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In the mid-1970s, no Western leader on an official visit to a Soviet Bloc country wasted any thoughts on whether or not to meet a dissident, even in countries where dissidents actually existed. By the late 1980s, such encounters had become part of an almost obligatory ritual. This remarkably swift and dramatic transformation was both preceded and accompanied by a similar change in the relationship between diplomats and dissidents. All of this happened despite considerable resistance on the part of the regimes in the host countries, which sometimes resorted to retaliatory measures, including expulsions. This article examines the role played by the United Kingdom in this normative and practical change. It identifies the different layers of relationships between the British government and Soviet Bloc dissidents, distinguishing between ‘para-contacts’, political contacts, and diplomatic contacts. It shows how political and diplomatic face-to-face contacts with the dissidents increased in frequency and scope during the 1980s, and how ministers’ and diplomats’ contacts furthered each other. Finally, it discusses possible explanations for this change.

Abstract This is the Introduction to the Special Issue on the Economic History of the Arts. It argues that economic history is well suited to study the arts. It also posits that the value of the discipline lies, among others, in its interdisciplinarity and the possibility to study creativity in history. Finally, attempts are made to coin the name of this field of research and some thoughts are shared on the way forward.

Historians have long studied how statistical offices and parliamentary bodies made use of surveys to explore the lives of workers, and, in so doing, how they produced new social categories and strategies for political intervention in the process. Less attention has been paid to the role that surveys played in the history of the early labour movement. Drawing on extensive discussions in socialist and trade-union periodicals, this article explores how the labour movement in the German Empire perceived, responded to, and used social surveys. The article is divided into three parts. The first part discusses labour’s critical response to the growing number of surveys on working-class life by middle-class reformers, social researchers, and the state. The second part studies what appeared to be the only logical consequence of their critique, namely the independent gathering and analysis of data. The third part finally analyses why, despite the large number of independent surveys launched by party functionaries and local trade unions, participation among ordinary workers remained strikingly low. In the conclusion, the article shows that this might have stemmed not only from disinterest and inertia but also from how the labour leadership conceived of and presented the benefits of social surveys.

Developed in the context of the Horizon 2020 project SPICE, this paper explores methods and tools for citizen curation, with a focus on designing activities that can effectively elicit and motivate citizens to produce meaningful interpretations and reflections on cultural heritage. Additionally, the paper aims to evaluate the potential of such methods and activities in supporting the analysis and reflection processes within the SPICE Interpretation-Reflection loop (IRL). We explore a selection of narrative-based methods for citizen curation to propose an approach for eliciting meaningful stories related to cultural heritage artifacts from citizens. The proposed approach is subsequently applied in a digital co-design workshop, conducted with members of the SPICE consortium, including the five SPICE museum partners. The collected story contributions are thereafter analysed using qualitative methods and tools adapted from narrative inquiry and the study of narrative identity. The findings provide valuable insights into the potential of narrative-based approaches for citizen engagement in the cultural heritage domain and support the development of the SPICE digital tools for promoting reflection, i.e. sentiment analysis, personalization, recommendation systems, and user- and community modeling tools. In SPICE, such tools play a central role in enabling citizens to create representations of themselves, while also cultivating an understanding and appreciation of similarities and differences across citizen groups. In this direction, the paper offers ideas and insights for designing engaging participatory approaches to elicit citizen input. At the same time, it aims to support the development of digital systems and tools in the cultural heritage domain, with the goal of fostering more inclusive and dynamic representations of citizens and citizen groups.

This essay takes stock of the work conducted in border studies so far and discusses some of the challenges ahead. It argues that, nearly half a century after border studies emerged in the social sciences, much remains to be done to turn our field into an academic discipline. As we approach a metaphorical middle age, it is high time for border studies scholars to invest a substantial part of our energies into developing common theoretical and methodological frameworks to better understand how borders, borderlands and borderlanders evolve. Doing so holds promise to make our work more relevant to the numerous academic and civil society stakeholders for whom borders and borderlands remain a crucially important though often underexamined issue.

Abstract Sanitation work in India is largely carried out by the historically marginalized Dalits, formerly known as untouchables, without proper devices or safety gear, as so-called ‘manual scavenging’. To counter manual scavenging, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have turned to courts and litigation as a form of resistance. This brought about some successes: manual scavenging was repeatedly outlawed, and several high-profile court cases have ordered local governments to take very explicit steps to eradicate it. However, manual scavenging persists rampantly, leading several authors to argue that litigation has failed in its purpose. We critically evaluate this claim by examining the underlying root question: what purpose do NGOs ascribe to litigation in their efforts to eradicate manual scavenging in the first place? Our analysis is based on a multi-method, qualitative research approach combining analysis of documents of, and interviews with, a total of 23 NGOs. Using the lens of active citizenship, we conclude that NGOs seek to shift responsibility to the government, of which it has absolved itself under neoliberalism, remind the government of its duty to serve its citizens, and overall participate politically. Specific features of courts, such as mandamus and a mediation-oriented approach, were mentioned as uniquely enabling petitioners to exercise active citizenship and force government officials to at least consider manual scavengers’ interests.

We present a microlevel database of Irish cooperative creameries covering the period 1897–1921. The data were hand collected from the annual reports of the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society (IAOS) and contain information from 531 creameries and covering 49 variables. We perform some initial analysis of the data, finding considerable heterogeneity in the productivity of creameries as measured by the milk/butter ratio. We focus on differences between the four historical provinces of Ireland, finding that the south of Ireland (the historical centre of butter production) was on average less productive than the north at the start of the period, although this changes after 1913, when Ulster becomes the least productive province. These results present interesting avenues for future work, given the IAOS’ focus on founding creameries in the north of the island.