, were used to prevent further individual anomie, and to instill within the rural populace the importance of becoming responsible citizens in the new democratic age.

This article examines how and why anti-colonial activists in Nyasaland, now Malawi, seized on modernization theory to make their case for national independence in the early 1960s. As far as British officials were concerned, Nyasaland’s small size, large population, and agrarian character meant that it stood little chance of joining the modern, industrialized world. The Malawi Congress Party, however, saw their country differently, as a future “Central African Denmark.” This article argues that Congress’s Danish vision was part of an anti-colonial challenge to the industry-first development strategies that dominated early international development thinking. Congress thinkers, far from rejecting the modernization idea, flipped the framework from industry to agriculture, helping to open new possibilities for small, agrarian territories on the empire’s margins. The article concludes by showing how this agrarian counter-current in development thinking subsequently shaped the international community’s turn to market-friendly, agriculture-centered policies in the 1970s, though in ways that eclipsed the original anti-colonial vision.

Luis Inácio Lula Da Silva, originally a metalworker and trade union activist, was president of Brazil from 2003 to 2010, leading the largest country of Latin America, with more than 212 million people. In 2020, social and labour historian John D. French, with a long career devoted to Brazilian labour history, published the much acclaimed biography Lula and His Politics of Cunning: From Metalworker to President of Brazil.1 In this book, French explicitly aims to give a bottom-up account of Lula's life.