After Woodrow Wilson’s speech to Congress in February 1918, ‘self-determination’ was expected to be a guiding concept for a post-imperial order once the Great War had ended. Yet when the Covenant of the League of Nations was negotiated at the Paris Peace Conference, the phrase was removed. Why and by whom? The existing literature offers little answer. This article argues that Wilson fought for inclusion of both the phrase ‘self-determination’ and the substance of it but was convinced to remove both by his own advisers and members of the British delegation. These men had an agenda at variance with Wilson’s, one focused on solidifying wartime transatlantic co-operation into a post-war governance model that would strengthen the British imperial position and bring the US into support of it. That agenda could not accommodate Wilsonian self-determination. Its resulting disappearance effectively reversed the post-imperial sense of wartime statements on self-determination made by Wilson and David Lloyd George. Anti-colonial movements, as the Paris negotiators knew, had taken inspiration from those promises. Their hopes for an organized dismantling of the imperial order were disappointed. Only after four decades of political violence would the pre-war order be replaced by one that better resembled Wilson’s abandoned vision.

The recovery of soldiers’ remains has been a major concern of the US military since the mid-nineteenth century. However, military defeats during the Cold War left the remains of US soldiers unattended for decades, which diminished the odds of their identification and created ambiguities about their fates. After the Vietnam War, some statespersons and soldiers’ families alleged that many missing soldiers had not been killed, but rather detained by the enemy and abandoned by US authorities. The US military strove to recover and identify as many missing soldiers as possible to debunk these allegations. Existing forensic methods failed to provide definitive conclusions, straining the relationship between the military and the American public. Consequently, the military turned to DNA profiling to identify missing personnel. Technical limitations and US society’s lingering distrust of authorities turned DNA profiling into a new battleground between the US military and prisoners of war/missing in action (POW/MIA) families. Despite the promise DNA technology seemed to offer for remains’ identification, this article argues that its success was reliant on POW/MIA families’ attitudes towards the military and politics, who demanded much more than identified remains as a means of achieving closure.

The merchant and art agent Philipp Hainhofer (1578–1647) is best known for his extraordinary art cabinets. Collaborating closely with neighbouring Augsburg artisans, Hainhofer worked to compile, collate, and market these visually and materially astounding collections to a range of elite patrons. His first commission, the Pomeranian Cabinet, was for Duke Philipp of Pomerania-Stettin in 1610, and took around seven years to complete. This article adopts a body-centred approach, arguing that in doing so, new light is shed on the ways period actors enacted their relationships with materials, objects, and other bodies. It uncovers the process through which the body of the art-lover was constructed, convening with those engaged in a shared material community through the lens of health and bodily entanglements. Hainhofer, as a merchant, diplomat, and secret agent, occupied a dubious position. Through the staging of the shared, art-loving body, he was able to create and sustain friendships, while simultaneously raising the status of the merchant through his material identification with these practices.

From 1942 to 1945, the Indian National Army (INA) and its civilian wing, the Indian Independence League (IIL), operated in Japanese-occupied Asia to prepare for wars against Britain. Led by first Rash Behari Bose and then Subhas Chandra Bose, the INA recruited members from diverse Indian communities in Asia. This article examines the spiritual training that the INA launched in Malaya in 1943 to unite Indians outside the subcontinent. Through twenty-three lectures, the spiritual training taught a strand of Indian nationalism by creating a historical narrative, which helped reproduce the Indian National Congress’s vision for India. Contrasting with existing literature that attributes the lectures solely to Chandra Bose, this article traces the lectures to the works of Behari Bose, Mohandas Gandhi, and Jawaharlal Nehru. It further argues that Behari Bose’s leadership of the IIL and the INA and the spread of Nehru’s political ideas in Malaya shaped the lectures. Accordingly, the article restores the importance of the lesser-known Behari Bose in the INA and the Indian independence struggle. More broadly, it demonstrates the relationship between violent and non-violent movements, and questions the historical memory about the anti-colonialists who worked with the Axis powers.

