Histories

The Industrial Revolution is commonly periodized through mechanization, steam, electricity, mass production, computing, digital networks, and artificial intelligence. This article proposes an alternative variable of historical observation: the functional-delegability frontier, defined as the historically demonstrated set of functions technically executable by technical systems under identifiable operating conditions. A function is specified independently of its mechanism as F = (I, O, C): admissible inputs, required output, and operating conditions. Analysis distinguishes extensive and intensive expansion, functional flexibility, recursive expansion, and recursive depth. A comparison of employment-based, energy-based, and techno-economic interpretations clarifies their different criteria of historical change. Applications to machine tools, automatic programming, circuit simulation, and code generation identify what the evidence supports and what would require reclassification. The cases document cross-sectoral reuse of production capabilities and the participation of computing in developing subsequent technical systems; they support, without conclusively establishing, the hypothesis of one still-unfolding Industrial Revolution. This interpretation concerns functional reallocation and cumulative dependence across technological discontinuities, not the absence of internal phases. Contemporary evidence is separated from prospective claims, and environmental constraints are treated as conditions of sustainable implementation rather than proof of technical impossibility. The framework identifies technical possibility, not adoption, profitability, labor displacement, or economic destiny.

This article examines Portuguese imperial expansion across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans through the lens of environmental history, arguing that mobility, ecological variability, and locally grounded environmental knowledge were central to the making, negotiation, and crossing of early modern imperial frontiers. Rather than advancing through stable territorial incorporation, Portuguese expansion developed through interconnected socio-ecological systems established across environmental frontiers and maritime interfaces. These spaces were neither fixed boundaries nor empty margins, but dynamic zones of interaction in which imperial projects were hindered by local communities, established networks of mobility and exchange, and more-than-human processes. Their configuration was shaped by seasonal rhythms, navigational practices, resource availability, and the material infrastructures through which movement, settlement, and resource access were organised. Drawing on travel accounts, administrative correspondence, cartographic materials, and ecological studies, the article situates Portuguese expansion within dynamic landscapes where human interventions intersected with local knowledge, material infrastructures, and changing environmental conditions. A comparative analysis of Madeira, Cabo Verde, the Cape, and Sofala reveals how wind and monsoon regimes, coastal geomorphologies, hydrological conditions, resource availability, and African and Atlantic ecological knowledge conditioned the possibilities and limits of imperial mobility, settlement, provisioning, and infrastructure building. By foregrounding environmental contingency and circulatory regimes, the article reconceptualizes the early modern Portuguese Empire as a differentiated and environmentally contingent formation in which imperial frontiers were continually produced, negotiated, crossed, and reconfigured through socio-ecological interactions. In doing so, it brings environmental history into dialogue with frontier and border studies, showing how maritime mobility and environmental change contributed to the making and transformation of territorial and spatial boundaries in the early modern world.

Lobola is an important African cultural institution historically associated with the exchange of cattle between families. Beyond their economic value, cattle carried meanings related to fertility, reproduction, ancestors, kinship, legitimacy, ritual and relationships between families. However, contemporary scholarship has often understood lobola mainly in terms of commercialisation, property and material exchange, with limited attention to the precolonial cultural meanings of cattle and bridewealth. This article problematises this predominantly economic understanding of lobola and addresses the resulting gap in its historical and cultural interpretation. Drawing on historical and anthropological evidence, I argue that the transformation of lobola from cattle to money should not be understood merely as an economic substitution or commercialisation, but as a transformation in how cultural meanings, relationships and obligations are expressed. The article concludes that recovering marginalised precolonial evidence provides a stronger historical basis for understanding the cultural significance of lobola and its transformation in contemporary Southern African societies.