We are continuing our policy of including some of the papers held at our regional symposia. Four contributions, by Alex Metcalfe, Andrew Jotischky, Naomi Tadmor and Michael Beckerman, come from the symposium ‘Edges of Europe: Frontiers in Context’ organised at the University of Lancaster on 16–17 June 2011. The article by Michael Beckerman and his collaborators represents a new departure for us, as the lecture was accompanied by a series of audio recordings which are available on the Cambridge University website (http://journals.cambridge.org/rht). It is generically rather different from the material we normally publish, but we think it is an exciting piece.

This paper continues the theme of ‘French Crossings’ explored in other Presidential Addresses by focusing on the border zone between the human and the animal. The focus is on the allegedly tiger-like character attributed to Maximilien Robespierre, particularly after his fall from power and his execution in 1794. This theme is explored in terms of Thermidorian propaganda, French Revolutionary historiography and the ancient discipline of physiognomy, which was reactivated by Johann-Caspar Lavater in the late eighteenth century and was still influential through much of the nineteenth. Robespierre's animal rather than human status was also held to emerge in his inability to smile or laugh, a significant point also in that the meaning of the smile was changing in the same period.

This paper investigates the development of land registry traditions in the medieval Mediterranean by examining a distinctive aspect of Latin, Greek and Arabic formularies used in boundary clauses. The paper makes particular reference to Islamic and Norman Sicily. The argument begins by recalling that the archetypal way of defining limits according to Classical Roman land surveyors was to begin ab oriente. Many practices from Antiquity were discontinued in the Latin West, but the idea of starting with or from the East endured in many cases where boundaries were assigned cardinal directions. In the Byzantine Empire, the ‘Roman’ model was prescribed and emulated by Greek surveyors and scribes too. But in the Arab-Muslim Mediterranean, lands were defined with the southern limit first. This contrast forms the basis of a typology that can be tested against charter evidence in frontier zones – for example, in twelfth-century Sicily, which had been under Byzantine, Muslim and Norman rulers. It concludes that, under the Normans, private documents drawn up in Arabic began mainly with the southern limit following the ‘Islamic’ model. However, Arabic descriptions of crown lands started mainly in the ‘Romano-Byzantine’ way. These findings offer a higher resolution view of early Norman governance and suggest that such boundary definitions of the royal chancery could not have been based on older ones written in the Islamic period.

Monastic reform is generally understood as a textually driven process governed by a renewed interest in early monastic ideals and practices in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and focusing on the discourses of reformers about the Egyptian ‘desert fathers’ as the originators of monasticism. Historians have suggested that tropes about the desert, solitude, etc., drawn from early texts found their way into mainstream accounts of monastic change in the period c. 1080–1150. This paper challenges this model by proposing that considerations of ‘reform’ must take into account parallel movements in Greek Orthodox monasticism and interactions of practice between the two monastic environments. Three case-studies of non-textually derived parallel practices are discussed, and the importance of the Holy Land as a source of inspiration for such practices is advanced in place of Egypt.

What, if anything, do historians and theorists of international relations owe to the theories and practices of the Middle Ages? This paper traces a number of themes that were intensely debated by theologians during the fourteenth century, tracking especially two different approaches to ‘the political’ on the part of neo-Augustinian voluntarists on the one hand and neo-Aristotelian intellectualists on the other. In the scholastic attempts to answer the question: ‘What are we presumed to be? And, in consequence, what is the scope of politics?’, their different views concerning the consequences of what Christians call ‘Original Sin’ and ‘the Fall’ are highlighted. Especially, the position of the voluntarists is shown to have been taken up not least by the Master of the Modern: Hobbes. The neo-Augustinian voluntarists can thereafter be seen to have provided some of the same arguments that have recently been rehearsed by contemporary ‘realist’ critics of modern liberalism who, it is argued, are negotiating the medieval in the modern.

The paper shows how the important theological and Anglo-biblical term ‘Covenant’ was formulated in the course of successive biblical translations, from the original Hebrew and Greek to the King Kames Bible. It suggests that the use of the term in English biblical versions reflected – and in turn propelled – the increasingly prominent Covenant theology. Once coined in the vernacular Scriptures, moreover, the term was applied to religious political alliances: from the Scottish Covenants of the 1590s to the English Solemn League and Covenant, 1644, studied in the paper.

