The Irish Land War was a pivotal conflict in the history of liberal political thought. With significant impacts on both sides of the Atlantic, events in Ireland were about more than Irish self-determination. Heavily reliant on a discourse of natural right, and asserting a relationship between land ownership and democratic-republican citizenship, the Land War provided a vehicle for popular radical opposition to an increasingly positivist liberalism. This article examines the rationales and political assumptions underlying the demand for land, and how such arguments catalysed an intellectual response among liberal political thinkers. Particular moral and metaphysical ideas about the distinctiveness of land allowed agrarian and labour radicals to reassert individualized but non-possessive rights to natural resources. Rooted in a materialist politics of the human body, this purposive conception of land posed a significant threat to claims for private property, social order, and the ameliorative authority of the state, pressing both liberal and conservative thinkers away from unstable notions of individual rights. The crisis over Irish land helped to shift the terrain of political argument away from questions of participation and popular power, and toward amelioration and public welfare.

In 1863, Emperor Tewodros II of Abyssinia (present-day Ethiopia and Eritrea) took a British consul hostage; five years later, the British sent a punitive expedition. This military expedition continued the brutal tradition of earlier ones and shaped later campaigns in Sudan and West Africa in the 1890s. Typically, a large contingent of non-military personnel accompanied these expeditions and the 1868 expedition to Maqdala was no different. What was unique for Maqdala was the inclusion of a member of staff from the British Museum. We argue that a letter from Charles Thomas Newton, keeper of the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities, to Sir Roderick Murchison, the president of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS), illustrates that the plunder of cultural heritage was planned. We also argue that the plunder did not go to plan. The inclusion of a man from the museum made this expedition unique in the museum's history. The acquisition of these objects through colonial violence constitutes a strong moral reason for their repatriation from the British Museum and the numerous institutions in which they are dispersed. Understanding the planning involved in their plunder illustrates the entanglement of politics and imperialism with scientific and cultural institutions that constituted the backbone of Victorian Britain.

The literature on monetary history has tended to present as ‘revolutionary’ the switch from barter and slave money to the introduction of paper money in regions like West Africa, while describing monetary reform processes in Britain, North America, and other Western capital markets as ‘evolutionary’. In part, the resulting tension comes from believing that colonial currency systems were imposed by the colonial states, while those that emerged elsewhere did so as a result of private transactions involving individual market participants. When read concurrently, four books published recently advance our understanding of the differences between theories that explain the emergence of money as a result of private transactions and those which describe the importance of state involvement in introducing and maintaining currency systems. These works highlight how closely similar the emergence of a modern currency system was in Britain, the United States, and several parts of Africa. By ‘modern’, I am referring here to currency systems that ultimately led to single national currencies which eventually came to be managed by central banks.

This article argues that projects to make Britain's imperial history visible to the public through the display of statues, the establishment of a history museum, and the renovation of historical markers solidified a colonial narrative about the British empire's permanence in India during the first two decades of the twentieth century, decades in which anticolonial unrest threatened the British occupation of the subcontinent. The monumental scale expressed permanence. An imperial aesthetic linked the cities important to showcasing the empire in Calcutta, New Delhi, and London. Contrary to mainstream assumptions that commemorations should be preserved for the sake of documenting history, these markers enacted a British story of triumph at a moment when mass campaigns against British rule were occurring. Coming at the end of a long nineteenth century of statue mania, when many European nations installed memorials to national heroes, the installation of monuments in India presented a colonialist public history of events such as the Black Hole incident of 1757 or the rebellions of 1857. Drawing from Viceroy George Curzon's ambitions in historical preservation and monumentalizing, the article shows how he stabilized a British narrative of India amid anticolonial campaigns of protest.

While discussion of eugenics and biopolitics during the Third Reich has largely focused upon the regime's most destructive and genocidal policies, this article concentrates on Nazi ‘special schools’ and ‘elite schools’ as a crucial sphere of quasi-eugenic thought and praxis, drawing attention to education as a previously under-researched category of intervention in the history of modern biopolitics. The article also sheds new light on the racialized nature of the Nazi ‘national community’ (the Volksgemeinschaft), and contributes to recent debates on the Third Reich's status as a ‘racial state’ which suggest that the National Socialist regime was driven less by fanatical adherence to racial ideology, and more by a mixture of anthropological and eugenic racism, combined with productivist pragmatism. The two case-studies draw attention to less familiar corners of the National Socialist pedagogical landscape, covering both extremes of the spectrum of biological selection in education, from the negative, eugenic policies applied to supposedly ‘abnormal’ pupils at the so-called ‘special schools’ (Hilfsschulen), to the ‘positive’ biological selection of elite-school applicants at the National Political Education Institutes (Nationalpolitische Erziehungsanstalten, NPEA), the regime's principal training institutions for the future elite of the Third Reich.

