The works presented in this collection take environmental scholarship in South Asia into novel territory by exploring how questions of national identity become entangled with environmental concerns in Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, and India. The essays provide insight into the motivations of colonial and national governments in controlling or managing nature, and bring into fresh perspective the different kinds of regional political conflicts that invoke nationalist sentiment through claims on nature. In doing all this, the volume also offers new ways to think about nationalism and, more specifically, nationalism in South Asia from the vantage point of interdisciplinary environmental studies. The contributors to this innovative volume show that manifestations of nationalism have long and complex histories in South Asia. Terrestrial entities, imagined in terms of dense ecological networks of relationships, have often been the space or reference point for national aspirations, as shared memories of Mother Nature or appropriated economic, political, and religious geographies. In recent times, different groups in South Asia have claimed and appropriated ancient landscapes and territories for the purpose of locating and justifying a specific and utopian version of nation by linking its origin to their nature-mediated attachments to these landscapes. The topics covered include forests, agriculture, marine fisheries, parks, sacred landscapes, property rights, trade, and economic development. Gunnel Cederlof is associate professor of history, Uppsala University, Sweden. K. Sivaramakrishnan is professor of anthropology and international studies and director of the South Asia Center, Jackson School of International Studies, at the University of Washington. The other contributors are Nina Bhatt, Vinita Damodaran, Claude A. Garcia, Urs Geiser, Goetz Hoeppe, Bengt G. Karlsson, Antje Linkenbach, Wolfgang Mey, Kathleen D. Morrison, J. P. Pascal, and Sarah Southwold-Llewellyn.

The works presented in this collection take environmental scholarship in South Asia into novel territory by exploring how questions of national identity become entangled with environmental concerns in Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, and India. The essays provide insight into the motivations of colonial and national governments in controlling or managing nature, and bring into fresh perspective the different kinds of regional political conflicts that invoke nationalist sentiment through claims on nature. In doing all this, the volume also offers new ways to think about nationalism and, more specifically, nationalism in South Asia from the vantage point of interdisciplinary environmental studies. The contributors to this innovative volume show that manifestations of nationalism have long and complex histories in South Asia. Terrestrial entities, imagined in terms of dense ecological networks of relationships, have often been the space or reference point for national aspirations, as shared memories of Mother Nature or appropriated economic, political, and religious geographies. In recent times, different groups in South Asia have claimed and appropriated ancient landscapes and territories for the purpose of locating and justifying a specific and utopian version of nation by linking its origin to their nature-mediated attachments to these landscapes. The topics covered include forests, agriculture, marine fisheries, parks, sacred landscapes, property rights, trade, and economic development. Gunnel Cederlof is associate professor of history, Uppsala University, Sweden. K. Sivaramakrishnan is professor of anthropology and international studies and director of the South Asia Center, Jackson School of International Studies, at the University of Washington. The other contributors are Nina Bhatt, Vinita Damodaran, Claude A. Garcia, Urs Geiser, Goetz Hoeppe, Bengt G. Karlsson, Antje Linkenbach, Wolfgang Mey, Kathleen D. Morrison, J. P. Pascal, and Sarah Southwold-Llewellyn.

Only children, here defined as individuals growing up without siblings, are a small but growing demographic subgroup. Existing research has consistently shown that, on average, only children have higher body mass index (BMI) than individuals who grow up with siblings. How this difference develops with age is unclear and existing evidence is inconclusive regarding the underlying mechanisms. We investigate BMI trajectories for only children and those with siblings up to late adolescence for four British birth cohorts and across adulthood for three cohorts. We use data on BMI from ages 2–63 years (cohort born 1946); 7–55 years (born 1958); 10–46 (born 1970) and 3–17 years (born 2000–2002). Using mixed effects regression separately for each cohort, we estimate the change in BMI by age comparing only children and those with siblings. The results show higher average BMI among only children in each cohort, yet the difference is substantively small and limited to school age and adolescence. The association between sibling status and BMI at age 10/11 is not explained by differential health behaviours (physical activity, inactivity and diet) or individual or family background characteristics in any of the cohorts. Although persistent across cohorts, and despite the underlying mechanism remaining unexplained, the substantively small magnitude of the observed difference and the convergence of the trajectories by early adulthood in all cohorts raises doubts about whether the difference in BMI between only children and siblings in the UK context should be of research or clinical concern. Future research could usefully be directed more at whether only children experience elevated rates of disease, for which high BMI is a risk factor, at different stages of the life course and across contexts.

