The purpose of this article is to explore the political importance of Neapolitan Carnival and the government's involvement in steering and controlling the celebrations at various historical junctions during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is particularly important to note in this context the ritual pillages of cuccagne staged by the rulers. The sponsorship of such Carnivalesque entertainments quelled the rulers' fears from popular rebellion and disorder as much as they fed popular needs for bread and circuses; and it is in this context of maintaining intact the city's fragile social balances that we should interpret the ubiquity of these violent spectacles in early modern Naples.

Explanations of local interconfessional relations in post-revolutionary England tend to highlight the role of Catholic quiescence and compromise in allowing Protestants and Catholics to ‘get along’. By examining the interactions of a Catholic family who were far from quiescent in their religious and political practice, this article suggests that these explanations may overemphasize the compromise of religious minorities, obscuring the importance of the wider local context to the shape of interconfessional relations. The subjects of this study, the Rookwoods of Stanningfield, Suffolk, were active in expression of Catholic religion and its political implications. Contrary to patterns suggested elsewhere, the social and economic interactions of this family with their neighbours illustrate that such ardent Catholicism was not enough to prevent cordial relations with local Protestants. The social and economic importance of the Rookwoods within their community is used to make suggestions as to why they were accepted on the local level against a backdrop of wider anti-Catholic polemic. The example of the Rookwoods implies a need to explore the broader factors which shaped the underlying balance of power on a local level before it is possible to understand the nature of compromises that allowed for peaceful co-existence.

Sri Lanka's kingdom of Kandy fell to the British in 1815 and a rebellion in its name was defeated two years later. Across the next three decades, islanders took up religious ceremonies, legal concepts, and regal traditions formerly linked to Kandy's king and his court. These reappropriations were responses to efforts by the state to control Sri Lanka: expressions of kingship reassembled in particular ways to resist specific British incursions. Critically, islanders situated these activities in historical, colonial, and global contexts, manipulating transoceanic and imperial networks. Although they invariably failed, episodes of reappropriation bemused colonists with their complexities and globalisms and gradually subverted British autocracy, the form of imperial governance in Sri Lanka. Autocracy then gave way to more regularized modes of rule. Bringing together three separate examples, this article disputes an important argument about Sri Lanka's insurgent national character and reveals islanders’ elaborate responses to the incursions of imperialism. More broadly, it suggests that such episodes should be viewed as creative instances of resistance that deployed networks, practices, and ideas and became enmeshed with the development of the state through their influence over colonial governance. This locates aspects of imperial change within the Indian Ocean world.

In this article, I consider Polynesian genealogies, which took the form of epic poems composed and recited by specialist genealogists, and were handed down orally through generations of Polynesians. Some were written down in the nineteenth century, reaching an English-speaking audience through a number of works largely neglected by historians. In recent years, some anthropologists have downplayed the possibility of learning anything significant about Polynesian thought through English-language sources, but I show that there is still fresh historical insight to be gained in demonstrating how genealogies came to interact with the traditions of outsiders in the nineteenth century. While not seeking to make any absolute claims about genealogy itself, I analyse a wide body of English-language literature, relating chiefly to Hawai‘i, and see emerging from it suggestions of a dynamic Polynesian oral tradition responsive to political, social, and religious upheaval. Tellingly, Protestant missionaries arriving in the islands set their own view of history against this supposedly irrelevant tradition, and in doing so disagreed with late nineteenth-century European and American colonists and scholars who sought to emphasize the historical significance of genealogy. Thus, Western ideas about history found themselves confounded and fragmented by Polynesian traditions.

This article considers a particular moment in world history when an instant of epoch-making triumph in the non-West – Japan's defeat of Russia in 1905 – coincided with a period of intense national anxiety in Britain in the wake of the South African War (1899–1902). One outcome of this historical intersection was the emergence in Britain of a euphoric ‘cult of Japan’ that saw many Edwardians, obsessed with the idea of ‘efficiency’, deploy Japan as both a referent for British shortcomings and a model for reform. The article asks why proponents of ‘efficiency’ – most of them ardent imperialists – deemed it acceptable, even strategically advantageous, in such domestic debates to draw upon examples from Japan – an ‘Oriental’ race and former protégé – in apparent contradiction of Western supremacism. The article contends that Britain's emulative attitudes were underpinned by an emergent plural conception of ‘civilization’, which appraised Japan's attainment of civilization as consistent with Western standards whilst at the same time recognizing elements of Japanese particularity – an outlook that justified reciprocal learning.

