ABSTRACT The paper aims to explore the significance of water in the lives of people in Rajasthan with particular focus on c. 600 to 1300 CE. Due to Rajasthan’s hot and dry climate, with limited rainfall, man-made ponds, stepwells, and tanks were the primary sources of water. Attempts have also been made to investigate and understand the significance of excavating different water sources, made possible through the combined efforts of both the royal family and the merchant class, in the context of Rajasthan. The paper aims to particularly look into the importance of step-wells, which became more popular in the ninth to tenth centuries, as a hub for drinking, washing, bathing, socialising, as well as for celebrating festivals and performing sacred rituals. Excavating various water sources was not only economically relevant, but also socially, politically, and religiously relevant in the climate of Rajasthan. The study relies heavily on epigraphical and literary sources for its primary data.

ABSTRACT This article explores how oral history can provide a fresh perspective on the history of student life in Britain. The first half focuses on methodology and the challenges of interviewing former students. It concentrates specifically on the difficulties of speaking with people primarily drawn from the upper middle class. Constructed narratives, nostalgia and the positionality of the interviewer are explored. The second half of the article argues that, oral history is ideally placed to help historians explore experiences that are sidelined by official historical records and the student press. It focuses on three specific themes: politics and protest; student loneliness and isolation; and the lives of international students.

ABSTRACT Chance of a Lifetime (1950) examines entrenched class hierarchies while dramatising the socio-economic realities of post-war Britain. This article explores how the film reframes class relations through collaboration rather than conflict, reflecting continuities with wartime propaganda while anticipating technocratic approaches to reconstruction. Drawing on critical responses, the analysis situates Chance within debates on managerial authority and working-class representation. Despite its commercial failure, the film’s ideological ambiguity renders it culturally significant: mediating competing discourses on class and modernisation, it offers valuable insight into Britain’s evolving industrial relations and the shifting cinematic portrayal of social change.

ABSTRACT Retrospectively applying Howe-Devereux famine intensity and magnitude scales to data on the food crisis in Vilnius under German occupation during World War I, we find that it suffered a famine in 1917 caused by the collateral effect of overly rigid epidemic prevention policies. German occupiers imposed a permanent quarantine, making food transportation across the delimitations of 32 quarantine zones illegal. Despite these restrictions, in early 1917, a typhus epidemic broke out. Further tightening of cross-zone mobility restrictions destroyed the illegal food trade, making food inaccessible in Vilnius, while it was available in Lithuania despite the failure of crops in 1916.

ABSTRACT By 1900 the British consumer co-operative movement boasted 1200 local consumer co-operative societies with over a million members, its own wholesale organisations in Scotland and England/Wales, a national political mouthpiece (the Co-operative Union – CU) and the Women’ Co-operative Guild (WCG). The movement improved the position of its members and working-class people through increasing their wealth, improving education, food safety and quality and a strong engagement with local communities, via engagement in a social and community-oriented activities. This article will explore the movement’s conflicts with private interests between 1870 and 1914. A central argument is that institutional, political and cultural developments within this period served to determine later developments in the 20th century. A form of ‘Path Dependence emerged with long term consequences for the movement. It will show how a culture of ‘rugged independence’ shaped lasting attitudes within the movement to other emergent local and national interest groups.