What is the history of science? How has it changed over the course of the twentieth century? And what does the future hold for the discipline? This ‘Retrospect’ provides an introduction to the historiography of science as it developed in the Anglophone world. It begins with the foundation of the Cambridge History of Science Committee in the 1940s and ends with the growth of cultural history in the 2000s. At the broadest level, it emphasizes the need to consider the close relationship between history and the history of science. All too often the historiography of science is treated separately from history at large. But as this essay shows, these seemingly distinct fields often developed in relation to one another. This essay also reveals the ways in which Cold War politics shaped the history of science as a discipline. It then concludes by considering the future, suggesting that the history of science and the history of political thought would benefit from greater engagement with one another.

The implicit view in many studies of Renaissance culture is that only the very wealthy were able actively to participate in, and to influence, the changing market for consumer goods. However, in recent years there has been an increasing awareness of the importance of studying the material culture of the non-elite. Building on the work of historians such as Sandra Cavallo, Paula Hohti, and Isabella Palumbo Fossati Casa, this article explores the items within the dotal inventories of the wives and daughters of artisans in sixteenth-century Verona. Through an analysis of 100 inventories, it will be argued that during the sixteenth century, artisans and their families played an active role in the burgeoning market for consumer goods. Even in provincial cities such as Verona, artisans were able to own vast numbers of commodities, which were at once practical, luxurious, and devotional, that functioned to increase both the comfort and splendour of the household. Dotal inventories are an underused source; however, this article will demonstrate how they can shed light on the material culture of the non-noble classes in the Renaissance.

The article examines the enduring phenomenon of double monasticism, the type of religious organization whereby a single monastic unit combined a male and a female community that followed the same rule, recognized the authority of the same superior, and functioned within the boundaries of the same monastic compound or in close proximity to each other, but not in shared quarters. After centuries of evolution since late antiquity, double monasteries effectively ceased to exist in the Latin West by the high middle ages, but demonstrated remarkable staying powers in the sphere of historic Byzantine cultural influences, particularly in Orthodox Eastern Europe and Christian Middle East, where this archaic type of monastic institution survived into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Based on previously unexplored archival material from the Orthodox lands of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and later the Ukrainian Hetmanate, a semi-autonomous state ruled by elective officers who recognized the tsar of Muscovy as their suzerain, the article analyses the place of kinship structures, economic and political factors, legal frameworks, and the role of the imperial state in the evolution and ultimate decline of the double monastery.

In 1626, after losing a bitterly fought parliamentary election in Canterbury, Thomas Scott wrote Canterburie cittizens. Initially, he planned to present it to the House of Commons, but the text quickly became too lengthy and, most importantly, too controversial in its assessments. Scholars can only be glad that he produced such an extensive account of the contest. His book allows us to see how the ‘Rule-alls’ on the corporation, dominated by brewers and innkeepers, struggled against Scott's humbler supporters. As Scott makes abundantly clear, this contest was not a result of any chance misunderstanding; rather it stemmed from long-standing divisions within the city which emerged at the 1621 elections and continued well into the Civil War. For days before the election, a group of godly ministers sought to rally votes for Scott, while the ‘Rule-alls’ systematically bullied voters into line. Consequently, although Scott had the largest numbers of supporters at the election, some were too frightened to voice their support loudly. After discussing this episode in detail, the article will reassess the literature on early Stuart elections and particularly, Mark Kishlansky's 1986 book, Parliamentary selections.

‘Theory’ is taken for granted as an object of historical study, especially in relation to the history of political thought, and most historiography proceeds as if little were lost by construing authors such as Aristotle, Machiavelli, and Smith as ‘theorists’. This article argues that the costs are likely to be high, and that in consequence ‘theory’ ought not to be considered a generic category capable of neutrally describing a given piece of thinking from the past. On the one hand, ascribing theoretical argument can obscure the nature of rival idioms for making claims regarding political life, such as biblical criticism, the common law, and ‘office talk’. On the other hand, the evidence suggests that the ‘political theorist’, as an avowed identity, only emerged in Britain late in the eighteenth century, tentatively and under the force of peculiar pressures. It follows that it will rarely be appropriate to use the term before c. 1800, and considerable caution will still be necessary when using the label in the post-1800 period. Abiding by this discipline is likely to lead to new discoveries in what has been a flat terrain of ‘political theory’.

In early modern England, spectral figures were regular visitors to the world of the living and a vibrant variety of beliefs and expectations clustered around these questionable shapes. Yet whilst historians have established the importance of ghosts as cultural resources that were used to articulate a range of contemporary concerns about worldly life, we know less about the social and personal dynamics that underpinned the telling, recording, and circulation of ghost stories at the time. This article therefore focuses on a unique set of manuscript sources relating to apparitions in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England to uncover a different vantage point. Drawing on the life-writing and correspondence of the antiquarian who collected the narratives, it lays bare concerns about familial relations and gender that ghost stories were bound up with. Tracing the way that belief in ghosts functioned at an individual level also allows the recovery of the personal religious sensibilities and spiritual imperatives that sustained and nourished continuing belief in ghosts. This subjective angle demonstrates that ghost stories were closely intertwined with processes of grieving and remembering the dead, and they continued to be associated with theological understandings of the afterlife and the fate of the soul.