Laying the groundwork for a new way to think through the history of British anti-apartheid activity, this article examines the liminal space between anti-racist and feminist activity through a case-study of Leeds Women Against Apartheid. Founded in 1986, LWAA were comprised of a dedicated nucleus of activists, and were concerned with imbuing international solidarity with a tangible meaning. To LWAA, solidarity had a quantifiable basis that could be articulated through the collection of material aid and the raising of funds. The first attempt to ‘gender’ the history of the British Anti-Apartheid Movement, this article argues for the importance of reconceptualizing women's activism, whilst also reflecting on the ‘value’ ascribed to their political engagement. As the example of LWAA shows, by organizing from an ‘autonomous outside position’, the group did so as a prosaic reaction to the realities of working with a masculinist movement. Furthermore, as is shown, while the movement may have been united by a commitment to anti-racism, matters of sexual equality were certainly understood as secondary, and were seen – on both the national and local level – as an unwanted interpolation. In a broader sense then, the article also reflects on the ‘problem’ of gender in progressive social movements.

This article recognizes the significance of commercial entertainment producers in early modern England operating outside of London. In doing so, it offers fresh methodological approaches for understanding pre-modern social status. I explore the geographical and social places of independent bearwards – individuals who kept bears for the commercial sport of baiting. Regional figures involved in entertainment production have been little explored and left behind frustratingly few biographical details. Yet three generations of one family – the Whitestones of Ormskirk in Lancashire (1610s through the 1630s) – do leave substantial surviving documentary evidence about their activities, assets, and networks. I use the Whitestones's probate inventories and wills and their and their neighbours’ court depositions and petitions to offer for the first time a holistic appraisal of the material, economic, and cultural circumstances of the bearward. By stepping inside the households and communities of several generations of independent entertainment producers, we can appreciate their complex and variable social status and the role of commercial recreation in social mobility. I finish by considering the human–animal relationships that underpinned the bearward's place in early modern England, offering fresh evidence of bears’ living arrangements and a theoretical framework for discussing their exploitation in the blood sport industry.

Taking a global approach to the American Civil War from the vantage of China, this article explores the nineteenth-century transnational connections and disconnections that linked the American community there to distant diplomatic crises unfolding in the Atlantic. Such episodes as the raiding of the Confederate privateer Alabama and the Trent Affair reached China's Americans through newspaper articles and correspondence that described an Atlantic theatre dominated by the spirit of war. Such reports had an ambiguous effect in China. On the one hand, they undermined American mercantile enterprises that had been poised to expand into China's interior. On the other, they created only ephemeral ripples of discontent amongst a wider Anglo-American community ultimately bound together by common interests and a sense of racial and cultural solidarity. I argue that while rumour and speculation were powerful forces capable of crippling the United States’ merchant marine, colonial society in ports such as Hong Kong proved surprisingly resistant to metropolitan socio-political crises. Through the central case-study of the Alabama and related debates sustained in 1860s China, this article accordingly explores the extent to which (semi)colonial societies were susceptible to or insulated from metropolitan crises.

In the European tradition, political emotion in the form of individual and collective glory was usually constrained by norms of legitimate political conduct defined by public virtue. This article describes an alternative relationship between glory and political reason by reconstructing the political thought of V. D. Savarkar, the architect of Hindu nationalism. The article argues that the relational concepts of glory and humiliation were at the heart of actualizing ‘Hindu-ness’ or Hindutva as a sovereign political category. The genealogy and development of Hindu nationalism is traced from the formative space of the colonial prison during Savarkar's incarceration from 1911 to 1937, the ideology's subsequent refining and dissemination, to its final form after Partition in 1947. Supplementing Savarkar's political treatises and histories, this article is the first to analyse his poetry as political thought. Together, these writings show how scriptural Hindu concepts like the gunas and prakriti were appropriated to justify a fraught majoritarian unity defined against endogenous shame sanctions and exogenous humiliation. In order to achieve this, political reason was yoked to a perspectivist history enabling Hindu self-overcoming, which was personified by communal heroes who embodied a passionate Hindu will to power.