Though historians have often traced the evolution of LGBT ‘communities’ in the United States, they have left the genealogy of queer ideas of ‘community’ underexamined. This article begins to address this lacuna by charting the bifurcated early history of these ideas in the nation’s ‘gay capital’, San Francisco. It identifies homophile activist José Sarria’s 1961 campaign for San Francisco city supervisor as the event that introduced the notion of a ‘gay community’ to lasting effect into local homophile organizing. Sarria’s camp mobilized the idea as a resistance tool for the fight against state repression. In the following years, the concept established itself across local homophile activism. Simultaneously with the rise of ‘gay community’, some homophile leaders also developed coalitional visions of ‘community’. These were inspired by Black freedom organizing and prioritized building community with other marginalized groups. Only a mid-1960s struggle over the orientation of the country’s first homophile community centre led to a lasting sidelining of this coalitional tradition. The reconstruction of this bipartite history challenges enduring myths of a monolithically conservative homophile movement, and helps explain the subsequent success of a homonormative gay politics in the late 1960s and 1970s.

This article examines the social and political aspects of late nineteenth-century water management in Batavia (now Jakarta), the capital of the Netherlands Indies. Through a detailed analysis of how a mixture of old and new water technologies featured in the city’s public debates and decision-making, it argues that water infrastructure served as a key site of social control over the city’s diverse population. From the 1870s onwards, deep-bore artesian wells linked to public hydrants were introduced to provide a reliable and hygienic supply of clean water. This was a response to long-standing concerns over the city’s waste-blocked canals and their deleterious health effects. The article shows how these technologies came to be entwined with new, punitive social norms, enforced through both formal regulations on water use and informal complaints over wastefulness; moreover, these norms had a clear racial dimension, being directed primarily against the city’s Asian communities and repurposing long-standing stereotypes. Yet, beyond official discourses, a close reading of these debates shows that Batavia’s canals and hydrants also functioned as grassroots sites of negotiation, where different ideas – not just of water and land but of the very concept of public spaces and the colonial public sphere – met and occasionally clashed.

This article analyses industrial working-class life narratives of the 1950s to 1980s, during a time of increasing air and water pollution in Imatra, a Finnish industrial pulp and paper mill town. Many residents worked for either Enso-Gutzeit, not only the largest local employer but also Europe’s largest pulp and paper mill, or the hydropower plant, in a variety of maintenance and production roles. Using oral histories concerning working life, the article considers the sensory experiences of pollution that individuals and communities witnessed and committed. In order to protect their community, silence was used as a form of nonverbal communication for much of the post-war period to convey tolerance of environmental degradation and ecological collapse. The impacts of pollution are invisible today, which creates a unique oral history that blends past and present environmental knowledge. Informants use silences, sentences lacking subjects, laughter to communicate nonverbal embarrassment, and repetitions to share thoughts they find uncomfortable or those they consider shameful. As a microhistory of an industrial community, this study reveals how and why residents performed an acceptance of pollution by examining the at times contradictory relationship between sensory experiences of air and water pollution.

This historiographical review engages with recent works in British colonial and South Asian history that shed light on the emergence of the concept of ‘society’ or the ‘social’ in South Asia. The review explores three main areas for the study of the social concept including: scholarship on liberalism and colonial law; histories of colonial sociology and knowledge production; and materialist histories of political economy and concept formation. The review then outlines some avenues for further research, focusing particularly on questions of form, language, and translation that have largely been overlooked in existing scholarship. It suggests that while there are robust accounts of the uses of the social concept in South Asia, what is missing is a consideration of the vernacular histories of this concept, including how it came to be articulated in South Asian languages. Ultimately, the review makes the case that conceptual history must take into account both the historical transformations that produced certain concepts as well as the languages and aesthetic and documentary forms through which we come to know those concepts.