This article revisits Sahlins’s discussion of Mauss’s Essay on the Gift, with a focus on its contribution to research on the gift and its broader, social and political implications. Sahlins’s reading of the Essay in Stone Age Economics (1972), we submit, richly buttressed Mauss’s attention to the gift’s “total” significance and its “spiritual” dimensions – even as it developed a new interpretation of the famed Maori notion of hau, or “spirit” of the gift. But it also offered a Hobbesian-inflected, rational and utilitarian rendering of the gift as a form of social contract, which elided the more complex and contradictory facets of gift-exchange that were underscored by Mauss in the Essay on the Gift. No less important, it left the reader wonder how precisely to relate between the gift’s spiritual and contractual dimensions. Recent returns by Sahlins to the topic of the gift indicate a persistent interest in the gift’s “spirit”, while confirming, even enhancing tendencies found in his early writings. Highlighting the anti-Hobbesian and anti-utilitarian effects of one modality of the gift – ‘the gift from everyone to everyone’ – in the sphere of kin-like relatedness in particular, they also pose a contrast to the Essay’s more inclusive vision of the gift’s extensions to all parts of social life, including the state. Building upon Mauss and Sahlins, we need pursue the relation between the “spirit” of gift relations and their “contractual” implications as not only a normative and political but also empirical question, equally pertinent across past and present settings.

Under historien har allvarliga epidemier och pandemier varit ett återkommande gissel för mänskligheten. Men när ett nytt coronavirus fick spridning i hela världen i början av 2020 hade det gått över femtio år sedan den senaste all-varliga pandemin, och reaktionen blev närmast panikartad. Katastrofscenarier baserade på fragmentariska data fick många att befara att tiotals miljoner människor skulle dö av viruset. Samhällen stängdes ned, undantagslagar som annars är reserverade för krig togs i bruk. Men viruset fortsatte att sprida sig som en löpeld.

Snart blev det allt tydligare att covid-19 är en betydligt mindre dödlig sjukdom än vad många hade befarat, och att viruset redan var så spritt att det blivit omöjligt att stoppa. I oktober 2020 uppskattade Världshälsoorganisationen att 800 miljoner människor i världen blivit smittade, tjugo gånger fler än antalet bekräftade fall, samtidigt som bara två av tusen smittade verkar avlida i sjukdomen globalt. I ljuset av hur tidigare pandemier upphört kommer spridningen av coronaviruset att ebba ut först efter två till tre år, när runt en tredjedel av världens befolkning blivit smittad och immun.

Historikern och klimatforskaren Fredrik Charpentier Ljungqvist sätter här in coronapandemin i ett historiskt per­spektiv och jämför den med tidigare pandemier, från antiken till modern tid. En utförlig genomgång görs av pandemins förlopp, den vetenskapliga oenigheten om hur farligt viruset är, diskussionen om flockimmunitet och vaccin samt de olika åtgärderna för att hejda smittspridningen.

From the late twelfth century onwards, we observe a gradual shift from a horizontal to a vertical relationship between king and commoners in the kingdoms of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. This gradual transformation contributed to, and partly enabled, the growth of royal power in medieval Scandinavia. As elsewhere in Europe, kingship underwent a fundamental ideological change bringing about new forms of legitimisation of royal power according to which the king functioned as a rex iustus by divine grace. This elevated position placed the king above other members of the secular elite as he was glorified as God’s elected representative on earth. This chapter explores this process by analysing the preserved law material, and placing special emphasis on mutual obligations between king and commoners, considering the extent to which the king was bound by law, individual rights to pursue feuds, royal privileges, and crimes against the Crown. It shows, among other things, how the king was bound by the law in all the three Scandinavian countries up to the thirteenth century when differences started to appear. The kings in Denmark and Sweden were increasingly restricted by specific constitutional provisions, while the kings in Norway became less and less confined by law.

