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Month: June 2026

Indian Samajvad in the History of Twentieth-Century Socialism

As one of the most widely influential political ideas and movements of the twentieth century, socialism had a history that was at once global and had various regional forms depending on the national contexts in which it took shape. In the years after the revolution in industrially backward Russia, socialism appeared to many—especially in colonized countries—not only as the way to challenge imperialist rule but also as a means to effect widespread socio-economic transformation in their countries. Such was the case in India, where socialists began articulating visions of an independent India free from colonialism, capitalism, and existing forms of exploitation. Socialism promised real freedom—not just political self-determination and sovereignty, but also economic freedom for the masses.1

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  1. Jayaprakash Narayan, a leading member of the Congress Socialist Party, sought to present this case at length in his Why Socialism? (Benares, 1936), a key ideological document of the Congress Socialists. [↩]

Measures of Success and Failure: Remembering Money in Medieval History Writing

At the beginning of February, Marcus Meer’s project ‘Money, History, and Moral Economies: Communicative Functions of Monetary Information in the Institutional Historiography of the Later Middle Ages (1250–1530)’ welcomed Gabriele Passabì to the team. Together, Dr Meer and Dr Passabì will look at why medieval chronicles abound in specific numeric references to sums of money (such as prices, taxes, debts, exchange rates) and broader discussions of monetary topics (about the debasement of currency, or problems with inflation or deflation, for example). Monetary rhetoric, the project argues, was a versatile communicative tool used in medieval chronicles to serve institutional strategies of remembering the past for the needs of the (medieval) present and to frame aspirations for the future. By investigating the monetary rhetoric of chronicles produced by and for cities, monasteries (both men’s and women’s), and courts in England, the Low Countries, and northern Germany between the thirteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the project will trace different manifestations of expanding monetary consciousness(es) and the economic thought and practice that accompanied them. In this post, they give a glimpse of their current work.

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Viola Klein: A Neglected Key Theorist of Gender Studies

Names such as Simone de Beauvoir, Hannah Arendt, or Simone Weil tend to evoke particular associations in people’s minds, even if these are somewhat vague or disparate. But we cannot say the same with any certainty for Viola Klein (1907–73). And yet, as a theorist and social researcher, she was highly attuned to the societal crises and failings of her time—especially the persistent gender inequalities and women’s experiences of oppression—and helped to address them. When comparing Klein to other thinkers, we must pay particular attention to her major work of social theory: The Feminine Character: History of an Ideology, published in 1946 by Routledge & Kegan Paul in the ‘International Library of Sociology’ series, which was founded by Karl Mannheim.

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On the Trail of Kaviani

According to legend, ‘Kaviani’ was the name given to their standard by the Sassanian warriors who won their independence from the foreign ruler Zahhāk. Kaviani was meant to show the world their triumph against tyranny and foreign domination. It became a royal banner and the first flag of Persia, remaining so until the seventh century CE, and the story of this heroic uprising developed into the national myth of Iran.1 At the beginning of the twentieth century, during a sweeping political and cultural renaissance movement in Iran, this national narrative once again came to the fore. When Iran was occupied by British and Russian troops in 1907, exiled Iranians spread their national myth far beyond their nation’s borders. As far away as Weimar Berlin, the name of the Sassanian standard was bestowed upon a Persian printworks and publishing house. The company’s logo was the Farāvahār, originally a Zoroastrian symbol for the spirit that also became a secular and cultural icon, especially after the fall of the Sassanian empire. Contrary to what one might assume, however, Kaviani took on a transnational outlook after 1920 and printed multilingual anti-colonial periodicals in various languages and scripts—including Arabic, Farsi, Ottoman Turkish, Urdu, English, and German. From the Berlin suburb of Charlottenburg, its publications reached numerous colonized and semi-colonized territories across West Asia and North Africa.

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  1. Djalal Khaleghi-Motlagh, ‘Derafš-e kāvīān’, Encyclopaedia Iranica, 7 Nov. 2013. [↩]