The ability to control international flows of information constitutes one of the core elements of the soft power of any modern state aspiring to exercise some level of regional or global hegemony. This phenomenon has been previously examined by those who study long-distance communications mainly in the context of the nineteenth-century telegraph or the twentieth-century broadcast. However, inquiries focusing on the analogous historical role performed by the postal service during the early modern era are much more scarce. Building upon this premise, this study examines the strategic advantages gained by the Republic of Venice through its control of the mail exchange between Europe and the Middle East – a de facto postal monopoly established during the sixteenth century. Venice deliberately subsidized this service in order to prevent the rise of potential competition. Despite the substantial cost, this was seen as an effective investment through which the republic gained a set of tangible strategic advantages. In particular, it helped to extend Venice’s relevance on the European political scene long past the point when its traditional political, economic, and naval–military power was already fading away.

Arnold J. Toynbee is considered one of the most crucial figures in the historiography of twentieth-century world history. Although Toynbee’s reputation has significantly waned since the 1950s among many professional historians in the English-speaking world, especially in Britain, some renowned world historians, such as William H. McNeill and Jürgen Osterhammel, have reassessed Toynbee as a pioneering European historian who envisaged world history beyond Eurocentrism since the emergence of the field of global and world history in the 1980s. This article reconsiders the global meaning of Toynbee’s world history beyond this historiographical narrative on Toynbee in the anglophone context by revealing that influential Japanese historians had already found significant potential in his world history in the mid-twentieth century, almost three decades before his reassessment in English-speaking academia. In particular, the article demonstrates how Japanese historians, such as Suzuki Shigetaka, Eguchi Bokurō, and Uehara Senroku, received Toynbee’s idea of world history with various motivations and historical contexts. The research also argues that, despite the differences in their receptive intentions and backgrounds, they interpreted Toynbee as a significant European intellectual who made a self-critique of conventional historical studies in Europe and demonstrated the possibility of rewriting world history beyond Eurocentric assumptions.

The Franciscan Missionaries of the Divine Motherhood (FMDM) arrived in Ireland in 1942, to establish and run Portiuncula Hospital in Ballinasloe, county Galway. This was not without its challenges and this article explores many of those challenges in the context of the construction and management of the hospital between 1942 and 1970. FMDM sisters were women in a patriarchal church and needed to also negotiate their place within the similar frameworks of the medical profession, civil service, and government, while being subject to gossip as to the work they were doing. The article is a revealing case-study of some of the global changes in medicine that had been taking place since the 1920s. It is also an example of how modern methods of healthcare were having an impact on the Irish healthcare system, with medically trained Catholic religious sisters at the forefront. The story of women religious in twentieth-century global Catholicism is a relatively unattended one. This case-study allows historians of religion to better understand the internationality of Catholic religious congregations, examining concepts of unity and disharmony, and the various efforts they made to confront but also comply with the patriarchal structures in which they found themselves.

Existing research into the deindustrialization that afflicted northern England and Scotland during the twentieth century has focused predominantly on men’s experiences of unemployment and strikes. In contrast, this article examines the relationship between women’s employment and deindustrialization through the lens of three new towns in north-west England. Skelmersdale, Runcorn, and Central Lancashire were established during the 1960s and 1970s, partly with the aim of attracting employers and workers to a region experiencing industrial decline. Competing constructions of women’s work, both paid and unpaid, informed how the towns were planned, managed, and experienced. The new towns widened employment opportunities for female workers, but they did not significantly reshape gender roles because women remained responsible for housework and childcare while men were conceptualized as breadwinners. To explore this contradiction, the article analyses archival material produced by the development corporations that planned the new towns, alongside original oral history interviews conducted with women who lived and worked in them. It argues that even in situations of deindustrialization and rising male unemployment, women’s jobs did not displace men’s. Rather, the new towns represented a continuation of and a departure from existing patterns of employment, demonstrating that state-led urban development was fraught with gendered tensions.