Svåra pandemier och epidemier har varit mänsklighetens ständiga följeslagare. Många är idag bortglömda. Men vilka konsekvenser har de haft för samhället? Historikern Fredrik Charpentier Ljungqvist skissar utvecklingen, och konstaterar att de i regel skyndade på historiska processer som redan var igång.

The association between climate variability and grain harvest yields has been an important component of food security and economy in European history. Yet, inter-regional comparisons of climate–yield relationships have been hampered by locally varying data types and the use of different statistical methods. Using a coherent statistical framework, considering the effects of diverse serial correlations on statistical significance, we assess the temperature and hydroclimate (precipitation and drought) signatures in grain harvest yields across varying environmental settings of early modern (ca. 1500–1800) Europe. An unprecedentedly large network of yield records from northern (Sweden), central (Switzerland), and southern (Spain) Europe are compared with a diverse set of seasonally and annually resolved palaeoclimate reconstructions. Considering the effects of different crop types and time series frequencies, we find within regions consistent climate–harvest yield associations characterized by a significant summer soil moisture signal in Sweden, winter temperature and precipitation signals in Switzerland, and spring and annual mean temperature signals in Spain. The regional-scale climate–harvest associations are weaker than the recently revealed climate signals in early modern grain prices but similar in strength to modern climate–harvest relationships at comparable spatial scales. This is a noteworthy finding considering the uncertainties inherent in both historical harvest and palaeoclimate data.

Rainfall erosivity causes considerable environmental damage by driving soil loss. However, the long-term evolution of erosive forcing (over centennial to millennial time-scales) remains essentially unknown. Using a rainfall erosivity model (REMARB), this study simulates the variability of rainfall erosivity in Arno River Basin (ARB), Italy, a Mediterranean fluvial basin, for the period 1000–2019 CE resulting in the world’s longest time-series of erosivity. The annual estimates show a noticeable and increasing variability of rainfall erosivity during the Little Ice Age (∼1250–1849), especially after c. 1490, until the end of 18th century. During this cold period, erosive forcing reached ∼1600 MJ mm hm−2 h−1 yr−1 once every four years, and ∼3000 MJ mm hm−2 h−1 yr−1 once every 20 years. The extremes of rainfall erosivity (the 98th percentile) followed a similar increasing trend, with an acceleration of the hydrological hazard (erosivity per unit of rainfall) during the 20th century. The comparison of REMARB output with the sediment yield of the basin (1951–2010) confirmed the model’s ability to predict geomorphological effects in the ARB. Thus, our methodology could be applied to simulate erosivity in environmentally similar basins. A relationship has been identified between the Atlantic Multidecadal Variation and erosivity patterns, suggesting a role of North Atlantic circulation dynamics on the hydrology of central Italy’s fluvial basins.

In this article, we assess the scholarship of climate history in the former Swedish Realm (roughly, present-day Sweden, Finland, and Estonia) during the early modern period. The research has primarily focused on impacts of climate change and variability on human history, but also on producing documentary-based reconstructions of past climate. Recent advances in palaeo-climatology, in particular dendroclimatology, during the past two to three decades has made the study of the impacts of climate in early modern history possible. However, while the field of climate history has developed substantially in much of Europe, it remains rather underdeveloped and has drawn limited interest in the Nordic countries. Besides some recent studies for Finland, the climate history of the former Swedish Realm is not reaching the standards of the field in contemporary European scholarship. Existing scholarship has nevertheless demonstrated the link between cold springs and summers and poor harvests, particular in Finland, but few studies have assessed the effects of climate on society besides for periods of severe food shortage or famines. The article concludes with outlines and reflections for future scholarship in climate history of the early modern Swedish Realm.

