New arrival!

This morning I was reading the September 2025 issue of American Historical Review and I happened across two things that struck me as particularly interesting.

The first thing was a typical graphical matter. A page in American Historical Review contains 21.5 cm of text, of which 1 cm is occupied by the divider separating the article text from the footnotes, so 20.5 cm of actual text. A typical page is divided up with somewhere in the nature of 13 cm of text and 7.5 cm of footnotes. However, this being history writing, footnotes are prone to swell up to take more of the page. But I had never, in all my reading of history, encountered a page like page 1044[^1] of this issue, which contained 3 cm of text and 17 cm of footnotes! To make matters even more extreme, when I started looking at the footnotes, I noticed that one of the footnotes continued over onto the next page, so that actual ratio was 3 cm of text to 22 cm of footnotes! This was in the section of a paper that detailed the background historiography of the matter being discussed, so more extensive footnotes are to be expected, but even so, I've never seen anything like this before.

The second thing was a historical matter. It was at the beginning of Giuliana Chamedes' paper "Unpaid Debts: Socialist Internationalism and Jamaica's Bid for a New International Economic Order" (which also contained the extensively footnoted page above). I was so amazed by the first paragraph of this paper that I'm going to type it out in its entirety in order to share it with you:

In 1973, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted a resolution calling for a New International Economic Order (NIEO) by an overwhelming majority. The initiative called for the literal and figurative settling of the debt between imperial and formerly colonized countries. Rather than just redistributing wealth within countries, the time had come to address wealth inequality on the world scale. To do so, the NIEO called for the reorganization of international trade, debt relief, the stabilization of commodity prices, and the institution of oversight for multinational corporations. It insisted on the protection of economic sovereignty for decolonized and decolonizing countries to "correct inequalities and redress existing injustices," suggesting that decolonization was an ongoing struggle. Many countries participated in the NIEO's drafting, including Jamaica, one of the founding members of the Group of 77 (G77). A "high point in the expression of a new internationalism, namely, that of countries emerging from colonialism," the NIEO represented a landmark in global history, as Sabrine Kott and others have argued. But by the early 1980s, the project was dead in the water.

My mind was blown upon reading this paragraph. Despite having a master's degree in history and having done a lot of reading outside of school in matters of history and politics, all of this information was new to me. I'd never even heard of the Group of 77. I read this paragraph a couple of days ago, I've done a lot of thinking about it since then, and I'm still trying to puzzle out how different the world would be if the NIEO had proceeded as planned.[^2]

[^1] American Historical Review uses continuous numbering across a volume, so this issue actually started on page 1009.

[^2] The phrase "the early 1980s" should give you a clue: The Reagan and Thatcher governments played a large role in stopping the NIEO.