How was trust created and reinforced between the inhabitants of medieval and early modern cities? And how did the social foundations of trusting relationships change over time? Current research highlights the role of kinship, neighbourhood, and associations, particularly guilds, in creating ‘relationships of trust’ and social capital in the face of high levels of migration, mortality, and economic volatility, but tells us little about their relative importance or how they developed. We uncover a profound shift in the contribution of family and guilds to trust networks among the middling and elite of one of Europe's major cities, London, over three centuries, from the 1330s to the 1680s. We examine almost 15,000 networks of sureties created to secure orphans’ inheritances to measure the presence of trusting relationships connected by guild membership, family, and place. We uncover a profound increase in the role of kinship – a re-embedding of trust within the family – and a decline of the importance of shared guild membership in connecting Londoners who secured orphans’ inheritances together. These developments indicate a profound transformation in the social fabric of urban society.

The episcopal mission of Englishman John Bale to Ireland in 1553 provides historians with a unique window into the interconnected British and Irish histories of the early English Reformation. Scholarship on Bale has long explored his life and theology in all European theatres of the Reformation in which he was involved. Yet, key features of his mission and theology remain underappreciated. Building on recent work that has contextualized Bale’s Irish mission and ecclesiology within the imperial outlook of the Edwardian regime and Reformation, the article examines Bale’s mission against the worlds of English evangelical and continental Protestant political theology he inhabited, and the mingling of Henrician and Edwardian ‘reformist’ energies in Ireland with which it intersected and clashed. It argues that, under conditions of English colonial rule and empire in Ireland, Bale expressed a political theology that, imperial by circumstance and implication, turned his spiritual vocation modelled on Christ into a receptacle for divine and princely sovereignty that set rival conceptions of royal authority, idolatry, and Anglo-Irish constitutional relations against each other. Evangelical political theology thus acquired different hues on either side of the Irish Sea, with important implications for how we understand the early English Reformation across England and Ireland.

The involvement of melancholy had the potential to undermine the authority of early modern individuals’ religious experiences, reframing their spiritual afflictions as the mere product of a distempered body. This article refines our understanding of the shifting relationship between melancholy and spiritual experience in the second half of the seventeenth century in England. Focusing on the views of Presbyterians and Independents, it explores how various interests and voices shaped attitudes to the disease throughout the challenges of growing anti-enthusiasm and post-Restoration nonconformity. By emphasizing the voices of sufferers themselves and including examination of a range of overlooked texts, it demonstrates that women and laypeople often diverged from learned views when describing their spiritual struggles. Complicating existing narratives, it suggests that sufferers from both groups avoided using melancholy as an explanatory factor in accounts of religious experience in the 1650s to ’70s, before increasingly incorporating the condition in the 1680s and ’90s. The involvement of melancholy remained fraught, however, and under continual negotiation. Bringing manuscript sources into conversation with published texts, the article argues that differences of opinion existed both between and within Presbyterian and Independent communities, as well as between those who suffered from melancholy and those who did not.

There has been debate about the extent to which the English old poor law could operate as a system of social discipline. This article looks closely at an almost completely neglected set of sources, petitions by local communities asking to stop (or cut) a pauper’s relief, to assess how far poor relief was used as a disciplinary tool. Taking 182 appeals by Lancashire townships from the Civil War to the appearance of workhouses in the county, it suggests that poor relief operated robustly as a system of labour discipline, but only weakly as a wider tool of behavioural control. There is some evidence that townships wanted to end doles to those engaged in ‘bad’ behaviour, such as excessive drinking, gambling, or insubordination, but such cases were infrequent. Far more important were attempts to stop relief where paupers could work or could support themselves through their own productive assets. In turn, townships’ focus on the ability to work suggests that ‘deserving’ poverty was understood in terms of bodily impotence, whilst the need to restrict poor relief to those who were ‘necessitous’ required officers to engage in close surveillance of the poor and their bodies.

This article explores sumptuary legislation and its enforcement in early modern Genoa. Whereas the sumptuary laws from other early modern Italian city-states partitioned society by social rank, profession, or citizenship, the laws in effect in late sixteenth-century Genoa divided the population only into men and women. Genoa therefore represents a key site for exploring gender difference through dress and adornment. Adopting a gendered, sociological, and material culture framework, this article demonstrates how sumptuary laws informed understandings of gender and gendered practices of dressing. It takes as its point of departure a ledger of sumptuary denouncements for the year 1594, and examines how Genoa’s citizens adhered to, or transgressed the gendered expectations set out by the city’s legislative structures. It argues that while prescriptions for idealized masculine and feminine comportment coloured the content and wording of the law, in daily life a spectrum of gendered identities could be enacted through clothing. This article thus advances discourse on the impact of sumptuary laws on understandings of gender in early modern Italy, and the ways in which masculine and feminine identifications were negotiated through and in dialogue with clothing.