he article evaluates recent scholarship on famines in Europe during the medieval and early modern periods (c. 700–1800), synthesizing the state-of-the-art knowledge and identifying both research gaps and interdisciplinary potentials. Particular focus is placed on how, and to what extent, climatic change and variability is given explanatory power in famine causation. Current research, supported by recent advances in palaeoclimatology, reveals that anomalous cold conditions constituted the main environmental backdrop for severe food production crises that could result in famines in pre-industrial Europe. Such food crises occurred most frequently between c. 1550 and 1710, during the climax of the Little Ice Age cooling, and can be connected to the strong dependency on grain in Europe during this period. The available body of scholarship demonstrates that famines in medieval and early modern Europe best can be understood as the result of the interactions of climatic and societal stressors responding to pre-existing vulnerabilities. Recent research has shown that societal responses to these famines, and the appropriation of their consequences, have been much more comprehensive, dynamic, and substantial than previously assumed. The article concludes by providing recommendations for future studies on historical famines.

Although variations in building activity are a useful indicator of societal well-being and demographic development, historical datasets for larger regions and longer periods are still rare. Here, we present 54,045 annually precise dendrochronological felling dates from historical construction timber from across most of Europe between 1250 and 1699 CE to infer variations in building activity. We use geostatistical techniques to compare spatiotemporal dynamics in past European building activity against independent demographic, economic, social and climatic data. We show that the felling dates capture major geographical patterns of demographic trends, especially in regions with dense data coverage. A particularly strong negative association is found between grain prices and the number of felling dates. In addition, a significant positive association is found between the number of felling dates and mining activity. These strong associations, with well-known macro-economic indicators from pre-industrial Europe, corroborate the use of felling dates as an independent source for exploring large-scale fluctuations of societal well-being and demographic development. Three prominent examples are the building boom in the Hanseatic League region of northeastern Germany during the 13th century, the onset of the Late Medieval Crisis in much of Europe c. 1300, and the cessation of building activity in large parts of central Europe during armed conflicts such as the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648 CE). Despite new insights gained from our European-wide felling date inventory, further studies are needed to investigate changes in construction activity of high versus low status buildings, and of urban versus rural buildings, and to compare those results with a variety of historical documentary sources and natural proxy archives.

Grain was the most important food source in early modern Europe (c. 1500–1800), and its price influenced the entire economy. The extent to which climate variability determined grain price variations remains contested, and claims of solar cycle influences on prices are disputed. We thoroughly reassess these questions, within a framework of comprehensive statistical analysis, by employing an unprecedentedly large grain price data set together with state-of-the-art palaeoclimate reconstructions and long meteorological series. A highly significant negative grain price–temperature relationship (i.e. colder = high prices and vice versa) is found across Europe. This association increases at larger spatial and temporal scales and reaches a correlation of −0.41−0.41 considering the European grain price average and previous year June–August temperatures at annual resolution, and of −0.63−0.63 at decadal timescales. This strong relationship is of episodic rather than periodic (cyclic) nature. Only weak and spatially inconsistent signals of hydroclimate (precipitation and drought), and no meaningful association with solar variations, are detected in the grain prices. The significant and persistent temperature effects on grain prices imply that this now rapidly changing climate element has been a more important factor in European economic history, even in southern Europe, than commonly acknowledged.

Background

Understanding of the impacts of climatic variability on human health remains poor despite a possibly increasing burden of vector-borne diseases under global warming. Numerous socioeconomic variables make such studies challenging during the modern period while studies of climate–disease relationships in historical times are constrained by a lack of long datasets. Previous studies have identified the occurrence of malaria vectors, and their dependence on climate variables, during historical times in northern Europe. Yet, malaria in Sweden in relation to climate variables is understudied and relationships have never been rigorously statistically established. This study seeks to examine the relationship between malaria and climate fluctuations, and to characterise the spatio-temporal variations at parish level during severe malaria years in Sweden 1749–1859.

