This article examines the historiographical debate over federalism between the 1930s and 1960s. In their most sweeping iterations, revisionists have sought to unravel the history of the nation-state, by using the history of anti-colonial federalist demands for equal incorporation into imperial states as evidence against a teleology of nationalist independence. In perceiving the democratic potentialities embedded within imperial state forms, revisionists argue that anti-colonial federalists therefore belong within a cosmopolitan tradition of seeking democratic supra-national governance beyond empire and nation. Some iterations of ‘post-colonial cosmopolitanism’ have unfortunately channelled debate into an opposition between federalism and nationalism, while also generating methodological republicanism, the tendency to view proto-republics within imperial formations. This review challenges these interpretive shortcomings and argues instead that federalism ought to be understood as part of a contest about the state as such. By integrating scholarship on French and British imperial federalism with recent work on regional federalisms in European and African contexts, this essay centres a whole range of ideological variations of ‘cosmopolitanism’ that adapted federalism to their critiques of the state. Ultimately, this reframing of federalist historiography enables new insights into contests about, and not just over, twentieth-century states.

Over the last thirty years, historians have made several important contributions to our understanding of the short but dramatic restoration of Catholicism in 1550s England. United by a shared rejection of the hitherto dominant interpretation of Mary I's reign as a retrograde and unfortunate interlude in the history of the English Reformation, so-called ‘revisionists’ have convincingly argued that Mary in fact presided over a remarkably dynamic and innovative revival of Catholicism. Whilst this scholarship has been extremely valuable in tackling the teleological assumption that Marian Catholicism was predestined to fail, this review suggests that the revisionist programme continues to be preoccupied by somewhat ill-conceived and unhelpful questions about how ‘successful’ Mary's church was in providing for a Catholic future. Such questions demonstrate just how far the historiography of Marian religion continues to operate within a framework still subtly shaped by sixteenth-century, confessionally charged polemic. This review suggests that, rather than debates about ‘successes’ or ‘failures’, we need to start working outwards from the valuable findings of revisionists regarding the dynamism of Marian religion, exploring their broader implications for how we understand the long-term development of Catholicism in England, as well as the Marian church's place within European Christendom more broadly.

This review outlines some of the key interventions in the literature on Latin America's Cold War produced since the early 1990s, concentrating largely on broad shifts in anglophone historiography. With questions of periodization and definition in mind, it offers a new, multi-layered model of the Cold War in the region, though with wider application. Using the example of Mexico, it then demonstrates some of the weaknesses of the current literature's assumptions and argues for the potential usefulness of a new way of seeing the period and its interconnected conflicts.

This review article considers the potentially fruitful relationship between the history of political thought and parliamentary history through a survey of recent books on Britain and France. Traditionally, this relationship has not been intimate, as the major historians of political thought have concentrated on linguistic and philosophical contexts, alongside political economy. However, as historians of political thought turn to concepts such as political representation, constitutionalism, party politics, and parliamentarism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it would be beneficial for parliamentary history to play a greater role. In order to place arguments in their non-intellectual contexts effectively, historians of political thought must become more careful analysts of events, institutions, and quotidian politics, as well as broader historiographical contexts, importantly the history of state formation. This review article argues that the development of parliamentarism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is an especially promising area for considering theory and practice in unison.

In the 1821 Preface to his Elements of the philosophy of right, Hegel famously claimed that ‘philosophy…is its own time comprehended in thoughts’. It is tempting to view history in equivalent terms. After all, historical research usually engages the past under the influence of contemporary concerns. Topics acquire pertinence on account of prevailing values and interests. And yet there is a clear difference between being roused to investigate a subject as a result of its ongoing resonance and interpreting its meaning in terms of current attitudes. This distinction, however, is often blurred, and with it appropriate relations between historical analysis and moral judgement. It may well be that, at the level of political philosophy, each of these activities can be reconciled; but first their respective provinces should be carefully delimited.

Human occupation of Australia dates back to at least 65,000 years. Aboriginal ontologies incorporate deep memories of this past, at times accompanied by a conviction that Aboriginal people have always been there. This poses a problem for historians and archaeologists: how to construct meaningful histories that extend across such a long duration of space and time. While earlier generations of scholars interpreted pre-colonial Aboriginal history as static and unchanging, marked by isolation and cultural conservatism, recent historical scholarship presents Australia's deep past as dynamic and often at the cutting-edge of human technological innovation. This historiographical shift places Aboriginal people at the centre of pre-colonial history by incorporating Aboriginal oral histories and material culture, as well as ethnographic and anthropological accounts. This review considers some of the debates within this expansive and expanding field, focusing in particular on questions relating to Aboriginal agriculture and land management and connections between Aboriginal communities and their Southeast Asian neighbours. At the same time, the study of Australia's deep past has become a venue for confronting colonial legacies, while also providing a new disciplinary approach to the question of reconciliation and the future of Aboriginal sovereignty in Australia.