Law

As the most carbon-intensive source of electricity, coal-fired power gener-ation is incompatible with international climate change mitigation efforts. The international community therefore agreed to transition away from coal to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050 and remain within the temperature limits set under international law. However, phasing out existing coal power stations can conflict with international investment protection treaties. Recent arbitration claims against the United States, Canada, and European coun-tries show how foreign investors can challenge climate measures before international tribunals and threaten to paralyze the ambitious actions needed to address climate change.
As a key financier of coal power infrastructure, China plays a crucial role in the global transition away from coal. Besides China’s domestic reliance on coal, its companies have heavily invested in coal power overseas, particularly in Asia. Taking into account the threat of investment arbitration to climate reg-ulation, a crucial question therefore is whether foreign investors, for example from China, could slow down Asia’s energy transition by challenging coal phase-out decisions before international arbitration?
To answer this question, this article examines the protection that China’s invest-ment treaties offer to its overseas coal plants, and scrutinizes the environmental exceptions included in these treaties to safeguard states’ right to regulate. Based on recent arbitral practice, the analysis demonstrates the limited effectiveness of these environmental exceptions in neutralizing arbitration challenges against phase-out decisions. Given the unpredictable interpretation of environmental exceptions by arbitral tribunals, the article emphasizes the need to exclude coal power from international investment protection. It also points to the role of home state governments in addressing the carbon footprint of the investments made by their nationals abroad. By enjoining Chinese investors to strictly comply with the environmental laws of the states where they invest, the “host country” principle governing China’s regulation of its overseas investments could help address the obstacle of foreign investment protection to coal phase out.

This article offers a reassessment of the Bibliotheca Mexicana controversy (ca. 1745-1755), a key moment in the development of "creole patriotism" as most famously articulated by David A. Brading in The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State 1492-1867 (1991). Through a rereading of the original sources and a reconstruction of the historiographical origins of creole patriotism in German existentialism, the article argues that the identity of the New World protagonists in the controversy had little to do with either creolism or protonationalist patriotism. These creole and peninsular "Mexicans" (Mexicani) certainly felt pride in their flourishing urban center of Mexico City and its dependent territories. However, this patria was analogous to early modern city-states, like the Duchy of Milan, rather than to modern nation-states, like Mexico. This local identity was also entirely compatible with a strong loyalty to the Hispanic Monarchy, a larger pan-Hispanic caste identity, and a sense of membership in the Catholic Republic of Letters.

This reflexión pedagógica discusses the lessons scholars and teachers of Latinx history can learn from the historical vision put forward in Lin-Manuel Miranda's 2015 Broadway musical Hamilton. Following a discussion of the origins of Miranda's Latinx-inflected view of the life and times of Alexander Hamilton, the article places his approach within the context of the existing historiography on US-Latinx history, and assesses the pros and cons, both pedagogical and rhetorical, of taking such a Hamiltonian approach. Keywords Historiography · Alexander Hamilton · Latinx history · Identity · Pedagogy Alexander Hamilton, the first secretary of the treasury and the leading author of The Federalist Papers, was a Nuyorican. Or so he is portrayed in Lin-Manuel Miranda's 2015 Broadway musical Hamilton. Born "a bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a Scotsman" in "a forgotten Spot in the Caribbean," purposely reminiscent of Puerto Rico, he sailed to the "mainland,"

The art of being a colonial letrado: Late humanism, learned sociability and urban life in eighteenth-century Mexico City El arte de ser un letrado colonial: humanismo tardío, sociabilidad docta y vida urbana en la Ciudad de México en el siglo XVIII

T he Renaissance saw a dramatic change in how the colour white was conceptualised. In the writings of the pioneering humanists of the fifteenth century, ways of discussing whiteness were transformed thanks to a renewed appreciation of the subtle vocabulary of classical Latin, which distinguished numerous varieties of white, such as albus, candidus and canus, while the colour's connotations were expanded beyond the narrow range of classical, biblical and patristic associations to include the full gamut of ancient history, literature and mythology. 1 Renaissance theorists also recognised the unique place of white in the colour spectrum and the ramifications this had for the artist. Leon Battista Alberti, for example, rated white pigments so highly that he advised they 'should be sold more dearly than the most precious gems' in order to encourage their judicious use, while Leonardo da Vinci stressed the variability of whiteness depending on other pig ments in proximity to it, even challeng ing the status of white as a colour in the strict sense of the word. 2 The early human ist tradition was then taken up by sixteenth-century tratta tisti such as Lodovico Dolce, Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo and Fulvio Pellegrino Morato, whose systematic and detailed discussions of the commonplaces associated with each colour are normally the starting point for modern scholarship on colour in the High Renaissance. 3 There exists, however, a previously unnoticed treatment of the colour white by * I would like to thank the following mentors and colleagues for their comments on earlier drafts of this piece:

In early 46 B.C.E. Cicero was looking forward to a quiet retirement. 1 His voice was failing him and his political clout was much reduced from the heady days of his consulship and his glorious return from exile a decade or so before. While keeping abreast of the ongoing struggle between Caesar and the senatorial faction, his career in politics was over. Or was it? Many reject this image of a former statesmen in his golden years, opting to paint the orator from Arpinum seething at the rise of Caesar and plotting the downfall of the strongman who had undermined the tradition Roman political model. This view is usually substantiated by a single passage at the end of Cicero's Brutus, a dialogue on the history of oratory completed sometime in the spring of 46 B.C.E., in which Cicero addresses Brutus directly, lamenting the political situation at Rome that had denied Brutus the career as an orator that he deserved. 2 In Cicero's call for Brutus to "maintain the fame of two great houses and add to them a new luster," many have seen a purposeful ambiguity on the part of Cicero. In particular, they have read the phrase "for you we crave such a constitution of public affairs as shall make it possible for you to maintain the fame of two great houses and add to them a new luster" as an explicit call to rid Rome of Caesar by violent means. Those "two great houses" (duo amplissuma genera), they tell us, refer to the bloodlines of the Iunii Bruti and the Servilii. Remember L. Iunius Brutus, who expelled Tarquin; remember C. Servilius Ahala, who killed the aspiring tyrant Maelius. From this passage, J. P. V. D. Balsdon, concluded darkly: "how, except by murder, could Brutus do as well as, or even better than, these ancestors?" 3

On the tensions between Moravians and Presbyterian evangelicals see J. S. Burkholder, 'This "Rends in Pieces All the Barriers between Virtue and Vice": Tennentists, Moravians, and the Antinomian Threat in the Delaware Valley', The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, cxxxv, 2011, pp. 5-31. 4. It seems, nonetheless, that a German version of the speech was made available to Moravian elders before its delivery on 26 May; see below, n. 111. 5. Nicolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf, Oratio, Philadelphia 1742. There has been some doubt about the attribution to the Franklin Press, since the setting is not typical of its work; see C. W. Miller, Benjamin Franklin's

This article represents the first study of the Scottish presence at the Council of Ferrara-Florence, which included three bishops and over forty other named Scots whose purpose in attending the council is reconstructed in as much detail as the surviving evidence permits. It also aims to show that educated and well-connected Scots were present in one of the premier cultural centers of the early Renaissance, such that the flowering of classicizing culture in Scotland a generation later comes as no surprise. It thereby underlines that ecumenical councils were important moments in the longer history of European cultural integration.