In the history of early modern political thought, gender is not well established as a subject. It seems that early modern politics and its philosophical underpinnings are characterized by an exclusion of women from the political sphere. This article shows that it is indeed possible to write a gendered history of early modern political thought that transcends questions of the structural exclusion of women from political participation. Through a nuanced reading of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century commentaries on Aristotle's practical philosophy, it deconstructs notions on the public/political and private/apolitical divide and reconstructs that early modern thinkers saw the relationship of husband and wife as deeply political. The article argues that it is both necessary and possible to write gender in and into the history of political thought in a historically sound and firmly contextual way that avoids anachronisms, and it shows – as Joan Scott has suggested – that gender is indeed a ‘useful category’ in the history of political thought.

This article reconsiders the gift within London's sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century livery companies. Previous research into guild gift-giving cultures has focused exclusively upon substantial bequests of money and property by mercantile elites to the ‘great twelve’ livery companies. Through charitable gifts, citizens established godly reputations and legacies, perpetuated through the guild institution. It is argued here that a rich culture of material gift-giving, hitherto overlooked by historians, also thrived within London's craft guilds. Drawing on company gift books, inventories, and material survivals from guild collections, this article examines typologies of donors and gifts, the anticipated ‘returns’ on the gift by the recipient company, and the ideal spatial and temporal contexts for gift-giving. This material approach reveals that master artisans negotiated civic status, authority, and memory through the presentation of a wide range of gifted artefacts for display and ritual use in London's livery halls. Moreover, this culture of gift-giving was so deep-rooted and significant that it survived the Reformation upheavals largely intact. Finally, the embellishment of rituals of gifting, and the synchronization of gifting and feasting rites from the second half of the sixteenth century, are further evidence for the resurgence of English civic culture in this era.

It is generally assumed that the kingless Commonwealth established in 1649 was the unforeseen consequence of the regicide: an expedient taken hesitantly and nothing more than a stop-gap. ‘Republicanism’ was a minority position even among those who remained at Westminster during the dramatic events of 1648–9: the majority remained committed to monarchical forms of government. By reappraising the surviving evidence, this article proposes a radically different account of the genesis of the Commonwealth regime. Not only were preparations already underway in the weeks before Charles I's death that helped to pave the way for government without a king, but also the decision to abolish kingship after the regicide was itself taken relatively quickly, with no discernible signs of hesitation. Even if few who defended or served the Commonwealth were republican, this need not mean that the majority were attached to monarchy. Rather, many of those who supported the regime, drawing upon the experiences and ideas of 1640s parliamentarianism, claimed that the form of government was only ever of secondary importance in comparison to its substance. They did not think kingship was inherently unlawful, but they did not believe it was absolutely necessary either.

By the time Hobbes wrote Leviathan, he was a theist, but not in the sense presumed by either side of the present-day debate concerning the sincerity of his professed theism. On the one hand, Hobbes's expressed theology was neither merely deistic, nor confined to natural theology: the Hobbesian God is not merely a first mover, but a person who counsels, commands, and threatens. On the other hand, the Hobbesian God's existence depends on being constructed artificially by human convention. The Hobbesian God is not a natural person; he exists as a person only insofar as he is by fiction represented. Like the state and pagan gods, he is an artificial person by fiction. The upshot is that Hobbes was a sincere theist and that his seventeenth-century critics were right to think that, in their sense, he was an atheist: he did not steadfastly believe in an independently existing deity who precedes human convention. Hobbes was agnostic on this question. He nevertheless believed that God is brought into being as an artificial person. This ‘personal theology’ not only involved a heretical interpretation of the Trinity, it also came to play a significant role in his moral and political philosophy.

Throughout its relatively brief existence, the English East India Company's college in Hertfordshire was hotly debated in Company headquarters, parliament, and the press. These disputes are deeply revealing of contemporary attitudes to the inter-related issues of elite education, government, ‘Britishness’, and empire. Previously, historians interested in the relationship between education and empire have concentrated largely on British attempts to construct colonial subjects, but just as important and just as controversial to contemporaries was the concomitant endeavour to create colonial officials. On a practical level, disputes in educational theory made it difficult to decide on how to train recruits who would satisfy growing demands for transparency, accountability, and merit. Furthermore, on certain points contemporaries fundamentally disagreed about which qualities an imperial official should have. These disagreements reflected deeper uncertainties, particularly regarding the ideal relationship to be fostered between the Company, Britain, and India. In short, this debate highlights the tensions, anxieties, and ambiguities surrounding reform and imperial expansion in the early nineteenth century.

This article contends that the Irish policy of both the Whig and Tory parties has received rather short shrift in the historiography surrounding Britain's decade of reform. In an attempt to rectify this gap, the article traces the emergence of the Whig policy of ‘justice to Ireland’ between 1835 and 1839; a policy championed by an emerging activist leadership within the party that promoted Catholics in Irish administration and attempted to pass substantial legislative reform. This ambitious Whig agenda upended a thirty-five-year consensus that relied on coercion to rule Ireland's recalcitrant population. Tories vehemently opposed this change, and used Irish agrarian violence – so-called ‘outrages’ – to undermine the success of the Whigs’ novel approach to governing Ireland through remedial legislation. This confrontation over Irish policy led to an 1839 House of Lords committee on Irish crime that passed a vote of censure on the Whigs’ Irish policy and nearly toppled Melbourne's government. However, the article demonstrates how the Whigs’ Irish policy was the one question that held together their big tent coalition of Whigs, English radicals, and O'Connellites, thus extending their administration for another two years.

