This series of comments brings together four historians of neoliberalism, each of whom focuses on a different part of the world but whose work has implications that are transnational if not global. Quinn Slobodian reconstructs the rise of the category of neoliberalism among historians and identifies the different paths of inquiry it is generating. Priya Lal, offering an Africanist’s perspective, moves beyond the reduction of the neoliberal narrative of the continent to one of linear declension and abjection by way of structural adjustment to show continuities from the colonial era to early independence. Gary Gerstle, an Americanist by training, offers a macro take on the move from a Keynesian and social democratic order to a neoliberal one while insisting we attend to the diverse ways policies and elite neoliberal ideas are taken up by populations for whom promises of freedom may mean something different from what intellectuals intended. Finally, Tehila Sasson, a historian of modern Britain and the world, explores the left-wing features of what has come to be called neoliberalism, insisting we keep a keen eye out for unintended consequences and unlikely origins. Together, the comment offers a satellite’s eye view of a subfield reaching maturity.

This comment examines the rapidly evolving ecosystem of historical research data in the United Kingdom, where cultural heritage collections are increasingly digitised, commercialised and fragmented. Historians face growing challenges in discovering, accessing and reusing data as resources move behind paywalls, and repositories remain scattered, without a national infrastructure to ensure long-term preservation or discoverability. Drawing on examples from major digital initiatives, we analyse the life cycle of historical research data and highlight the complex interplay of commercial, institutional and scholarly interests that shape access. We distinguish three types of data that emerge from historians’ typical engagements with digitised collections: derived, enhanced and aggregated data. We argue that historians must actively participate in the practices relating to the creation, maintenance and reuse of such data. This will involve new forms of citation, favouring open datasets, improving digital skills and building communities around shared resources. The comment concludes with proposals to improve discoverability, sustainability and reuse, urging the discipline to establish common standards and infrastructures to secure an equitable data commons for future research.

Starting in late September 1872, horses started falling ill with a severe respiratory complaint in the countryside about a dozen miles north of Toronto, Ontario. Veterinary experts swiftly diagnosed the malady, which paralyzed street transportation, commerce, and everyday life in Toronto itself during the first weeks of October, as influenza. Over the next year, an equine plague that most contemporaries referred to as the epizootic—and which I call the Great Horse Flu in the book I am completing on this outbreak—spread throughout southern Canada, every reach of the United States, and parts of Cuba, Mexico, and Central America. The novel influenza virus responsible for this outbreak sickened between ninety and ninety-nine percent of horses, donkeys, and mules across this vast swath of the northern Americas.1 Our best guess is that the Great Horse Flu killed between one and four percent of the equines it afflicted—a case fatality rate roughly not unlike those recorded by the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918–1920 and the COVID Pandemic. In less than a year, an estimated 112,500 to 554,000 horses and ponies perished alongside tens or hundreds of thousands of mules and donkeys.2

Sometimes male ostriches emit a low guttural sound that sounds strangely like a lion. On the plains in South Africa, these sounds aimed at female ostriches might confuse an unknowing listener. But on a ship bound from South Africa to Galveston, Texas in February 1887, these lion-esque sounds would not have been heard. Instead, as these dozens of ostriches crossed the Atlantic, their vocalizations were probably a quiet chirp, despite each bird weighing well over 100 pounds. Each ostrich had a more solitary existence on the ship than they had experienced in the wild or on a South African farm. On the Atlantic, they lived in single padded stalls near the middle of the hold, with paddocks between the stalls to offer some exercise and perhaps some interaction among the birds.1

In winter of 1900, the famed nature writer Ernest Thompson Seton lived briefly in a log cabin built in the middle of the National Zoological Park, located just north of the White House. The small lodging was placed between the muddied bison paddocks and the denuded deer and antelope yards.

The extinction of the passenger pigeon is one of the best-known cautionary tales in American environmental history. At one time, between three and five billion passenger pigeons blanketed the skies over central and eastern North America. Passenger pigeons were swift (they could fly as fast as sixty miles per hour) and gregarious (in the winter, thousands would roost together on a single tree, occasionally causing limbs to break beneath their weight). They survived primarily on the beechnuts, acorns, and chestnuts found in the mixed hardwood forests of the eastern United States. Between 1810 and 1867, Americans destroyed much of that habitat, clearing 200,000 square miles of woodlands (an area equal to the size of Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin combined). The passenger pigeon was also tasty, which is why between about 1870 and 1900, market hunters reduced what remained of the population to only a few dozen. The last of the species, named Martha by its keepers, died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914. Even more than the North American bison, a few hundred of whom survived the hide hunters who slaughtered millions of them in the Great Plains in the late nineteenth century, the passenger pigeon’s story exemplifies the wastefulness and shortsightedness of Americans’ exploitation of animals in the early years of industrial capitalism.

Two of the world’s greatest boxers—Muhammad Ali of Louisville, KY and George Foreman of Houston, TX—met for the legendary “Rumble in the Jungle” in Kinshasa, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) in 1974. With concerts by the African American “Godfather of Soul” James Brown and South African singer-songwriter Miriam Makeba, nicknamed “Mama Africa,” the entwining tones of the U.S. civil rights era and anti-Apartheid movement augmented a cultural moment that displayed Pan-African, Black nationalist, and anti-imperial connections. However, the appearance of an insidious symbol from each aforementioned era is what decidedly swayed the local population against Foreman and for Ali.1

In a private 1972 report to the Director of the National Park Service, Jack Anderson, Superintendent of Yellowstone National Park, confessed that “we are apprehensive that their proposal would ultimately end up with the complete slaughter of all bison, as occurred on the Crow Indian Reservation.”1 For decades, livestock producers at the local and national level pressured park officials to eliminate a specific disease—brucellosis caused by Brucella abortus—from Yellowstone’s buffalo herds. Following World War II, governments targeted this bacterial contagion in American domestic and wild animal populations to improve public health and livestock producers’ profits. Symptoms of brucellosis, which humans can catch from other mammalian hosts, vary across species. For domestic cattle, it can cause spontaneous abortions and, in rare cases, death. Buffalo seem largely unaffected by brucellosis but for humans, the bacterial infection can cause a plethora of chronic and debilitating symptoms.2