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The 'paperback revolution' among many other effects provided the principal means of diffusion of academic knowledge to mass audiences, not as is sometimes thought in the 1960s but as early as the 1930s in the UK and the 1940s in the US. Mass-market paperback publishers Penguin in the UK and New American Library in the US commissioned original work and reprinted many classic works to very large audiences through their Pelican and Mentor lines before the better-known 'quality' paperbacks. Important works of social science, history, religion, philosophy and the history of science reached their widest audience in this form, especially in the US through unorthodox outlets such as newsstands and variety stores. The mass-market publishers combined entrepeneurial, educational and democratic methods and motivations in ways that encouraged readers to make their own choices and then fed those choices back into new commissions, repackagings and reprintings, thus acting out the 'co-production' of knowledge that is much talked about but hard to document.

This article suggests that the study of the War of Resistance should pay due attention to the effect of the war on the wartime everyday, that is, on Chinese culture, politics, society and the economy away from the battlefield. Not only was the impact deep and enduring, but evolving and regionally and socially divergent responses to the war also shaped the military course of the war. In modern war, as Karl von Clausewitz pointed out, public morale is a key factor in deciding the outcome of the fighting. The article first sketches the war’s impact on the Chinese economy, suggesting that ‘demodernization’ and the revival of traditional trading patterns formed the main consequences. It then discusses the reading lives of a young woman who grew up during the war and a senior Nationalist official to delineate contrasting emotional private responses, with one finding in literature an inspirational alternative and the other becoming increasingly disillusioned. The article concludes with an examination of three popular history textbooks. They all stressed the importance of an awareness of Chinese civilization but narrated its nature and its prospects in contrasting ways. Such textbooks were used in obligatory Chinese history courses at universities. The article makes no attempt to be comprehensive, but only to use a few examples as illustration of the potential of researching wartime everydayness.

On June 27, 2016 the gay poet and novelist, Dennis Cooper, tried to log into his popular blog The Weaklings as he had almost every day for the previous decade only to find that his account had been shut down and his blog removed. An automated message informed him that Google had revoked his access because he had violated Blogger’s “terms of service.” Cooper and his lawyer repeatedly asked Google for more information but for over a month no response was forthcoming. The incident quickly caught the attention of the international media, with articles appearing in venues such as the New Yorker, The Guardian, Le Figaro, Vox, and the New York Times. An online petition was also launched, demanding that Google reinstate the blog, and was ultimately signed by over four and a half thousand people.

The medieval English escheator was a royal official who seized the goods and chattels of felons, fugitives and outlaws for the crown’s benefit. This article uses escheators' inquests and accounts to ask: what information exists about the location of forfeited possessions at the point of their appraisal by the escheator, and what is revealed about the use of space in the houses and outbuildings of lower status people? We also ask more general questions about contemporary understanding of the relationship between domestic objects and space. We find that there was limited interest in describing possessions according to their position within buildings. Nonetheless, one may use the order of items as they are recorded in the escheators’ lists of forfeited goods to explore the issues raised in the article. The records reveal an emphasis on the difference between 'household utensils' and other movables, especially crops and livestock.

This article problematizes the persistence of sexual inequality in Britain, by examining the intellectual work performed by judges as they sought to preserve men’s paternal rights from new challenges in the nineteenth-century. One set of challenges included changing understandings of childhood and male domestic authority, another derived from the peculiarities of British state formation. The article argues that the gender order was repeatedly unsettled by two processes of state formation: first, the efforts of reformers to rationalise the multiplicity of jurisdictions that characterised the ancien regime; second, the process of bringing within one polity the separate bodies of law found in England and Wales, Scotland and Ireland. Judicial efforts to reconfigure paternal rights in the face of these challenges produced a more severely patriarchal model of paternal rights than had existed before, but this proved short-lived. At the end of the nineteenth century, conflicts within the legal elite unravelled this patriarchal settlement in favour of a new model, which endured until the 1970s. This body of law was still profoundly inegalitarian, but used a more expansive definition of child welfare to place new limits on paternal power. Exploring this story reveals the extent to which the fragmentation of the juridical state created a double standard between rich and poor, with the rights of rich fathers enjoying much greater legal protection than those of the poor. The article argues that we should not see the law as a stable patriarchal monolith but as a gendered system that was continuously being reconstructed at the point of use by actors with considerable freedom of manoeuvre. Any history of the law must therefore also be a history of judicial mentalities.

