The term ‘cultural history of science’, as others have observed, is clumsy and imperfect. Cultural history is itself riddled with ambiguities which the addition of ‘science’ is unlikely to clarify. However, the term loosely describes a genre of historical writing which has become a staple of cross-disciplinary research: books which examine science's wider cultural ‘impacts’ and ‘contexts’. The heterogeneity of this field is so great, however, that an examination of methodology is called for.

The close of the First World War signalled a proliferation of newly established nation-states across Europe. However, the unilateral proclamations of these states’ independence did not guarantee their international recognition, nor did it guarantee their financial viability. This article examines the funding of two such states: the unrecognized Lithuanian (1919–23) and Irish (1919–21) republics. Both funded their wars of independence by selling ‘war bonds’ to their respective diasporas in the United States; the Lithuanians raising almost $1.9m from c. 28,000 subscribers and the Irish raising $5.8m from c. 300,000 subscribers. Communication between the organizers of these bond drives was virtually non-existent, but following the example of the US Liberty Loans they employed remarkably similar tactics. Yet, issued by self-proclaimed nation-states with neither territorial integrity nor a credible history of borrowing, the Lithuanian and Irish war bonds promised a return only when the states had received international recognition. In this sense, they were examples of what the authors term Pre-Sovereign Debt. Practically, they were a focal point for agitation for governmental recognition and rousing of American public opinion. Symbolically, they were tangible representations of the Lithuanian and Irish pretensions to statehood.

This article makes a case that disability, particularly visual, hearing, and speech impairments, played a significant role in Scottish Enlightenment thought. Focusing on the work of Dugald Stewart, and in particular on his essay ‘Some account of a boy born blind and deaf’, we argue that disability was a deep preoccupation of Scottish Enlightenment thinkers who used it as a test case for various important philosophical questions including those concerning ‘human nature’ and the limits of humanity. The article starts by situating the philosophical debate in the context of lived experiences of, and proximity to, impairment. The second part offers a close reading of Stewart's text ‘Some account’, about James Mitchell, a fourteen-year-old deafblind boy living in the Scottish Highlands. The third part examines how disability operated in relation to other hierarchies of difference that have been demonstrated to have been central to Enlightenment thought, in particular that of race. Overall, the contribution this article makes is to introduce disability as an important, if currently overlooked, category in Scottish Enlightenment thought that needs further investigation.

This article reassesses what has been called ‘the puzzle of distribution’: why did some drugs rapidly emerge as global consumer goods in the era of the Columbian Exchange, whereas others remained restricted to regional centres of usage? I argue here that the early modern concept of transplantation allows us to approach the puzzle of distribution from a novel perspective. Early modern intoxicants were not disaggregated, free-floating commodities. Their consumption and trade took place within a larger constellation of social codes, cultural practices, ecologies, and built environments. Psychedelic compounds such as peyote and ayahuasca serve here as case studies for examining how the globalization of drugs involved far more than the transport of the substances themselves. Despite their centrality to numerous societies throughout the pre-Columbian Americas, the larger ‘assemblage’ of material cultures, cultural assumptions, and religious meanings that accrued around these substances made it difficult for them to follow the same paths as commodified drugs like cacao or tobacco.

This article examines the emergent use of alcohol as a preservation medium for scientific specimens from the mid-seventeenth century in Britain. Taking the work of the London apothecary James Petiver (1660–1718) as its focus, the article explores the ways in which alcohol was used to fix and remediate the specimen, shown ‘lifelike’ in glass, in displays or in engravings. Petiver actively promoted the use of pickling spirits, publishing instructions on how to preserve specimens and distributing these to his collecting agents in the Indies trade. The article introduces the early history of preservation in alcohol in England, and particularly the work of Robert Boyle in promoting the wet collection. It then follows Petiver's agent, Richard Bradley, on his 1711 visit to Leiden and Amsterdam, examining the role of alcohol alongside other means of preserving and activating the scientific collection.