Soviet mass operations against a number of ethnic minorities were one of the most large-scale state-run terror campaigns in European history. The partial opening up of the formerly closed Soviet archives has had an enormous impact on the study of the Great Terror and its most secret part, ‘the national operations of the NKVD’ implemented in July 1937 to November 1938. The aim of this review is threefold. The first is to discuss the main approaches in the recent studies of the national operations of the NKVD with respect to the following topics: the role of Stalin in the dramatic turn of nationalities politics, the intent, implementation, and magnitude of the national operations; and dimensions for further research. The second aim is to examine contemporary academic discussions from the perspectives of the research project ‘Swedes, emotions, and moral diplomacy in the Great Terror. Foreign Office’s rescue operation in the Soviet Union, 1937–38’, in which the author took part. The third aim is to focus on the importance of the local context when accessing both the motives and the implementations of the national operations.

Scholars studying the Second World War animal by-products industry have underestimated the systematic nature and broad scope of German intervention. This article examines how the close co-operation between French and German veterinarians, reflecting a shared professional interest in animal slaughter and disease control, facilitated the large-scale restructuring and modernization of French carcass disposal under Nazi occupation from 1940 to 1944. Animal by-products were an important resource for Germany’s war effort. Drawing on the previously unexploited papers of Wehrmacht veterinarian Conrad Herbig and the archives of the Vichy Salvage Service, I argue that German veterinary officers, in collaboration with their French counterparts, leveraged their expertise to impose a new vision of hygienic and efficient rendering practices in France. Herbig’s experiences in the Indre-et-Loire department reveal how the Nazi occupation authorities harnessed French material and institutional resources to direct French hides, fats, and bones towards German military production, even as logistical constraints limited their ambitions. Franco-German veterinary collaboration under Vichy represented an intensification of long-term trends towards professionalization, industrial concentration, and hygienic regulation in the French meat industry. This microhistorical case-study thus sheds new light on the dynamics of the occupation and its post-war impact on French agriculture and food production.

As contemporaries noted, the long months from the Munich Crisis (autumn 1938) through to the end of the Phoney War (spring 1940) felt like a ‘war of nerves’. The battlefields were physical and material as much as psychological and imagined. Turning to sources that reveal visceral experience, we can explore the internal and internalized history of the international crisis. First, I listen to writers, politicians, academics, anthropological researchers, psychiatrists, and advertisers as one after the other they projected this overwhelming nervous disorder onto bodies and onto the body politic. In his largely forgotten Journal under the terror, 1938 (1939), the Bloomsburyite, prolific man of letters, and literary scholar F. L. Lucas emerges as a perspicacious narrator of the war of nerves, and he was both witness and victim of a world he described as filled with ‘nervous breakdowns’. Second, I exhume the casualties of this war of nerves, a group of people who exercised their bodily autonomy and self-determination to free themselves from the world in crisis. Based on a dataset of 185 cases, the ‘crisis suicides’ – ‘committed daily by people terrorised at the thought of a war’ – constituted an apparent epidemic. Together these bodies of evidence of bodily experience make a case for reframing and renaming the period, and identifying the first battle of Britain’s ‘People’s War’.

This article explores how Protestants defended the co-existence of multiple translations of the Bible into English in Elizabethan England. The matter of biblical plurality is considered through the prism of the debates surrounding bible translation which occurred throughout the 1580s between the Catholic translator of the Bible into English, Gregory Martin (c. 1542–1582), and the English Protestant polemicist William Fulke (1537/8–1589). It is contended that this debate, which has tended to be cast as a storm in a teacup, reveals how Protestants responded, innovatively, to the publication of the Catholic English New Testament. Attention is paid to how Martin attacked the existence of the many different Protestant English bible translations in circulation and, reciprocally, how Fulke defended them. This study of the Martin and Fulke debate thereby unsettles some long-standing assumptions about the combative relationship between different versions of the English Bible and it points, instead, to ways in which contemporaries might have seen the plurality of translations as spiritually and polemically advantageous. Fulke's arguments help us to comprehend how, prior to early seventeenth-century attempts to restrict the existence of multiple English bibles, some Elizabethans responded to, and even defended, the plurality of English bible translations which had come to exist.

