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AbstractOn the basis of a new series on the consumption of traditional and modern sources of energy between 1820 and 1913, this article addresses the start of modern growth and the great divergence on the world scale. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, the greater availability of modern energy sources expanded working capacity well beyond the potential of previous agricultural civilizations. Growth of energy consumption rose primarily in western Europe, northern America, and Oceania. As a result, labour productivity rose, leading to an increase in real wages, which was an incentive to replace labour with mechanical engines. The higher energy consumption in these three macro‐areas led to global inequality in productive capacity and technology which peaked on the eve of the First World War.

The phenomenon of Soviet fashion is widely acknowledged, but it is still little known about Soviet designers' professional routines and the way they solved their professional tasks in a planned economy. The existing studies explored Soviet fashion as part of the planned economy and everyday culture. The study aims at explaining how Soviet designers overcame the limits of the planned economy and made performative statements. Soviet fashion design is analyzed in terms of bricolage. Evidence comes from archival documents and 14 in-depth interviews with ex-employees of the Perm Clothing Design House and Experimental Workshop of Everyday Service Department. As a result, the author describes the features and peculiarities of individual bricolage in Soviet fashion design, resources enriching bricoleurs' repertoire, and practices of dialogues of the bricoleurs with resources and technologies. Designers did not limit themselves to reproducing official principles of Soviet fashion, but using the bricolage opportunities, they endeavored to make the inner sense shift. Their performative statements did not transform the public fashion discourse, but they affected the professional discourse of a concrete organization or co-workers. In the context of Soviet subjectivity studies, our findings extend the vision of Soviet subject's creativity under conditions of scarcity and government control.

Meteorological cartographies provide a way of tracing understandings of the monsoon through the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This paper analyses developments in cartographic representations of the monsoon, from nautical charts to synoptic charts to upper-air charts, to show how such visualisations constructed meteorological knowledge. Assemblages of weather phenomena, people, politics, technologies, instruments, and graphic techniques produced these representations; in turn, these representations were leveraged in pursuit of human agendas. New perspectives and means of recording the monsoon contributed to the non-linear progression of monsoon science, from maritime understandings depicted in nautical charts, to fusions of maritime and terrestrial understandings depicted in synoptic charts, to atmospheric understandings depicted in upper-air charts. Although overlapping, these shifting modes of observation and representation mirrored shifting imperial concerns from oceanic trade to revenue extraction to global aviation. Analysing these visual representations, and the assemblages that produced them, reveals changing constructions of the monsoon and associated colonial agendas.

The pragmatic methodology of empirical sciences proposed by the representatives of the Lvov-Warsaw School of philosophy, Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz and, to an extent, Tadeusz Kotarbinski, postulates the analysis of scientific practices. It prioritizes meta-scientific logical and semiotic analysis over formal and natural sciences, yet its study of concepts remains relevant for empirical sciences. The propositions are justified not just by empirical data or observation statements. An analysis of the concepts of empirical sciences, including social sciences and humanities, defines philosophy of science – applied methodology, in Ajdukiewicz's views. The language of logic and semiotics (the latter is understood as the logical analysis of language) qualifies scientific epistemological presuppositions. An example of such an attitude is Ajdukiewicz's own analysis, and another example in the Poznan school of philosophy of science is the work of Jerzy Kmita (a classic example is his 1995 book "Jak słowa łączą się ze światem"). This is relevant as far as the conceptual context of a denominational "event" predefines our understanding of the reality it points to. A conceptual scheme not only defines one's conceptual view of the world, but also delimits what can be considered as empirical evidence. As a result, it defines the scholarly accepted mode of justification of propositions. In the practice of historical research, the justificat Eion refers to the so called historical sources, that is information used as source data. The article discusses the conclusions of Tomasz Falkowski's book "Myśl i zdarzenie. Pojęcie zdarzenia historycznego w historiografii francuskiej XX wieku"

Using the example of the so called "Polish refugees" (pol'perebezhchiki), the paper discusses a research problem of the "blind spots" of historical memory. By the technical term pol'perebezhchiki the NKVD investigators denoted a special social group of the former citizens of the interwar Poland – mainly ethnic Belarusians, Ukrainians, and Jews, – who escaped to the Soviet Union in the 1920s – 1930s, and, according to the order № 00485 from 11.08.1937 issued by Nicholas Ezhov, were almost totally exterminated during the 1937–38 'NKVD Polish operation'. "Polish refugees" do not exist, as the objects of commemoration, neither in traditions of national remembrance (Polish, Jewish, Belarusian, Ukrainian or Russian ones), because they cannot be introduced into the heroic or lacrimous national narratives; nor in the memory of their families: as young men, they were not married and did not have children. They are ignored by scholars as well. Based on the materials of the NKVD archives in Perm, the author tries to reconstruct the main features of the standard procedure of the treatment of "Polish refugees" elaborated by the NKVD up to 1931: (1) several months of imprisonment near the Polish-Soviet border, (2) transferring to the "Sarov concentration camp" organized especially for such refugees, (3) several years of labour in one of the GULAG camp, (4) and finally, liberation from the camp and accepting of Soviet citizenship. The object of special interest are the series of biographies of the group of "Polish refugees" who were, at the moment of their arrest, the students of Perm educational institutes.