From collective reckonings with the past to debates over value and authority, from diasporic sojourners to meditations on time and the surreal, this issue consists of nine articles across three rubrics. In addition, we are proud to feature the first biennial Thrupp lecture and commentaries. Given in honor of Sylvia Thrupp (1903–1997), founding editor of the journal Comparative Studies in Society and History, the Thrupp lecture is held in Ann Arbor and features the work of a distinguished scholar and visiting discussants. Its goal is to recreate the energy and insight essential to Thrupp’s comparativist vision. The inaugural lecture was delivered by Prof. Lauren Benton, with commentaries from Prof. Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, Prof. Judith Scheele, and yours truly. The lecture, commentaries, and an afterword by Prof. Benton are featured in this issue.

RECOGNITION AND RECKONING Frederick Wojnarowski considers how vocabularies for classifying protests end up shaping the revolutionary and political potential of collective action. In “Hirak and Hosha: Modalities of Collective Action in Jordan in the Wake of the Arab Spring,” he shows how the rural and the tribal end up being effaced from scholarly accounts since the Arab Uprisings of 2010–2012. Bringing together seemingly disparate protests—self-consciously leftist Hirak protests and hosha (“tribal clashes”)—within the same frame offers an important reappraisal of the moral valence and legitimacy of protest movements and how anthropological and historical scholarship recognizes (or not) the sites and vocabularies of revolutionary action. Questions of recognition and misrecognition are central in Yukiko Koga’s essay as well. Focusing on an archive of civil lawsuits filed in courts across Japan since the 1990s by Chinese and South Korean victims, “Post-imperial Reckoning: Transitional Injustice and the Unmaking of the Japanese Empire in East Asia” emphasizes how the transition from empire to nation-state in East Asia created forms of legal evasion and what the author terms “transitional injustice” that made imperial violence illegible. The focus on “post-war” justice in the Tokyo Tribunal and other such venues meant that an imperial reckoning was forestalled, leading to a “politics of abandonment after empire in perpetrator and victim nations.” Through a fine-grained analysis of legal and diplomatic debates on compensation, the author notes the potential for a belated mode of imperial reckoning in East Asia. Questions of reckoning and recognition also haunt Vanessa Freije’s article. In “‘The Word of the State against Ours’: The Right to Know and State Terror in 1970s Mexico,” the author examines two moments from 1970s Mexican history: the first on political reforms within the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) and the second on activists mobilizing against disappearances. Tracing a shared epistemic struggle surrounding information and the ability/inability to reckon and reform, Freije’s article is a nuanced examination of the politics of information in Mexico and elsewhere. Finally, Kabir Tambar draws our attention to clamor and interruption in political moments shaped by remarkable uncertainty. “A History of Clamor: Historical Time and the Late Ottoman Surreal” turns to a seemingly unremarkable moment of late Ottoman parliamentary debate, specifically the efforts of a Greek Orthodox deputy of parliament, Emmanouil Emmanouilidis, to rebuke the promise of the nearly century-long process of reform (ıslahat). Through a reimagining of the concept of infelicity, Tambar locates in Emmanouilidis’ speech and its various interruptions a “history of clamor” that not only moves beyond the written word in the archive but also the “expectation of a progressive historical rhythm, which undergirds the historiography of both the nationalists and many of their critics” in this moment that Tambar calls the “late Ottoman surreal.”

TRANSFORMING VALUES Narrated in utopian terms, the “circular economy” discourse in extractive industries extends beyond the movement of materials to “imagining environmental and technical futures,” as Tom Özden-Schilling emphasizes in “Spiraling out in the Circular Economy: Movement and Belonging at a Malaysian Rare Earth Elements Refinery.” Özden-Schilling’s article follows activists and university researchers and their conflicts over questions of “waste” at a Malaysian rare earth element processing facility. His article shows how waste is not just a question of responsible material management but tied to broader questions of value, exclusion, and migration that echo older extractive histories and relations between extractive industries, the state, and communities. Tirthankar Roy’s essay, “Constructing a Colonial State: The Land Rights Debate in Eighteenth-Century Bengal,” also emphasizes the relationship between value and institutions, in this case revisiting the Permanent Settlement of 1793 and the East India Company’s state-building efforts in late eighteenth-century Bengal. Roy argues that, instead of following Indian or English precedents, the Permanent Settlement was built on a logic of concentrating fiscal powers, one where failures in data collection led the state down certain institutional paths that limited fiscal flexibility. Valuation and information reemerge in Ellen M. Nye’s essay, which analyzes a seventeenth-century trial in Ottoman Istanbul of imported lion dollar coins suspected of being false. In “Money on Trial: Performances of Value and Authority in Ottoman Istanbul during the Age of Global Silver,” the author moves beyond a divide between conceptions about money as a commensurable trade commodity and as an artifact of state authority. Nye shows how, through circulation, money and its meaning were made and remade both within and outside the state and across multiple scales.

DIASPORIC SOJOURNERS The two papers in this rubric focus on the shared geographic space of Southeast Asia in order to explore, from distinct vantage points, diasporic belonging amongst Chinese communities in the region. In “Two Journeys into Diaspora: Qing and British Imperial Investigations in the Dutch East Indies and Australia,” Nicholas McGee compares two imperial investigations on the status of Chinese communities of the Asia-Pacific in the 1880s. Focusing on the official investigations of the Qing Commissioners Wang Ronghe and Yu Qiong and an unofficial mission carried out by the British translator, orientalist, and diplomat Edward Harper Parker, McGee notes the resonances and commonalities across these imperial expeditions, the tensions that marked Chinese migration within white settler spaces, and the global reach of the late Qing state. Emphasizing the diasporic reconfiguration of the Nine Emperor Gods Festival in Southeast Asia, Esmond Chuah Meng Soh and Keng We Koh trace the shifting identities of the Nine Emperors at the center of the festival to showcase how Southeast Asian Chinese communities reconstituted religious authority outside East Asia. “Stars, Kings, Pirates: The Nine Emperor Gods Festival and the Making of a Diasporic Religious Ecology in Postcolonial Southeast Asia” emphasizes a complex diasporic religious ecology where, throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Chinese communities in Southeast Asia sought both identification and distance from China.