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Fifteen Eighty Four

Academic perspectives from Cambridge University Press

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Two types of division of labour in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations: teasing out the implications

The conduct of empirical exercises and comparative case studies and the invoking of theoretical analyses are common to almost all economic debates as participants seek to support/undercut different positions....

P. Sai-wing Ho | 15 May 2026

Post-Soviet Brides in the China Dream

In Post-Soviet Brides in China Dream, I look at marriages between Chinese men and post-Soviet Slavic women and how they have come to be seen in China as an ideal type of transnational love and a pathway...

Elena Barabantseva | 15 May 2026

The Logic of Corruption: Why It Persists and Why Reforms Fail

Corruption is everywhere. From senior politicians and bureaucrats to street-level bureaucrats, and from the richest countries to the poorest, corruption remains widespread, and efforts to fight it keep...

Chandra Shekhar | 15 May 2026

Languaging: Playfulness and Precarity

There is something deeply uncomfortable about admitting that you are not fully fluent in your own mother tongue. As a Mongolian born and raised in Mongolia, I grew up believing Mongolian was naturally...

Sender Dovchin | 15 May 2026

A Biography of Understanding Language through Humor

Like many books, this one has a biography worth telling. The first edition of Understanding Language through Humor (ULTH) emerged out of a conversation with Cambridge University Press (CUP) Linguistics...

Stanley Dubinsky , University of South Carolina | 14 May 2026

How and Why Americans Mobilized their Youth during World War I

Several boys are standing at attention in the middle of the street during a parade in Kansas City, Missouri, May 18, 1918. Courtesy of the National Archives at College Park, Maryland. On May 18,...

Emmanuel Destenay | 14 May 2026

Kenya’s “42 tribes” is a myth. And that should change how we talk about ethnicity

In July 2023, President Ruto stood in a marquee in Kilifi County and proclaimed that the Pemba people officially constituted an ethnic community of Kenya. The crowd was elated. Recognition as an ethnic...

Samantha Balaton-Chrimes | 13 May 2026

Legislating with the autocrat?

In March 1979, the government of dictator General Jorge Rafael Videla, submitted a law proposal to overhaul Argentina’s revenue-sharing regime. Following the rules of this regime, the bill was duly...

Emilia Simison, Alejandro Bonvecchi | 12 May 2026

Still Searching…

In 1915, Robert Chenault Givler published the results of his PhD thesis, which he had undertaken at the Harvard Psychological Laboratory. The work was entitled ‘The Psycho-physiological Effect of the...

Christian R. Gelder | 11 May 2026

Imagining Another (Roman) World

What the viral TikTok “how often do you think about the Roman empire” did not ask was what people imagine when they think of the Roman world. When I ask my first-year students to jot down three instant...

Astrid Van Oyen | 8 May 2026

Why Elizabeth Maconchy Needs Context

When Lucy Walker and I began work on Elizabeth Maconchy in Context, we were motivated by a simple conviction: Maconchy’s music and career demand a fuller account than she has usually been granted. She...

Lucy Walker, Justin Vickers | 7 May 2026

Ethnic Stereotypes and the New Testament

Cynocephali illustrated in the Kiev Psalter of 1397 In the past several years we have witnessed a rapid and unsettling shift from the “post-racial” aspirations of the Obama era and the global outcry...

Matthijs den Dulk | 6 May 2026