Thousands of civilians from Allied and neutral countries reached Britain during the Second World War. Nearly all who arrived between 1941 and 1945 were detained for interrogation – an unprecedented course of action by Britain which has nevertheless seldomly been studied. This article focuses on the administrative history of this process and the people it affected. It demonstrates how certain parts of the state treated non-Britons with suspicion throughout the war, long after fears of a ‘fifth column’ had subsided. At the same time, others saw them favourably, not least because many either offered intelligence, intended to volunteer with the Allied Forces, or work for the war industry. Examining how these conflicting views co-existed within a single detention camp, this article thus illustrates the complex relationship that existed between non-Britons and the wartime state, which perceived them simultaneously as suspects, assets, and allies. By making use of the thousands of resulting interrogation reports, the article also offers more detail than currently exists on the gender and nationality background of those who reached Britain, as well as about the journeys they took to escape occupied territory.

The effects and dangers of opium were subject to intense scientific scrutiny and experimentation in Paris in the decades around 1700, as rival networks of healers contended for commercial advantage over the compound drugs that contained it. Opium, widely consumed in the Ottoman empire, became a subject of European scientific interest in an attempt to render it safe, agreeable, and beneficial for European bodies. Apothecaries sought to resurrect an ancient drug and infuse it with new life in the laboratory; physicians conducted chemical experiments upon it. Yet it was hard to reach agreement as to opium's harmful or beneficial effects; some aspects of its nature proved impossible to ‘domesticate’ in the same way as other exotic drugs like coffee or tea, or even cinchona. I argue that only by investigating the discrete networks which sold and experimented upon opium can the historian account for the ways in which this drug generated social, political, and financial capital for experimenters as it circulated throughout society.

This article explores the praxis of transatlantic snuff- and tobacco-taking and its importance to personal and national identity-making over the long eighteenth century. It focuses in particular on the role of snuff- and tobacco boxes, which uniquely provided white middling-sorts on both sides of the Atlantic with a socialized canvas upon which significant statements of status, personality, and sensibility could be made. However, a closer study of these objects during America's revolutionary period reveals stark contrasts in the social, political, and gendered meanings ascribed to tobacco-taking between Britain and America. The material evidence, it is argued, suggests that for men, and especially for women in revolutionary America, snuff- and tobacco-taking became almost synonymous with loyalty to the republic.

Taking the humoral body as its spatial focus, this article considers how medical writers and practitioners engaged with ‘intoxicants’ both in terms of the prescription of medicines and in the conceptualization of compulsive consumption – or what is often styled by modern practitioners as ‘addiction’. Focusing in the first instance on the compilers of vernacular pharmacopoeia – compilations of medical ingredients and techniques – the article argues that just as sugar, tobacco, and especially opiates had a significant and possibly transformative role in everyday physic, so the ‘operation’ of opiates, distilled spirits, and tobacco was crucial in stimulating new thinking about how bodies became substance-dependent. The article also argues, however, that, in order to conceptualize the problem, writers turned to the venerable language of custom rather than the relatively new language of addiction – in particular, the ancient idea of custom as ‘second nature’.

While various historians use Mass Observation sources to study popular engagement with politics in the 1940s, they tend to rely on file reports summarizing research or the writings of the national panel, which paid limited attention to how the public engaged with key aspects of electioneering. By contrast, we re-examine Mass Observation's various election surveys to explore people's assumptions about how election campaigns should be conducted, the qualities looked for in political parties, and their reflections on the records of governments. Our conclusions shed light on the transformation of British public politics after 1918. During the interwar years it became common thinking to assume that parties would centre their campaigning around a detailed programme for government. Whereas Mass Observation's employees often claimed that much of the public was apathetic about politics, a reanalysis of the survey results indicates that many people were eager to be seen to be able to offer a considered assessment of the veracity of the competing parties’ promises. Mass Observation's election studies were criticized for their supposed amateurism. However, they offer richer insights into how the public engaged with party programmes than the quantitative surveys that came to dominate election studies in the 1950s and beyond.

This article contributes to a body of work exploring the possibilities of a popular politics in Ireland before the rising of 1641. It does so by revisiting the ‘recusancy revolt’ of 1603 in which, in the interregnum created by Elizabeth I's death, churches and civic space in towns in the south and west of Ireland were reoccupied for Catholic worship. Reading for meaning in the shaping and timing of the crowd rituals at the heart of the protest, the article argues that Old English elites and people physically acted out the recovery of these spaces for the public performance of a civic Catholicism, in which corporate worship was integral both to the maintenance of the civic order and to the defence of ancient liberties and freedoms against the encroachments of an anglicizing and Protestant regime. Analysing the dynamics of these confessional protests, the article assesses the potential for an active citizenry represented by popular political mobilization in 1603 and contrasts this with later popular mobilization in the 1641 rising. It explores the paradox at the heart of a protest in which it was believed that the restoration of public Catholic worship could co-exist with continuing civic loyalty to an English and Protestant monarchy.

