This editorial considers how scholars interested in issues of global constitutionalism should approach the questions that have concerned those interested in enlightenment. Reflecting on the relocation of the journal’s editorial offices to Edinburgh, we foreground discussions from the historiography of the long eighteenth century that should be of interest to scholars of international relations, international law and political theory. Two main contributions are emphasized. First, a contextualist and political approach to enlightenment invites us to see global constitutionalism as a strategic response to crisis, aiming to combat fanaticism. Second, a global approach to enlightenment invites us to continue enlarging the world of global constitutionalism. Taken together, the contributions support the journal’s ongoing efforts to decolonize global constitutionalism by enjoining readers and contributors to attend to neglected sides and sites of global constitutional processes.

This article examines the work of Emil Schlagintweit (1835–1904), one of Germany's most prominent nineteenth-century Tibetologists in order to challenge some common assumptions regarding Orientalist scholarship and its relationship to nineteenth-century nationalism and imperialism. Schlagintweit began to work on Tibetan religion and language in the wake of an expedition led by three of his brothers in the 1850s, and his work can provide important nuances to existing understandings of German Orientalism in the second half of the nineteenth century. It demonstrates that German scholars did indeed emphasize rigorous analysis in line with the notion of Wissenschaftlichkeit, yet it also demonstrates that their work could go beyond this and rely on a wider array of methodologies and traditions. Interpretations which treat German Orientalists as fundamentally different from other European scholars should therefore be treated with caution. At the same time, the relationship between Orientalist knowledge and imperial realities remained ambivalent for scholars such as Schlagintweit.

For a plant as renowned and beloved in China as the plum blossom (meihua 梅花), there is conspicuously little written in English about eating it. However, without understanding the historical affection for consuming plum blossoms, our comprehension of it as a cultural icon misses an important dimension. This article explores the intriguing discourse surrounding plum blossom consumption in three sections. The first section introduces the key concept of qing 清 (“purity”) and its relation to the “poet’s spleen” (shiren pi 詩人脾), which provides a theoretical framework for a relationship between eating it and writing poetry. The second section examines Song-dynasty poems on this eating practice, particularly those by Yang Wanli 楊萬里 (1127–1206) and the Rivers and Lakes poets (jianghu shiren 江湖詩人). Their poetry was closely tied to new developments in the notion of qi 氣 and “poetic spleen” (shipi 詩脾). The third section turns to culinary recipes, primarily from the Rivers and Lakes poet Lin Hong 林洪 (fl. 1224–1263), who promotes qing aesthetics in plum blossom dishes. I argue that the discovery of culinary value in a flower long regarded as more symbolic than edible marks a significant development in Song-dynasty (960–1279) literati culture, aesthetics, intellectual history, and medicine.

Samuel Moyn provides insight into how the history of democracy can continue its globalization. There is a growing belief that the currently acceptable fund of ideas has not served the recent past well which is why an expansion, a planetary one, of democracy's ideas is necessary – especially now as we move deeper into the shadow of declining American/Western imperialism and ideology. Deciding which of democracy's intellectual traditions to privilege is driven by a mix of forced necessity and choice: finding salient ground for democracy is likely only possible in poisoned traditions including European ones.

Hannah Arendt did not live to complete her anticipated work on judgment, a faculty she considered essential for resuscitating political life against the threat of totalitarianism. Scholars have attempted to reconstitute it, primarily through her Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy. Yet when discussing her turn to judgment, Arendt cites the ancient Greek historian Herodotus as a model, claiming that recovering the ancient sense of histor (judge) is crucial to reclaiming human dignity. Herodotus is in fact central to her depiction of the Greeks throughout her work. Excavating his influence not only helps clarify her theory of judgment; it also reveals how she both distances herself from Heidegger and yet retains certain core agreements. Her reading of Herodotus thus helps delineate the intellectual relationship between two of the twentieth century’s foremost thinkers, while inviting us to reflect on how and why to read the Greeks today.

This article traces the history of how two generations of US archaeologists navigated their relationship with the Guatemalan government, from the Jorge Ubico dictatorship in the 1930s through the democratic opening of the 1940s and 1950s and the subsequent CIA-sponsored coup. Critiques of modern archaeology have focused on the discipline’s history of ideological and material collusion with different projects of US and European imperialism in the Global South. While the archaeologists discussed here benefited from US hegemony in the region, their own correspondence reflects an ambivalent relationship to formal frameworks of international law and a desire to function as autonomous nonstate actors. Rather than reflecting the political context of a given moment, the archaeologists’ behavior was often determined by a generations-old professional culture based on pragmatism and collective entitlement to the control of antiquities.

This article examines women’s storytelling and nanga (harp) performances in nineteenth- and twentiethcentury western Uganda to investigate how these songs shaped community identity and norms. Drawing on musical recordings, archival sources, and interviews, this article demonstrates that these performances functioned as important public histories, teaching audiences about past famines, droughts, climate change, and cattle events. These narratives both chronicled regional histories and provided the shared intellectual material from which community norms and a shared identity could be articulated. Extant scholarship has focused overwhelmingly on how male intellectuals contributed to ideas of race, nation, or ethnicity. This article thus provides an important alternative by showing how women produced histories that contributed to group identity—yet this historical production occurred through musical performances rather than in books, tracts, or petitions. In doing so, this article reintegrates western Ugandan women into narratives of imperial encounters and intellectual history.

This article examines multi-vector pro-life exchanges between Poland and two American countries: the United States and Chile. We make the case that the 1970s through 1990s represent a significant historical moment that yielded both transplantable templates and direct longitudinal consequences for transnational social activism in the twenty-first century. We argue that during this time Poland acted as an incubation site for pro-life transnationalism, where “right to life” became the rallying cry of new generations of Catholic Far Right thinkers and activists like the politician Marek Jurek and journalists and social activists Ewa Kowalewska and Lech Kowalewski. The transnational entanglements that empowered Jurek, Kowalewska, and Kowalewski assumed intellectual and political forms, while also producing direct contact and active exchange of tactics, ideas, and know-how with the leaders of the U.S. pro-life movement such as John Willke or Father Paul Marx. Our study, situated at the intersection of intellectual history and social movement studies, highlights the importance of examining transnationalism with full attention to its local rootedness, and makes a case for incorporating non-progressive social activism into the post-1989 story of civic and social mobilization.