The article explores the post-1945 discourse around Italian war crimes committed in Ethiopia from 1935 to 1942. Although Italians largely escaped prosecutions after the Second World War, the article demonstrates how an international controversy – the appointment and dismissal of a former general of the Italian army as governor of Somalia in 1949 – forced a reappraisal of Italy's imperial, fascist, and wartime past. Exploring this discourse is important for three reasons. First, it shows that, contrary to long-held assumptions, questions related to war crimes and empire were part of Italy's public debate after 1945. Second, it challenges the notion of national forgetting of the imperial past in post-war Italy. Third, it helps us better understand the multiple and subtle connections between empire and international legal order in the interwar and the early post-war period. It shows that arguments based on race, which drew heavily on fascist rhetoric and were made within rather than outside the law, served to justify violations of international legal conventions before similar issues were raised during the wars of decolonization of the 1950s and 1960s.

Studying the food practices of one vast and prominent Irish household reveals a complex history of consumption, status, and power in sixteenth-century Europe. This article is a close analysis of the little studied but unusually detailed household accounts of William Fitzwilliam, lord deputy of Ireland during 1572–5 and 1588–94. It first discusses how early modern historians have probed similar records and how these examples can be interpreted. The following sections examine the specific foods consumed at Dublin Castle and the high cost, distinctive rhythms, and deep symbolism of grand-scale dining at the viceroy's primary residence. This study of the everyday life of one of the most powerful officeholders in England and Ireland offers fresh perspectives on the region's political history. It also adds to the burgeoning study of Irish consumption, showing that the country was connected to continental developments. More than an Irish story, this article offers evidence of Europe-wide changes, like the elaboration of courtly cuisine and the shifting associations of foodstuffs, and how these changes were filtered through local circumstances. It suggests too how historians can make productive use of household accounts, sources well suited to comparison and combination with other disciplinary approaches.

In this historiographical review, I analyse recent works on the history of economic growth and provide a starting point for thinking about how this literature fits together as a discrete field of research. The questions being asked in these texts are relatively new, and as of yet no attempt has been made to identify the major themes that are driving this research. In putting these works into dialogue with each other, across the disciplinary boundaries of history, ecology, anthropology, economics, and political science, we can see that a new subfield of academic inquiry is emerging. Driven by concerns over climate change and rising economic inequality, this new research aims to understand the obsession with economic growth that has shaped so much of our contemporary world.

The American publisher Charles Francis Hall had no previous experience with the Arctic before he travelled there in 1860. Yet, Hall transformed himself into an Arctic authority, and was given command of a United States governmental funded expedition in 1870. Hall was only able to undertake his work in the Arctic because of his relationship with Tookoolito and Ipiirvik, a married Inuit couple from Cumberland Sound, and this article examines the structural processes that enabled Hall to rescript their expertise as his own. Tookoolito and Ipiirvik travelled with Hall for over a decade, a relationship where the unequal power-dynamic was continuously transformed and renegotiated in the United States and the Arctic. Drawing on recent historiographical insights on the construction of exploration knowledge in the imperial context, this article interrogates the epistemic and physical violence involved in Hall's erasure of Tookoolito and Ipiirvik's expertise and personhood. In doing so, I highlight the structural function of the erasure of Indigenous knowledge and labour in the production of nineteenth-century European and Euro-American Arctic science, and its enduring influence on the historiography.

Scholars have often considered twentieth-century sovereignty in colonial contexts as increasingly connected to the modern, territorially bounded state, stimulated by the influence of European rule. Yet there remained more malleable and amorphous sovereign configurations well into the twentieth century. Focusing on the case of Indore, a ‘minor’ state in late colonial central India, this article reveals the ongoing dynamism of ḍakait (‘bandits’) within such configurations. By approaching the state as a disaggregated entity, it captures how such communities held complex reciprocal relationships with local state representatives. These interactions challenge older histories, both in South Asia and beyond, that understand banditry primarily as evidence of state evasion or resistance, rather than reflecting an interlocking web of relational and gradated jurisdictions. By exploring connections between ḍakait and the state at the ‘everyday’ level, this article also takes issue with existing emphases on the wider institutional frameworks that classified such communities as ‘criminal tribes’. Such connections could engender local responses that undercut their ethnographic categorization and complicate postcolonial critiques of the essentialization of caste and ‘tribe’ in South Asia. Reconceptualizing sovereignty ultimately provides us with a compelling analytic tool to reconsider wider scholarly axioms relating to colonial knowledge, marginality, and state–society relations.