No form of English popular protest has been subject to such close scholarly analysis as the eighteenth-century food riot, a response not just to the understanding that food riots comprised two out of every three crowd actions but also to the influence of E. P. Thompson's seminal paper ‘The moral economy of the English crowd’. If the food riot is now understood as an event of considerable complexity, one assertion remains unchallenged: that riots remained a tradition of the towns, with agrarian society all but unaffected by food rioting. This article offers a new interpretation in which the rural is not just the backdrop to food protests but instead a locus and focus of collective actions over the marketing of provisions, with agricultural workers taking centre stage. It is shown that agricultural workers often took the lead in market town riots as well as well as in instigating riots in the countryside. Further, such episodes of collective protest were neither rare nor unusual but instead formed an integral part of the food rioting repertoire. It is also shown that rural industrial workers – notoriously active in market town riots – were often joined or even led by agricultural workers in their protests.

This article addresses early modern women's power through an object study of the wedding girdle, a thickly embellished belt that was the most costly, emblematic, and intimate item in a Renaissance bride's trousseau, and which uniquely illuminates the lives of women. Building on the work that women's history has done to uncover how women navigated the patriarchal system, I propose that a focus on the household is vital to understanding the socially specific ways in which burgher women – members of the citizen class of Renaissance Prague – exerted agency in their daily lives. Burgher sensibilities, specifically the desire to display the prosperity, industry, and piety of their households, created distinct mechanisms for women to assert themselves. This article sets women's lives against the interwoven structures of the household, namely, gendered roles and expectations, the legal property system, and moral discourses surrounding marriage. By levering these structures, the same that constrained them, burgher women were able to express power.

Concerns about fake news and media manipulation are commonplace in contemporary society, and, throughout the twentieth century, historians regularly presented the First World War as an era of manipulated public messages. Yet, despite broad statements about the impact of press censorship in First World War Britain, publication of an official history of the ‘D’ notice system, and growing revision of historical understanding of the interaction between the state, the press, propaganda, and the public during the war, no thorough assessment of the content of the D notices issued by the Press Bureau to newspaper editors has been undertaken. This article provides a thorough analysis of the more than seven hundred notices issued during the war years. While drawing attention to several exceptions which exceeded plausible claims of a threat to security, it argues that most notices genuinely sought to protect potentially dangerous information and that casual assumptions about misleading state press management are not borne out by a close reading of the actual notices issued.

The development of motor vehicles and their mass production and consumption during the first decades of the twentieth century had significant economic and social effects. The developed Atlantic countries, world leaders in vehicle production, were the protagonists of the success of the car. However, the globalization brought about by the second industrial revolution drew in other countries on the periphery, thanks to transport technologies, telecommunications, and the media. Thus, the consumption patterns and lifestyles of the ‘centres’ and the ‘peripheries’ tended to become more uniform, especially among the urban population. This included an interest in travelling and leisure activities in general. The link between the use of motor vehicles and new tourism practices in Spain between 1918 and 1939 provides an excellent viewpoint from which both to analyse the country's economic and social transformation during this period and to relativize the degree of backwardness observed in Spain in other studies. In this respect, we provide evidence which shows that, despite being a country of the so-called European periphery, Spain had similar patterns of consumption of durable consumer goods, such as the motor vehicle, as other, more advanced countries. There is therefore room to reconsider what has been termed ‘Spanish backwardness’.