This article sheds new light on the opening of Japan in the late nineteenth century focusing on the legalization of overseas travel and the introduction of passports. It argues that the Tokugawa shogunate introduced passports as a belated endorsement of the increasingly common practice of undercover border-crossing as it feared losing the political grip. Once the new regulation was in place, most travellers went to China or Korea as petty merchants or low-skill labourers, in part recruited by Western merchants and consuls. The foreign ministry, fearing that unrestricted emigration of labourers and mercenaries might harm the country's international reputation and political stability, limited the number of passports to distribute to the treaty ports. Japan's passport system thus focused more on regulating the overseas travel than promoting it, in contrast to the positive light in which the opening of Japan is commonly portrayed. The government largely succeeded in preventing the unwanted emigration, but never fully controlled the process because of the less vigilant port officials and the ambiguity on some of the borders' exact location. Overall, the investigation into the first two decades of the Japanese passport travellers leads to a more complex understanding of modern Japan's opening of borders.

Between the early twentieth century and the 1960s, the Indian state began to incorporate the easternmost Himalayas. This article illuminates this state-making process by examining its material and communicative culture, embodied in tour diaries. These diaries were not private reflections written during one's spare time but the compulsory output of administrative tours. Often followed by more reflective notes, their perceived insights were used to determine local or general policy changes. Drawing on a literature that sees paperwork as constitutive of bureaucracy, this article argues that tour diaries exemplified and buttressed a certain form of frontier governance, marked by itinerancy and personalization well into independence. In their historical development, their language and materiality, their administrative usage, tour diaries embodied more than anything else the contingent, spatially uneven, and fractured nature of Indian state-making in the Himalayas, revealing the importance of process geographies anchored in paperwork circulation for its sustenance. Transmitted whole or extracted into policy files, diaries tied wandering officers together in a distinctive community of practice, policies, and ideas – preserving the fiction of the frontier state as a coherent whole in uncertain circumstances. As much as through maps, regulations, and routes, the frontier was made through writing.

The history of free will has yet to be written. With few exceptions, the literature on the subject is dominated by legal and philosophical works, most of which recount the ideas of prominent thinkers or discuss hypothetical questions far removed from specific historical contexts. The following article seeks to redress the balance by tracing the debate on hypnosis in Germany from 1894 to 1936. Examining responses to hypnosis is tantamount to recording common understandings of autonomy and heteronomy, self-control and mind control, free will and automaticity. More specifically, it is possible to identify distinct philosophical positions related to the question as to whether hypnosis could surmount free will or not. The article demonstrates that the discourse often centred on the perceived struggle, located within a particular ‘personality’, between an individual's ‘character’ or ‘soul’ and the infiltration by a foreign or hostile force. While one group (compatibilists) emphasized the resilience of the ‘moral inhibitions’, another group (determinists) doubted that these were sufficient to withstand hypnosis.

The Polish mission to Liberia (1934–8) was a series of diplomatic, commercial, and scientific initiatives carried out by Poland's Maritime and Colonial League and Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Contextualizing the mission in terms of contemporary attempts to construct Poland's colonial identity, this article argues that Poland's colonial lobby imagined their presence in Liberia as a unique form of colonialism, distinct from its Western counterparts. Many participants in the mission considered Poland to have a special moral mandate in Africa by virtue of its own experience as a recently occupied nation. The grandiose visions of Liberia as a Polish colony and unfulfilled economic promises, however, contributed to the ultimate termination of the mission in 1938. The Poles’ concept of colonialism obscured their plausible objectives in Liberia and distracted them from executing their economic plan. The construction of a Polish colonial identity was a perfect means of rallying patriots around the flag and creating domestic support for Poland's maritime projects, but a colonial ideology was a double-edged sword in foreign affairs.

Labour history has been revitalized by the global turn. It has encouraged historians to look beyond national frameworks to explore issues relating to mobility and inter-territorial connection. This article, while accepting the benefits of a global approach, argues that historians should not lose sight of the factors that constrain mobility or lead to the collapse of cross-border exchanges. Singapore's dockworkers were at the forefront of the island's anti-colonial campaigns of the 1940s and 1950s. Inspired by anti-colonial movements elsewhere in the world, dockworkers drew on international discourses relating to self-determination to place their local struggles in a global context. This activism, however, coincided with the emergence of countervailing forces, including the universalization of the nation-state and the rise of state-led developmentalism. In this context, dockworkers’ internationalism came to be regarded as a threat to state sovereignty and development. As a result, once Singapore achieved independence the ruling People's Action Party encouraged dockworkers to abandon their globalized outlook in the name of modernization and nation building. Global history, then, should be as much about the rise of the national as the transnational, and the loss of connection as the forging of inter-territorial networks.

On 29 November 1814, the Austrian Emperor Francis, the Russian Tsar Alexander, and the Prussian King Frederick Wilhelm, along with 6,000 others, attended a concert in Vienna's Redouten Hall; Beethoven personally conducted three of his works: the Seventh symphony, the bombastic ‘Wellington's victory’, and a newly written cantata entitled ‘The glorious moment’. In this cantata, the figure of ‘Vienna’ sings the following words:

Oh heaven, what delight!
What spectacle greets my gaze!
All that the earth holds in high honour
Has assembled within my walls!
My heart throbs! My tongue stammers!
I am Europe – no longer one city.