Can a lyric touch? And if so, who does the touching? These questions put pressure on some persistent debates over lyric, which turn on a series of separations: between poet and fictional speaker; between ritual events and imagined worlds; and between transhistorical forms and historical reading practices. The prospect of touch in lyric suggests an intimate, personal and embodied form of contact between speaker and addressee, while at the same time potentially extending that contact to any receptive reader or listener. The reflexive nature of touch, as Didier Anzieu showed in his writing on the skin, forecloses any hard distinction between subject and object; to be touched is also to make contact. And yet lyrics invariably promise more than they can literally fulfil, whether they proffer the numinous familiarity of a lover’s body or “a paradoxical intimacy between strangers who cannot be said to truly come into contact with one another but between whom something might nevertheless be understood to have been communicated.” If lyric aspires to be a kind of contact, its representations of touching are nevertheless indistinguishable from imaginative fantasy. In short, touch captures the indeterminacy of lyric address, at once personal and impersonal, an abstracted metaphor and a claim on the material and historical particularity of individual bodies. Touch cuts across the either/or debates regarding the definition and function of lyric by insisting on its tense both/and structure.

Implicit in recent debates among historians of human rights is the question of whether and how early rights promises, particularly eighteenth-century rights declarations, enabled later rights claims. Can promises, initially unrealized, create the conditions for their own fulfillment? Reading Hannah Arendt with Arthur Danto, this article offers an account of human rights politics as a practice of repeated promise-making – one characterized not by reliance on the past as a stable foundation, but by uncertainty about, and contestation of, history. Using archival sources, it also reconstructs Arendt’s and Danto’s involvement in human rights politics, including Danto’s early role in Amnesty International USA.

By the fin de siècle, colonial India had witnessed vast social and educational reforms in the forging of a public sphere amongst Indian elite and service communities. Often categorised as a period of colonial modernity, writing for and by women in various regional communities grew from the late nineteenth century. These publications took the form of domestic manuals, periodicals and magazines and attempted to navigate the role of women in the twentieth century. The Indian Ladies’ Magazine (henceforth ILM), an English-language magazine published in Madras by Kamala Satthianadhan, an Indian Christian, was one such publication. It had two runs, between 1901 and 1918 (published monthly) and between 1927 and 1938 (published bi-monthly) and was the first Indian English-language woman’s magazine to have a female editor (30). The second run was edited by Satthianadhan’s daughter Padmini Sengupta. The magazine became one of the earliest mediums by which women could cut across cultural identities to instruct, converse and debate in a public forum as contributors and readers. Its readership was made up of English, Anglo-Indian and Indian English-educated middle-class women— a minority within a minority.

Locals of the Channel Islands have long perceived women who had relationships with soldiers during the German occupation as the lowest form of collaborator. The author challenges this perception through the life stories of two women: a Romanian Jew in hiding and the woman who sheltered her for the last eighteen months of the occupation. Both were in relationships with German soldiers. The families of these two women met for the first time at a recent commemoration in Jersey. The following examines the long-term impact of their “illicit” relationships on the lives of these women, and how they complicate narrow representations of the alleged “Jerrybag.”

The seventeenth-century Dutch Republic has long been studied by scholars interested in charting the moment at which the status of the Bible underwent a transformative reappraisal. The crucial event, such accounts generally agreed, came in 1670: the publication of Benedict de Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus marked a watershed, as the previously unsystematic attacks on the Bible’s authority by figures such as Thomas Hobbes and Isaac La Peyrère were finally replaced by a comprehensive historicisation of the Bible’s text, and a replacement of the truth of its message with a new philosophy that invalidated any appeal to revelation. This account was set within a broader historiographical narrative of seventeenth-century Dutch intellectual life, which maintained that the Enlightenment depended on developments in early modern natural philosophy and, above all, the remarkable effervescence of, and debate over, Cartesianism in the second half of the century.

A review of Naor Ben Yehoyada's book The Mediterranean Incarnate

This essay takes as its central explanandum the survival of an unusual personal seed collection within a larger government institution, ultimately asking why individuals and institutions save seeds. To answer this question, it considers the cultures of seed collecting and preservation among amateurs, enthusiasts, and others without professional status in botanical or agricultural research and, simultaneously, among professional breeders, geneticists, and seed scientists. The essay also reviews the roles played in saving seeds by institutional policies, technical procedures, and biological realities. Returning to the particular collection in question, the author suggests that its survival is not surprising but, instead, overdetermined given the many circumstances that drive the preservation of seeds as resources for an uncertain future.

“The challenge for the missionaries was to develop methods of evangelization and organizational structures that would attempt the religious conversion of sedentary and not sedentary peoples on different mission frontiers” .

The following Communication presents a newly discovered manuscript by John Locke. The manuscript dates from 1667–8 and it deserves notice as the most significant example of Locke's thought on the toleration of Catholics prior to theEpistola de tolerantia(1689). The manuscript, entitledReasons for tolerateing Papists equally with others, reveals Locke's engagement with Sir Charles Wolseley'sLiberty of conscience, the magistrates interest(1668) and significantly informs the compositional history of Locke'sEssay concerning toleration(1667–8).