Methods

Symptom-based annual malaria case/death data were obtained from nationwide parish records and military hospital records in Stockholm. Pearson (r_p) and Spearman’s rank (r_s) correlation analyses were conducted to evaluate inter-annual relationship between malaria data and long meteorological series. The climate response to larger malaria events was further explored by Superposed Epoch Analysis, and through Geographic Information Systems analysis to map spatial variations of malaria deaths.

Results

The number of malaria deaths showed the most significant positive relationship with warm-season temperature of the preceding year. The strongest correlation was found between malaria deaths and the mean temperature of the preceding June–August (r_s = 0.57, p < 0.01) during the 1756–1820 period. Only non-linear patterns can be found in response to precipitation variations. Most malaria hot-spots, during severe malaria years, concentrated in areas around big inland lakes and southern-most Sweden.

Conclusions

Unusually warm and/or dry summers appear to have contributed to malaria epidemics due to both indoor winter transmission and the evidenced long incubation and relapse time of P. vivax, but the results also highlight the difficulties in modelling climate–malaria associations. The inter-annual spatial variation of malaria hot-spots further shows that malaria outbreaks were more pronounced in the southern-most region of Sweden in the first half of the nineteenth century compared to the second half of the eighteenth century.

This paper uses Martin Luther and Mao Zedong’s translation strategies to philosophize anew the dialectic between the national and the global in the history of revolutions. Luther and Mao each instigated a "revolution" by translating a universal faith into a vernacular; the end product in each case was the globalization of his vernacularized faith and the export of his local revolution all over the world.By vernacularizing a universal faith, Luther and Mao respectively inaugurated a new national idiom, a new national identity and, in the case of Mao, founded a new nation. The far more intriguing phenomenon which I identify – and on which I seek to make my most original contributions is: Protestantism and Maoism developed global reach not despite, but because of, their insistence on a local translation-articulation of a universalist ideology.My paper attends to both the similarities and differences between Luther and Mao.

Evidence of interbreeding between archaic hominins and humans comes from methods thatinfer the locations of segments of archaic haplotypes, or ‘archaic coverage’ using thegenomes of people living today. As more estimates of archaic coverage have emerged, ithas become clear that most of this coverage is found on the autosomes— very little isretained on chromosome X. Here, we summarize published estimates of archaic coverageon autosomes and chromosome X from extant human samples. We find on average 7 timesmore archaic coverage on autosomes than chromosome X, and identify broad continentalpatterns in this ratio: greatest in European samples, and least in South Asian samples. Wealso perform extensive simulation studies to investigate how the amount of archaic cover-age, lengths of coverage, and rates of purging of archaic coverage are affected by sex-biascaused by an unequal sex ratio within the archaic introgressors. Our results generally con-firm that, with increasing male sex-bias, less archaic coverage is retained on chromosomeX. Ours is the first study to explicitly model such sex-bias and its potential role in creating thedearth of archaic coverage on chromosome X.

"A groundbreaking work that retells modern history through the rise and spread of written constitutions-some enlightened, many oppressive-to every corner of the globe. Filling a crucial void in our understanding of world history, Linda Colley reconfigures the rise of the modern world over three centuries through the advent of written constitutions. Her absorbing work challenges accepted narratives, focusing on rulers like Catherine the Great, who wrote her enlightened Nakaz years before the French Revolution; African visionaries like Sierra Leone’s James Africanus Beale Horton; and Tunisias’s soldier-constitutionalist Khayr-al-Din, who championed constitutional reform in the Muslim world. Demonstrating how constitutions repeatedly evolved in tandem with warfare, and how they were used to free, but also exclude, people (especially women and indigenous populations), this handsomely illustrated history-with its pageant of powerful monarchs, visionary lawmakers, and insurrectionist rebels-evokes The Silk Roads in its range and ambition. Whether reinterpreting the lasting influence of Japan’s 1889 Meiji constitution or exploring the first constitution to enfranchise women in tiny Pitcairn Island in 1838, this book is one of the most original and absorbing histories in decades"–