The first issue of 2021 consists of two thematic dossiers. The first explores the relationship between history and fiction in the late eighteenth century. It opens with a study of the social and political tensions surrounding Jewish emancipation at the end of the ancien régime, using a close reading of a neglected play by François Gariel, Les esclaves livournais à Alger (1786), to reveal the ambivalence of “toleration” in Enlightenment Tuscany. The second article focuses on the figure of the explorer Lapérouse during the French Revolution: with nothing heard of his round-the-world expedition after 1788, the famous seafarer became a constantly shifting public figure, open to appropriation and to multiple political, scientific and philosophical usages.

The second dossier is centered on Ottoman and Turkish worlds. Its first article considers the slow spread of printing in the Ottoman Empire. Rather than emphasizing the failure of cultural modernization, it focuses on typographical and technical considerations and, using punctuation as a case study, advocates a combined history of print and manuscript. The final article in the issue is a study of the tensions between Sunnis and Alevis in contemporary Turkey. By applying an ethnographic and historiographic approach to the Alevi institution of “joint couples” (musahip), it explores how sexuality is used to reinforce confessional difference.

The issue also includes a selection of book reviews on the theme of “Economy, production, and markets.”