In recent decades, historians have acknowledged the role that women played in shaping and disseminating scientific knowledge during the Enlightenment. Current scholarship also suggests that fashion was a means through which haptic, economic, and practical knowledge was shared among women. This article focuses on one particular fashion accessory – the artificial flower – to explore its contribution to our understanding of women’s knowledge of botany in eighteenth-century France. An analysis of the receipts preserved in the credit records of France’s most famous fashion merchant, Marie-Jeanne (Rose) Bertin (1747–1813), demonstrates high levels of specificity in the flowers that women chose to adorn their outfits. Seventy-five different types of flowers are mentioned using their vernacular names, suggesting that knowledge about a wide variety of flowers was exchanged between fashion merchants and their clients during conversations about clothing. This article therefore casts the fashion merchant’s shop as a site of botanical knowledge generation and exchange.

The caudillo strongman remains emblematic of Latin American authoritarianism, but scholarship has seldom reflected on the semantic shifts that this concept suffered over time and its implications for the history of political thought. Numerous political experiments have been marginalized from historical and state-building narratives as the irrelevant work of caudillos, such as the short-lived Rio Grandense Republic in southern Brazil (1836–45). By explaining the Rio Grandense caudillos’ engagement with constitutionalism, this article argues that ‘caudillo’ can be a useful category of analysis if historically contextualized. The article thus reconsiders the history of political thought and state-building in Latin America and beyond in the age of revolutions, suggesting the serious need to scrutinize ‘failed’ states and revolutions. This argument is pursued in three steps. First, the article describes shifting understandings and usages of ‘caudillo’ in nineteenth-century Brazil and neighbouring River Plate states. Second, it analyses the Rio Grandense Republic’s 1842–3 constituent assembly and the novel electoral procedures it employed. Third, it examines the never-promulgated constitutional draft produced by its assemblymen. This constitutional draft is then compared to contemporary River Plate and Brazilian constitutions and its rejection is explained through the assemblymen’s divergent understandings of constitutionalism and democracy.

In 1881, Patrick Ford, the Irish-American nationalist editor of the New York Irish newspaper The Irish World and American Industrial Liberator, published The criminal history of the British empire, a collection of five letters that he had written to William Gladstone. In The criminal history, Ford constructed a comprehensive account of British imperial history, beginning with England’s conquest of Ireland, before detailing the colonization of North America, Britain’s participation in the transatlantic slave trade, the American Revolution, British rule in India, the opium wars, and Britain’s contemporary colonization of Africa. This article contributes to scholarship on American views of the British empire in the post-bellum United States. In exploring how Ford constructed a Manichean interpretation of world history, where the British imperial project devastated every region it invaded, the article analyses Ford’s reasons for writing and publishing the letters that formed The criminal history. Finally, the article shows that Ford’s central purpose was to foster a visceral hatred of the British empire among his Irish-American readership, to maintain a commitment to their ethnic heritage as proud Irish people, and to encourage his readers that a better future would soon arrive, when the British empire was finally a relic of the past.

This article maps the memories of Gĩkũyũ women and girls who were forcibly concentrated during the 1950s emergency period in Kenya. Using Britain’s strategy of ‘villagization’, it considers the unique forms of surveillance and violence deployed against women understood as the ‘backbone’ of the anti-colonial Mau Mau movement. By analysing colonial records and women’s oral testimonies, the article examines civilian relationships to coercively designed counterinsurgency environments. It situates these ‘villages’ into a longer tradition of Britain’s carceral landscape across colonial states, offering fresh insights to established histories of violence, gender, and colonialism.

It is more than thirty years since Ayatollah Khomeini, the supreme leader of Iran, issued a fatwa (religious decree) calling for the execution of the British-Indian novelist Salman Rushdie, whose third novel, The Satanic Verses, was published in 1988. But the ‘Rushdie Affair’ has yet to be subject to a sustained analysis by historians. Journalists and political scientists continue to focus on the fatwa, despite the fact the protests against the novel in Britain – where The Satanic Verses is primarily set – predated Khomeini’s decree by two months. This article fills this lacuna by shifting attention onto the emergence of the campaign against The Satanic Verses in Britain and in Bradford especially, where a copy of Rushdie’s ‘blasphemous’ novel was infamously burnt by Muslim protestors. It shows how an earlier set of campaigns fought in Bradford by Muslim activists paved the way for the city to become a key site of protest against both Rushdie and his novel. The protests that greeted The Satanic Verses were shaped by the contradictory nature of Britain’s emergence as a multicultural society, I argue, and the political complexities thrown up by the hybridized milieu Rushdie had sought to use his fiction to evoke.

In 1952, while working on my Ph.D. at the University of Michigan, two men from the Department of State came to our apartment and picked up my passport and that of my husband, Chandler Davis. In 1962, Chandler was finally allowed to immigrate to Canada with his family and take up a professorship at the University of Toronto. The ten years in between were packed with politics: Chandler’s refusal to answer questions before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC); his firing from the University of Michigan; his court case challenging HUAC; his six months’ prison term for contempt of Congress; and throughout, his inability to get a tenure-track appointment at any American university. I myself was not called to confess my political views or memberships but investigations against Chandler were based on the publication of Operation mind – a pamphlet which I had co-authored together with Elizabeth Douvan and which is presented here. I was without a passport and not part of a university community for years. This article reflects on the impact of this experience of persecution on my work as a historian, and the relationship between politics, activism, and what Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre called ‘the historian’s craft’ and ‘consciousness’.