Among all the paper ephemera surviving from eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain, the humble Methodist ticket has attracted little attention from scholars and collectors. Issued quarterly to members as a testimonial to religious conduct, many still exist, reflecting the sheer quantity produced by 1850, and the significance of keeping practices, where Methodist habits were distinctive. This article explores first the origin and spread of tickets primarily within British Methodism, but also noting its trans-oceanic contexts. Apparently inconsequential objects, they shaped experience and knowledge, illuminating eighteenth-century religious life, female participation, and plebeian agency. Discussion then turns to patterns of saving and memorialization that from the 1740s preserved Methodists’ tickets. Such practices extended the lifecycle of the individual ticket and created the accidents of its survival, giving it new uses as an institutional resource. In recovering the dead, it acquired nostalgic value, but other capacities were lost and forgotten. The ticket's origins, uses, and preservation intersect with major historical and historiographical currents to complicate established narratives of print, urban association, and commerce, and to present alternative understandings of collecting.

The British wrote and read a large quantity of fictional depictions of future wars and invasions in the period between 1871 and 1914, imagining the various ways in which a great war might look before the real conflict broke out. This article outlines the ways in which this form of literature described a British world united across time and space. The stories have traditionally been read as indicative of a societal fear of invasion, of imperial decline, or of the dangers of revolutionary upheaval. The article argues that the stories’ popularity can instead be traced to the way they included their readers in the experience of invasion and conflict, and how they were well suited to the era of modern mass newspapers. The article therefore concludes that earlier interpretations of how readers engaged with such fiction has underestimated how a varied readership could view the stories as entertaining spectacles where they were invited to participate. As such, the article offers a new interpretation of an important literary genre as well as of British pre-war political culture.

By focusing on the history of white ants in colonial South Asia, this article shows how insects were ubiquitous and fundamental to the shaping of British colonial power. British rule in India was vulnerable to white ants because these insects consumed paper and wood, the key material foundations of the colonial state. The white ant problem also made the colonial state more resilient and intrusive. The sphere of strict governmental intervention was extended to include both animate and inanimate non-humans, while these insects were invoked as symbols to characterize colonized landscapes, peoples, and cultures. Nonetheless, encounters with white ants were not entirely within the control of the colonial state. Despite effective state intervention, white ants did not vanish altogether, and remained objects of everyday control until the final decade of colonial rule and after. Meanwhile, colonized and post-colonial South Asians used white ants to articulate their own distinct political agendas. Over time, white ants featured variously as metaphors for Islamic decadence, British colonial exploitation, communism, democratic socialism, and, more recently, the Indian National Congress. This article argues that co-constitutive encounters between the worlds of insects and politics have been an intrinsic feature of British colonialism and its legacies in South Asia.

This article examines the memory of the Great War and the underexplored topic of morale during the Phoney War, and contributes to, and connects, their historiographies. Analysis of previously unexamined Mass Observation (MO) material confirms and qualifies some of the concerns about morale that MO expressed at the time. It also reveals that many Britons looked backwards to the Great War during the Phoney War, whether they had lived through the Great War or not, and their memories and understandings of the Great War informed their attitudes to the Second World War. Memories of wartime trauma were just one facet of the varied legacy of the Great War that Britons drew upon. Importantly, Britons of different ages drew upon post-war representations and personal and vicarious experiences to different extents, but those who were able to typically ascribed influence to personal rather than cultural memories of the Great War. This complicates the assumption that the latter determined Britons’ responses to the outbreak of the Second World War and contributes to understandings of both the reception and influence of cultural representations of the Great War, and the place of the Great War in the subjective worlds of Britons during the Second World War.

The National Family Planning Programme (NFPP) was launched in Ghana in May 1970. It was a tool to implement the 1969 Population Policy Paper, which the military government, the National Liberation Council (NLC), had written with the aid of Ford Foundation advisers. The policy paper reiterated international ‘overpopulation’ discourses that pushed for national planning to stem population growth, especially in ‘developing’ countries. Indeed, it constituted an example of development planning. It discursively linked Ghana's prosperity, and modernity, to stemming rapid population growth through fertility limitation. When the NFPP was launched by the Progress Party (PP) government in 1970, its focus was to implement the population policy by limiting population growth through curbing fertility. International discourses of development and population, as well as the specific interventions of organizations such as the Ford Foundation, the Population Council, and the International Planned Parenthood Federation, shaped Ghana's family planning story. However, choices over the implementation of family planning were ultimately linked to governments’ modernization and development projects and ideologies. Different approaches to family planning by the Nkrumah, NLC, and PP governments highlight the fact that family planning was ultimately political, but legitimized by development discourses of global and local origin.

Edmund Burke is difficult to classify. Born in Ireland in 1730, he entered parliament in 1765 having already achieved literary distinction for several philosophical works, including On the origins of the sublime and beautiful (1757). His subsequent career as a Whig statesman, politician, and reformer spanned the tumultuous decades of the late eighteenth century and culminated, less than a decade before his death, in his famous polemic against the French Revolution, Reflections on the revolution in France (1790). Over the course of his life, Burke opined with such frequency on so many topics that the nature of his ‘philosophy’ remains an open question, and scholars continue to offer strikingly different interpretations of his life and legacies. ‘Burke's legacy to history’, historian Richard Bourke summarized, ‘has been a complicated affair’.