New global histories of punishment are steadily decentring the history of punishment and convict labour, challenging traditional conceptions of a linear path towards a single penal modernity and the penitentiary as the telos of its history. Through an exploration of three strands of extramural convict labour emerging in Copenhagen (1558), Ulm (1561), and Almadén (1566), this interpretative essay argues that this challenge can be furthered by taking a view of Europe's own penal history from which the focus is less on origins and more on how the landscape of punishment evolved through a continuous and largely contingent process of assemblage. In this process, a few key elements – labour, displacement, pain, and confinement – were combined and mixed to different effects in specific contexts. Along with that approach comes the need to historicize the process by relating it to other practices of labour coercion, both within the penal field and outside it.

This study draws on ethnographic and archival evidence from the Italian Archipelago of La Maddalena, offshore from the northeastern corner of Sardinia, where in 1972 the U.S. Navy installed a base for nuclear submarines. It addresses two questions: (1) How do non-experts make sense of radiological risk absent knowledge and classified information about its instantiations and consequences? (2) How do objectifications of risk change and stabilize within the same community over time? STS scholarship has emphasized the epistemic and relational dimensions of lay/expert controversies over risk assessment. Many case studies, mostly focused on the Anglo-Saxon world, have assumed lay and expert ways of knowing are incompatible due to clashing cultural identities. I use Keane's concept of “semiotic ideologies” and Peircean semiotic theory to critically reassess the validity of that assumption and examine the role of material evidence in processes of signification to explain how experts and non-experts fix, challenge, and negotiate the meanings of radiological risk in sociotechnical controversies. I critically review empirical studies and analyze ethnographic and archival data to advance a set of methodological and substantive arguments: meanings of risk change as new signs become available for interpretation; and meanings of risk are semiotically regimented: their emergence or silencing depend upon the power relations in place in a given community and organizational efforts to assemble coherent technopolitical arguments. I call this set of organizational practices “politics of coherence.”

This article examines the sedentarization of transhumants in northern Greece within the context of the political, legal, social, and economic transformation of the region that occurred throughout the nineteenth century. Based on a wide range of primary sources, this research conducts a chronological survey of the local actors, events, and institutions with reference to a broader political and economic context. It emphasizes that, in the first half of the century, a provincial-elite regime and imperial policies did not create substantial change in transhumance. In the 1860s, however, economic transformations at both imperial and global levels did accelerate change in the region's land and labour regimes. In response, regional landholders began to institute sedentarization, adopting various legal and economic means based on strategies including negotiation, persuasion, and compulsion.

This article examines the concept of the “true hunter” (vrai chasseur) among big game hunters in French colonial Indochina. Drawing primarily on French language texts published by highly experienced European hunters between 1910 and 1950, it first examines in detail the true hunter ethic, which required hunters to hunt and kill their prey in a “sporting” (sportif) manner. This ethic involved adherence to an expansive and complicated set of rules related to stalking, marksmanship, knowledge possession, restraint, prey selection, choice of firearms and ammunition, and others. True hunting was regarded as by definition difficult and, as is argued, the practical realization of the true hunter ideal entailed not simply engaging in hunting as an activity, but instead successfully performing a very difficult but specific type of killing. The article's second purpose is to engage a paradox associated with the texts, their authors, and the ethic. While critical of other hunters for “unnecessary slaughter,” many killed staggering numbers of animals. This paradox is accounted for by placing the true hunters in the broader social context of colonial Indochina. Both their type of sport hunting and the virtuosity of their killing distinguished them from the indigenous populations that served their hunts and other European hunters. This virtuosity also legitimized the scale of their killing and placed these hunters into a distinctive social and moral community.

This article examines revolutionary discourses of national historical transformation in Bolivia and tracks the ways those discourses are appropriated, contested, and recast by farmers in the rural agricultural province of Ayopaya. During fieldwork carried out with Quechua-speaking farmers in Ayopaya between 2011 and 2012, I learned about people's enduring concerns with a recent hacienda past. Against governmental declarations that Bolivia's colonial past was dead or had passed, farmers meditated on the duration of earlier histories of colonial land dispossession and violations of indigenous sovereignty. Talk about the region's oppressive history here allowed people to assess deficient state aid and resources but also to oppose unwelcome state interventions pushing a legal model of bounded collectivity. I trace the ways that farmers and villagers mobilized the hacienda past to address inequitable land tenure, violated sovereignty, and women's marginalization from political life, and thereby raise new questions about the critical possibilities opened up by the re-politicization of this colonial history. Rural support for Bolivia's Movement Toward Socialism party government eroded nearly a decade ago, and this complicates both triumphalist and defeatist accounts of President Evo Morales’ 2019 resignation, which tend to paint Morales’ rural indigenous supporters as innocent and naïve.

Starting with the author's own experience of ghostliness in the archive, the article explores the political meaning of the postwar Volkswagen in West Germany as embodiment of the country's “economic miracle.” The investigation follows the uncanny in texts and images about the Volkswagen between 1945 and 1960 and argues that the car carried with it a “public secret” as a “debris” from the Nazi empire that silently transcended the 1945 divide. This reading of the Volkswagen as well as the methodological path toward it highlight a phenomenon that postcolonial scholars have described as “haunting”: a confusion about the relationship between past and present that also bears on those who study the past. Taking this analysis as an encouragement to revisit the powerful myths and “miracles” of postwar consumer cultures in the West from a new angle, the article calls for historical genealogies of these myths that conceive of the postwar West as a—not yet—postcolonial space and that cross the 1945 threshold.

The role played by Christianity and Christian churches in the demonization of the Jews by the German National Socialist and Italian Fascist regimes remains a subject of intense controversy. The historiography at the base of this debate has been largely rooted in research on either Germany or Italy, yet comparative empirical study is particularly well-suited to allow broader generalizations. Such work is especially valuable given the very different relationships the two regimes maintained with the churches. This article identifies similarities and differences in the Nazi and Italian Fascist uses of Christianity in their efforts to turn their populations against the Jews through examination of two of their most influential popular anti-Semitic propaganda vehicles: La difesa della razza in Italy and Der Stürmer in Germany. Both mixed pseudoscientific racial theories with arguments based on Christian religious authority, and both presented themselves as defenders of Christianity against the Jewish threat. Yet while the Italian publication, reflecting the Fascist regime's close relationship with the Roman Catholic Church, took care to present itself as in harmony with the Church, the German publication adopted a much more critical attitude toward contemporary German churches and churchmen, casting them as having strayed from the true teachings of Jesus.