Was Kim Il-sung's desire to have nuclear weapons the sole reason for North Korea's quest for nuclear power? The answer, I argue, is highly unlikely given that extensive economic considerations played the most fundamental role in North Korea's pursuit of atomic energy from 1945 to 1965. With original, creative research on previously unexamined North Korean publications and Soviet archival materials, I demonstrate how the ‘peaceful’ impetus steered North Korea's early nuclear enterprises in the Cold War period. While previous studies draw only upon circumstantial evidence to argue that North Korea's going nuclear was predestined due to its security concerns, this article revises this teleological assumption by reconstructing historical contexts wherein the two driving factors that formed early North Korea's nuclear programme were mostly emulating how the Soviets harnessed nuclear power for economic gain, and aversion to the Americans’ use of nuclear power for atomic weapons to a lesser degree. That is, North Korea, like other countries in what later would be termed the Global South, sought to master nuclear technology for industrial ends in the first place, which turned out to be economically burdensome to continue, long before September 1965 when its first research reactor went online.

Traditionally, anti-standing army ideology in the 1690s and 1700s has been viewed primarily through an English prism. As a result of the unique contribution of Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, the place of Scotland has also been examined in this regard, particularly in relation to the ‘paper war’ of 1697–9. However, Ireland also loomed larger than has previously been acknowledged within the associated debates. This was evident both in the arguments advanced and in the writers who advanced them. Several individuals with close connections to Ireland – both Anglo-Irish and English Protestants – figured prominently among the anti-standing army writers, including Robert Molesworth, John Trenchard, Sir Francis Brewster, and Henry Maxwell. That they did so requires explanation, given that the army in Ireland offered the minority Protestant ruling elite the greatest security against a Catholic Jacobite rebellion. The involvement of these men in anti-standing army debates also highlights their engagement in an Irish Protestant context with the idea of a Gothic constitution and the extent to which their writings contributed to the post-Glorious Revolution whig canon. Yet the debates also highlight the limitations of such ideology when faced with the question of Irish identity and confessional allegiance, the constitutional relationship with England, and the presence of a standing army in Ireland. One proposed solution to such limitations was political Union.

This article proposes a transition in Western European thinking on slavery by examining the legality of slave jettison and its indemnification in the seventeenth-century Christian Mediterranean and comparing this with the late eighteenth-century Atlantic. Under the law of general average (GA), a shipmaster may legally sacrifice cargo or parts of a vessel to save a maritime venture from peril. GA then mandates that the costs of this sacrifice be shared proportionally between all interested parties. However, the status of human cargo with respect to pre-modern GA remains unclear, beyond the well-known example of the eighteenth-century British slave ship, the Zong. A jettison, a moment of crisis, forces the slave's dual conception as person and property to be definitively resolved. This article uses historical GA records and early modern jurisprudence on human jettison to shed light on the legal conceptualization of the slave in the two contexts. It finds that seventeenth-century jurisprudence generally ruled against slave jettison and that such a jettison could not be indemnified. In some Mediterranean operational contexts, slaves were excluded from GA altogether. To a certain extent, this finding justifies the conceptual divide historians have placed between Atlantic bondage and earlier forms of slavery.

This article examines four Marian histories written by Bohuslav Balbín (1621–88), a Bohemian Jesuit, scholar, and noble, in the second half of the seventeenth century. Assessing the content and form of these works, it argues that Balbín reinterpreted and intellectualized the genre of Marian hagiotopography, expanding the historical sections of his works and conceiving of hagiotopography as historical scholarship. Balbín's unique approach to this genre and his focus on Bohemian, Moravian, and Silesian history allowed him to present his particular vision of the Bohemian composite monarchy, which was influenced by his status as a Jesuit and by his patriotism. Balbín's representation of the inherent unity of the territories which made up the composite state criticized Habsburg policy during and following the Thirty Years’ War. In this way, the article sheds light on the interplay between Catholicism, patriotism, and scholarship in early modern Europe.