Examining the understudied collection of costume images from Heidelberg Calvinist, lawyer, and church councillor Marcus zum Lamm's (1544–1606) ‘treasury’ of images, the Thesaurus Picturarum, this article intervenes in the historiography on sixteenth-century German national imaginaries, emphasizing the import of costume books and manuscript alba for national self-fashioning. By bringing late sixteenth-century ethnographic costume image collections into scholarly discourse on the variegated ways of conceiving and visualizing Germany and Germanness over the century, this article sheds new light on a complex narrative of continuity and change in the history of German nationhood and identity. Using zum Lamm's images as a case-study, this article stresses the importance of incorporating costume image collections into a nexus of patriotic genres, including works of topographical-historical, natural philosophical, ethnographic, cartographic, cosmographic, and genealogical interest. Furthermore, it calls for historians working on sixteenth-century costume books and alba to look deeper into the meanings of such images and collections in the specific contexts of their production; networks of knowledge and material exchange; and – in the German context – the political landscape of territorialization, confessionalization, and dynastic ambition in the Holy Roman Empire between the Peace of Augsburg and the Thirty Years War (1555–1618).

At the end of the Second World War, British society's hostility and resentment towards France's military defeat and the French state's collaboration with Germany were strong. In order to deflate this enmity and thus prepare the ground to forge western European co-operation, the French and British governments co-operated and developed gendered public and media strategies within which citizens, and, in particular, former female resistance fighters, were central to the dissemination of positive images of France. This article takes seriously these strategies and adds nuance to understandings of modern foreign policy in terms of methods and actors. The article elaborates on neglected agents of diplomacy, such as female members of civil society, and the significance of rhetoric, gendered performance, and appearances that contributed to the restoration of the image of France in Britain. By doing so, the article also sheds light on the efforts of French and British authorities to construct a narrative of binational unity that disrupted the tenacious idea that Britain had fought alone during the war.

The Congress system that arose in Europe after the Napoleonic Wars facilitated European imperial expansionism throughout the nineteenth century. Yet, the ties between that system and expansionism have rarely been unwound and studied in detail. Taking the French invasion of Algiers in 1830 as a case in point, this article shows how the Congress system's shared discourses of security and threat perceptions as well as its common practices of concerted diplomacy fostered European imperialism in North Africa. The article emphasizes obscured continuities and understudied multilateral diplomatic efforts. It uncovers the ways in which the post-1815 system decisively shaped the aims, justifications, and execution of the French war against Algiers. European, North African, and Ottoman actors each furthered or contested the idea that the invasion was part of an international legacy dating back to the Congress of Vienna, related to the concerted repression of North African ‘Barbary piracy’. In bringing these connections to light, it becomes apparent that the post-1815 international system cannot be understood in isolation from nineteenth-century imperialism.

Since Bodin, scholars have been debating whether sovereignty is indivisible or rather decentred, multiple, and shared. This article adds to practice-oriented conceptualizations of sovereignty, which acknowledge the existence of jurisdictional pluralism in nineteenth-century state-building. Borrowing from imperial history, it contrasts the nominal supremacy of the Prussian crown – as embodied by the monarchical principle – with the residual sovereign rights of potentates that had lost their lands in Germany's successive wars of unification. The possession of ‘bare sovereignty’ allowed such mediatized princes and exiled rulers to maintain a presence in the lives of their former subjects. They did so by exercising privileges and functions of royalty which left vague in whose name was being governed. The Hohenzollerns for their part struggled (and to a certain extent proved unwilling) to assert exclusive dominion because right of conquest-based justifications had no firm standing in international law, alienated segments of domestic public opinion, and did not necessarily serve the interests of the state. The article argues, ultimately, that the resulting negotiation and contestation of monarchical sovereignty in Prussia speaks to global themes of state-building through state destruction in the Age of Empire.

Henry Valois (1551–89) was elected king of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1573 and arrived in Poland in January 1574. After five months, Henry fled Poland–Lithuania upon inheriting the French throne from his brother, Charles IX. As Henry III of France, he was branded a violent tyrant, who allowed his mignons to run the kingdom and isolated himself from his subjects. Historians have done much to rehabilitate Henry's reputation, but his first experience of kingship in the Commonwealth has been neglected in these reassessments. This article uses the previously unstudied treasury accounts of Henry's Polish court to re-examine his experience of the Polish–Lithuanian elective, parliamentary monarchy as crucial to the development of his characteristic style of kingship and court. Some of these practices were a response to the challenges posed by the Polish political system to a newly elected king. This allows us to recover a lost political connection between Poland and France. Secondly, the article demonstrates Henry's active engagement in the Polish–Lithuanian politics, challenging the narrative that he was a passive king anticipating his return to Paris. Instead, Henry planned to cement his rule in Poland by mounting his own faction and pursuing a bold diplomatic agenda.