This lecture explores the history of Enlightenment-era collecting of antiquities to probe the claims to universality of Western museums. Focusing on the British Museum's Enlightenment Gallery, it underscores the imperial and familial contexts of British collecting cultures. Questioning received narratives of collecting which highlight the role played by individual elite British men, it suggests that women, servants and non-European elites played instrumental parts in knowledge production and the acquisition of antiquities. The private correspondence of the East India Company civil servant Claudius Rich – the East India Company's Resident or diplomatic representative at Baghdad 1801–1821 – and his wife Mary (née Mackintosh) Rich illuminates social histories of knowledge and material culture that challenge interpretations of the British Museum's Enlightenment Gallery which privilege trade and discovery over empire.

The castle was one of the most characteristic features of the western European landscape in the Middle Ages, dominating social and political order from the eleventh century onwards. The origins of the castle are generally assigned to the ninth and tenth centuries, and the standard story begins with the defensive fortifications established against the Vikings during the reign of the West Frankish king Charles the Bald (843–77). In this article I argue that there are serious problems with this origin story, by re-evaluating some of the key sources on which it rests – particularly the Edict of Pîtres (864). I seek to demonstrate that my analysis of this source has important implications for how we think about the relationship between fortifications and the state in the Carolingian Empire; and by extension the evolution of the castle in north-western Europe between the ninth and twelfth centuries.

This paper seeks to provide some historical perspective on contemporary preoccupations with competing versions of the truth. Truth has always been contested and subject to scrutiny, particularly during troubled times. It can take many forms – judicial truth, religious truth, personal truth – and is bound up with the context of time and place. This paper sets out the multidisciplinary approaches to truth and examines its role in a specific context, that of early modern Europe and, in particular, the French religious wars of the sixteenth century. Truth was a subject of intense debate among both Renaissance and Reformation scholars, it was upheld as an absolute by judges, theologians and rulers. Yet, it also needed to be concealed by those who maintained a different truth to that of the authorities. In the case of France, in order to advance their cause, the Huguenots used subterfuge of various kinds, including the illicit carrying of messages. In this instance, truth was dependent on the integrity of its carrier, whether the messenger could be trusted and, therefore, their truth accepted. Both sides also sought to defend the truth by countering what they presented as the deceit of their opponents. Then, as now, acceptance of what is true depends on which side we are on and who we are prepared to believe.

The Pacific has often been invisible in global histories written in the UK. Yet it has consistently been a site for contemplating the past and the future, even among Britons cast on its shores. In this lecture, I reconsider a critical moment of globalisation and empire, the ‘age of revolutions’ at the end of the eighteenth century and the start of the nineteenth century, by journeying with European voyagers to the Pacific Ocean. The lecture will point to what this age meant for Pacific islanders, in social, political and cultural terms. It works with a definition of the Pacific's age of revolutions as a surge of indigeneity met by a counter-revolutionary imperialism. What was involved in undertaking a European voyage changed in this era, even as one important expedition was interrupted by news from revolutionary Europe. Yet more fundamentally vocabularies and practices of monarchy were consolidated by islanders across the Pacific. This was followed by the outworkings of counter-revolutionary imperialism through agreements of alliance and alleged cessation. Such an argument allows me, for instance, to place the 1806 wreck of the Port-au-Prince within the Pacific's age of revolutions. This was an English ship used to raid French and Spanish targets in the Pacific, but which was stripped of its guns, iron, gunpowder and carronades by Tongans. To chart the trajectory from revolution and islander agency on to violence and empire is to appreciate the unsettled paths that gave rise to our modern world. This view foregrounds people who inhabited and travelled through the earth's oceanic frontiers. It is a global history from a specific place in the oceanic south, on the opposite side of the planet to Europe.

In late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain, many contemporaries observed a striking phenomenon: that children were especially active in the boycotts of sugar produced by enslaved people. First-hand accounts often suggested that children's activism was unilateral and unmediated, whereas historians of British abolitionism have tended to assume that children were passive recipients of antislavery literature and adult influence. Engaging with both the historiography on British abolitionism and the new histories of childhood, this article examines the nature of juvenile engagement within the sugar boycotts. Collecting together some of the extensive but dispersed evidence of juvenile antislavery across the country, and focusing upon a case study of the Plymley household of Shropshire during the early 1790s, we explore the intricacies of children's involvement. Children's agency, we argue, needs to be understood as a specific, historicised phenomenon. Adults often chose to represent children's abolitionist activities as self-determined, for their participation in the boycotts affirmed both adult positions and their own child-rearing practices. However, whilst adults frequently solicited particular types of juvenile response, children often responded independently and in unexpected ways, negotiating their own positions in relation to their parents, siblings, and peers. We situate juvenile antislavery as a recursive process, operating within complex, intergenerational interactions.

This paper analyses the phenomenon of historical reenactment of Great War battles as an effort to create what is termed ‘living history’. Thousands of people all over the world have participated in such reenactments, and their number increased significantly during the period surrounding the centenary of the outbreak of the Great War. Through a comparison with representations of war in historical writing, in museums and in the performing arts, I examine the claim of reenactors that they can enter into historical experience. I criticise this claim, and show how distant it is from those who do not claim to relive history but (more modestly) to represent it. In their search for ‘living history’, reenactors make two major errors. They strip war of its political content, and they sanitise and trivialise combat.

The anticlerical violence of the Spanish Civil War has received significant scholarly attention in recent years. However, there has been relatively little focus on the iconoclasm, even though the destruction of objects was easily the most common form of anticlerical violence. Nor has the effect of iconoclastic violence on those who treasured or venerated these objects been examined. This article looks at the emotional significance of the material artefacts that came under attack during the Civil War. It argues that, while some objects were treated simply as the material of which they were made, most provoked more complex interactions. In contrast to most earlier episodes of iconoclasm, these also left a visual record, which shows how the memory of the violence was shaped not only by textual accounts but also by photographs that memorialised and aestheticised it.