While Stephen Greenblatt’s 1980 book, Renaissance self-fashioning: from More to Shakespeare, was methodologically innovative within the field of literary criticism, his work also grew from the roots of Jacob Burckhardt’s old cultural history, and his method of new historicism developed alongside the new cultural history. Although certain parts of Burckhardt’s arguments have been discarded, the work of Greenblatt and others has continued to build upon his foundation. Courtiership, anxiety, and the relationship between outward and interior identities, text and context, hybridity, and individuation are all useful concepts for constructing less monolithic understandings of early modern identities. With a European scale, this article traces early modern historiography and literary criticism from the nineteenth century to 2024 and introduces historical examples of identity formation from early modern England, France, Iberia, the Italian peninsula, and the Holy Roman Empire. The article reflects upon early modern examples of self-fashioning in the light of Burckhardt, the Annales, Greenblatt, and others who have contributed to our understanding of agency and identity up to the present day, arguing that these historians and literary scholars have worked together to answer questions that are fundamentally psychological in nature.

Historians have increasingly stressed the impact of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars on Britain and Ireland. Less attention, however, has been paid to the legacies of martial mobilization after 1815. Drawing on hitherto unused press and archival sources, this article assesses the implications of wartime military expansion for the music profession, and musical culture more generally, in the decades after Waterloo. It demonstrates that men and boys who honed their instrumental skills in uniform embarked on a variety of civilian musical careers, becoming instructors, wind performers, composers, and even opera singers. The article traces the post-war circulation of regimental instruments and reveals that a multitude of militia and volunteer bands remained active long after demobilization. The wartime proliferation of military bands, moreover, encouraged the subsequent spread of quasi-martial wind ensembles in wider society. Finally, the article proves that brass bands were first introduced to Britain and Ireland in a regimental guise. The influence of the military on musical culture after 1815, in short, was palpable and often profound, and manifested itself in numerous ways and settings.

This article contributes to a recent shift in the study of early modern political thought, moving away from a state-centric view of the period towards an interest in the political significance of a range of other communities. More specifically, I argue that debates about the scope of one key concept, that of societas, resulted in different visions of the relationships between a variety of human associations. To demonstrate this, I reconstruct Johannes Althusius’s theory of societas and compare it to those of several contemporaries, ranging from Renaissance Ciceronianism to Jean Bodin and Hugo Grotius. I show that Althusius provided an innovative juridical interpretation of societas, which he used to ground a conception of politics according to which all human associations, from the family to the corporation to the state, are political. This complements traditional theological interpretations of his thought, which alone cannot fully account for its distinctiveness. Althusius’s conception of politics enabled him to chart an original middle way between two options available at the time: on the one hand, the isolation of politics from social and religious life; on the other, its subordination to or full identification with other kinds of community.

Anthony Kitchin, the bishop of Llandaff between 1545 and 1563, is traditionally seen as a self-serving careerist, an unprincipled hypocrite, and a pastoral failure. He was one of only two Marian Catholic bishops to serve under Elizabeth I, and Eamon Duffy memorably jests that he ‘would doubtless have become a Hindu if required, providing he was allowed to hold on to the see of Llandaff’. But re-evaluating Kitchin’s career uncovers a man with a consistent stance that was not unusual amongst his peers, and reveals that the Elizabethan government retained serious hopes of bringing numerous Marian bishops, not just Kitchin, into conformity. Still more striking, while Kitchin has been reviled as a hypocrite for swearing the 1559 oath of supremacy, there is persuasive evidence that he did not in fact swear that oath, keeping his see only through a contingent and awkward compromise with the Elizabethan state, and that the details of this compromise were conveniently forgotten, perhaps even deliberately suppressed. Re-evaluating Kitchin significantly advances our understanding of the period by contributing to the extensive and developing historiography on Catholic conscience and loyalty to the crown, helping problematize binary distinctions between zealous Catholic resistance and craven conformity.