By examining British anti-slavery debates across a longue durée – before and after West Indian emancipation – the basis of moral responsibility for political action may be reassessed. Recent interest in humanitarian or transnational compassion may have underappreciated the geographical limitations of the moral responsibility Britons assumed for slavery and the slave trade. The notion of national complicity was crucial in mobilising individual Britons to petition, abstain from slave-grown produce or otherwise pressure parliament. While the peculiar aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars created a British responsibility for other nations’ slave trading, there was little comparable appetite for the internationalising responsibility for the slave-labour origins of traded goods. This meant that transnational obligations to police the slave trade did not translate into concern about the slave production behind overseas trade. By tracing these national debates over time, it is possible to discern the dominant and recessive arguments for how and when moral revulsion should translate into political action by Britons and the British state. This suggests a need to revisit scholarly conclusions about abolitionist campaigning, the basis of moral responsibility for slavery, and the antecedents of modern consumer responsibility.

This paper explores the life and activities of Hugh Hamilton Lindsay (1802–81), an East India Company official who worked at Canton from 1820. Lindsay's is a key voice in the challenge to the Company's policies in China on the cusp of the abolition of its monopoly, and to British policy on the eve of the first ‘Opium War’ with the empire of the Qing. Lindsay first made his mark on Sino-British relations by leading a covert East India Company foray north along the Chinese coast in 1832 in the ship Lord Amherst, and in widely disseminating his bullish conclusions and policy recommendations in publications and reports that followed. He is known as a bellicose pamphleteer, but a more complex picture emerges if we follow Lindsay and his commercial activities as the British fanned out from Canton into the Chinese ‘treaty ports’ opened after 1842, and across Britain's wider developing empire in Asia. His field of operations developed to include the British colony of Labuan and led him into a heated public conflict with Sir James Brooke in the early 1850s. Lindsay was never happy with the status quo: he lobbied and hectored, and in business he innovated, and pushed hard on the frontiers of British power and influence. Commercial opportunity drove him, but so did a specific vision of the ‘English character’, and notions of pride and national and personal honour.

This paper revisits the question of the impact of the 1848 revolutions on governance and administration across the European states. Few historians would contend that the immediate post-revolutionary years saw a ‘return’ to pre-1848 conditions, but the transitions of the 1850s are usually presented as episodes within a narrative that is deemed to be specific to the respective nation-state. This paper argues that the 1850s saw a profound transformation in political and administrative practices across the continent, encompassing the emergence of new centrist political coalitions with a distinctively post-revolutionary mode of politics characterised by a technocratic vision of progress, the absorption into government of civil-society-based bodies of expertise, and changes in public information management. In short, it proposes that we need to move beyond the restrictive interpretation implied by the tenacious rubric ‘decade of reaction’ towards recognising that the 1850s were – after the Napoleonic period – the second high-water-mark in nineteenth-century political and administrative innovation across the continent. The paper argues, moreover, that these transitions took place on an authentically European basis and that they only come fully into focus when we survey the spectrum of governmental experiences across the European states. The paper closes with some reflections on the broader implications of this reappraisal for our understanding of European history in the middle and later decades of the nineteenth century.

This article presents thirty ‘auditory snapshots’ from a wide variety of geographical locations and contexts in order to elaborate several points. First, we believe that the study of history cannot be separated from the study of sound, whether in the form of ‘soundscapes’ or pieces of music. Second, we find that considerations of edges, into which we fold such things as provinces, peripheries and frontiers, can be greatly enriched by looking at a broad range of musical phenomena, from the liturgy of Ugandan Jews to reggae-infused Polish mountain songs and from the sounds of Mozart's Black contemporary Saint-Georges to Silent Night on the Southern Seas. Finally, drawing on certain ideas from James C. Scott's The Art of Not Being Governed, we argue that paradoxically, in music, the middle often has unusual properties. In other words, musical structure mimics the ongoing battle between those in positions of authority and those who wish to evade that authority. Beginnings and endings, then, tend to be sites of power and convention, while middles attempt to subvert it. While culturally and geographically we may contrast centres and peripheries, in music the centre is often the edge.