Via an examination of the Labour party's approach to by-election campaigning in Scotland between the fall of the first Labour administration in October 1924 and the party's return to office in May 1929, this article explores the changing horizons of British radicalism in an era of mass democracy. While traditional depictions of interwar politics as a two-party contest in which political allegiances were shaped primarily by social class have increasingly been questioned, accounts of Labour politics in this period have focused chiefly on national responses to the challenges posed by the expanded franchise. In contrast, this article considers local experiences, as provincial participation and autonomy, particularly in candidate selection and electioneering, came to be viewed as an impediment to wider electoral success, and political debate coalesced around attempts to speak for a political nation that was, as the focus on Scotland reveals, indisputably British. Often portrayed as evidence of ideological divisions, such internal quarrels had crucial spatial features, and reflected a conflict between two models of political identity and participation: one oppositional in outlook, local in loyalty, and rooted in the radical tradition, the other focused upon electoral concerns and Labour's national standing.

In September 1937, Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler met in Germany. Millions of ostensibly enthusiastic Germans welcomed the Duce. Here were the world's first two fascist dictators, purportedly united in solidarity, representing the ‘115 million’ Germans and Italians against the Western powers and Bolshevism. Most historians have dismissed the 1937 dictators’ encounter as insignificant because no concrete political decisions were made. In contrast, I explore this meeting in terms of the confluence of culture and politics and argue that the meeting was highly significant. Its choreography combined rituals of traditional state visits with a new emphasis on the personality of both leaders and their alleged ‘friendship’, emblematic of the ‘friendship’ between the Italian and German peoples. Seen through this lens, the meeting pioneered a new style of face-to-face diplomacy, which challenged the culture of liberal internationalism and represented the aim of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany to create a New Order in Europe. At the same time, analysis of this meeting reveals some deep-seated tensions between both regimes, an observation that has significant implications for the study of fascist international collaboration.

A renewed interest in aspects of high politics among historians who subscribe to the ‘new political history’ has coincided with the embrace by some political scientists of interpretivism as a method for understanding how beliefs and traditions impact on British political life. In order to examine the potential synergies between these two developments, this article utilizes a form of ‘historical interpretivism’ to study the beliefs and actions of senior civil servants. In 1980, the British government released a Memorandum of Guidance for Officials Appearing before Select Committees – known ever since as the ‘Osmotherly’ rules – to help civil servants navigate the stresses of appearing before parliamentary committees. This article analyses the civil service files in the decade leading up to the publication of the Osmotherly rules to reveal how senior civil servants sought to reconcile their interpretations of Westminster tradition with the need to respond to the demands of the ‘open government’ agenda. The article argues that studying the narratives which guide the beliefs of individual civil servants and their political masters can help political historians and political scientists alike analyse the power of tradition in shaping political action.

The concept of coming to terms with the past originated in post-1945 West Germany but such historical therapy is evident in all the belligerent countries. In that process, the two world wars are intricately connected, each seen refractively through the prism of the other. This article focuses on Britain whose national obsession with the two world wars is particularly acute. The first and second sections suggest that British public discourse has been able to construct a satisfying narrative of 1939–45 but not of 1914–18, meaning a narrative that has both a clear beginning, middle, and end and also a stark moral meaning. Viable narratives draw on the events themselves, the words used to conceptualize them, and the interpretations of 'instant' histories and memoirs. The third section argues that the elevation of 1939–45 in national discourse as our ‘finest hour’ (Churchill) has aggravated the problematic nature of 1914–18 for the British. In the wake of Brexit, the last section argues that Britain – unlike France and Germany – has found it difficult to move on from the era of the two world wars by locating these conflicts in a more positive narrative of the twentieth century as the eventual triumph of European integration.

This essay surveys the wave of new literature on early modern migration and assesses its impact on the Dutch golden age. From the late sixteenth century, the Netherlands developed into an international hub of religious refugees, displaced minorities, and labour migrants. While migration to the Dutch Republic has often been studied in socio-economic terms, recent historiography has turned the focus of attention to its many cultural resonances. More specifically, it has been noted that the arrival of thousands of newcomers generated the construction of new patriotic narratives and cultural codes in Dutch society. The experience of civil war and forced migration during the Dutch revolt had already fostered the development of a national discourse that framed religious exile as a heroic experience. In the seventeenth century, the accommodation of persecuted minorities could therefore be presented as something typically ‘Dutch’. It followed that diaspora identities and signs of transnational religious solidarity developed into markers of social respectability and tools of cultural integration. The notion of a ‘republic of the refugees’ had profound international implications, too, because it shaped and justified Dutch interventions abroad.