This paper explores the hoarding, collecting and occasional display of old apparatus in new laboratories. The first section uses a 1936 exhibition of Cambridge's scientific relics as a jumping-off point to survey the range of historical practices in the various Cambridge laboratories. This panoramic approach is intended to show the variety and complexity of pasts that scientists had used material to conjure in the years prior to the exhibition. Commerce and commemoration emerge as two key themes. The second part turns to the Cavendish Laboratory (experimental physics) to explore the highly specific senses of time and memorialization at play in the early years of the laboratory (c.1874–1910), and the way these were transformed over the subsequent generations leading up to the 1936 moment. The key figure here is James Clerk Maxwell, whose turn to history involved a mix of antiquarianism and modernism. The paper concludes with an attempt to characterize the meanings and significances of ‘the museum in the lab’. This phenomenon ought to be understood in terms of the wide range of ‘collections’ present in laboratory spaces.

Archaeology is often defined by our interest in how cultural traditions change over time and generate patterns of material culture diversity. As acknowledged throughout the history of archaeological research, evolutionary biology broadly parallels these interests by also examining patterns of inheritance and diversity. Today, one of the most common frameworks used in evolutionary biology to infer patterns of macroevolution is Bayesian phylogenetic inference. Despite the popularity of this approach across the sciences, few worked examples can be found in the archaeological literature. This chapter closes this gap by providing a step-by-step application of a Bayesian phylogenetic approach to archaeological data from the Great Plains. We conclude that Bayesian methods are not only able to reconstruct evolutionary relationships in a more robust manner but also ask a new generation of questions about the pace of cultural change, periods of cultural divergence, and rates of cultural diversification.

This study presents the first characterisation of the early glaze technology that emerged in Cyprus during the 13th century CE, with the glazed ware assemblage recovered from the theatre site at Nea Paphos as the main focus. By framing the results of the technological study using SEM-EDS and thin-section petrography within the historical context, we are able to establish the link between local production and broader technological and socio-historical developments. The early glaze technology in Cyprus appears to have followed the established traditions characteristic of the eastern Mediterranean region during the late medieval period. This is reflected in the use of high lead glaze, the addition of iron and copper oxide as colourants, and the use of painting and sgraffito as principal decorative techniques. Although the introduction of glaze production in Cyprus coincided with the time when the island fell under the Frankish rule, there is no evidence indicating that the Frankish rulers directly controlled the production or the Franks were involved in the actual production process. However, we argue that the establishment of the Frankish influence had indirectly stimulated the beginning of glazed ware production in Cyprus by facilitating the movement of labour and creating the market and demand required for such production through its link to the Crusaders' campaigns in the wider Levantine region.

The Maʻagan Mikhael B shipwreck is the remains of a 23-m-long merchantman found off the coast of Israel. A significant portion of the wooden hull survived in a good state of preservation, and over 870 glass fragments were found inside the hull remains. The finds included lumps of raw glass and fragments of glass vessels, which were probably intended for recycling. Fragments of bowls, cups, wine glasses, oil lamps, tesserae, bracelets, a glass vessel seal and two almost intact bottles, were also found. Except for a few finds dated to the Late Roman period, most of the glass vessels were dated to the end of the Byzantine and/or the Umayyad periods (7th–8th centuries CE). This is the first time that a glass cargo discovered in a shipwreck from the Early Islamic period has been studied in detail, using typological and analytical methods. The results indicate maritime trade between glass workshops in Israel and Egypt, and that glass cullet was also exported from Israel, although the destination of this cargo is as yet unknown.

John Bossy, who died on 23 October 2015 at the age of 82, had a long association with Past and Present. He became a member of the Editorial Board in 1973 and during the course of his career published a number of seminal articles and incisive reviews in the pages of the journal. He was one of the most original and distinctive historians of his generation, whose many publications on the religious and political history of early modern England and Europe shifted paradigms and set fresh agendas during his lifetime. Defiantly refusing to be categorized or constrained within conventional generic moulds and boundaries, his work is always stimulating and provocative. Less a tidy finished product than a set of hypotheses for further investigation, it reads as part of the ongoing dialogue and open ended conversation which John Bossy conducted with himself. He made an enduring mark on the field of early modern history and he leaves behind a powerful intellectual legacy.

The normalization of married women’s employment was one of the major social changes taking place in western societies in the second half of the twentieth century. Focusing on Britain, this article explores the role played by the emerging discipline of sociology in fostering this change between 1940 and 1970. It argues that a group of social researchers active in this period helped to reshape popular understandings of married women’s work, which they presented as a permanent feature of ‘modern’ societies rooted in irreversible demographic and socio-economic trends. By framing paid work as an activity which met women’s new psychic needs and material aspirations across social classes, this sociological narrative dampened much of the moral fervour which accompanied popular debates about working wives and mothers. But whilst sociological research into women had a cultural throw which reached far beyond professional social science, its authors could not always control the meanings it acquired in the hands of others. It could, for instance, be deployed by professional women’s bodies to advance demands for flexible working, or by civil servants to legitimize inaction on day care provision for the children of working mothers. This analysis reconstructs the professional lives and collective contribution of Pearl Jephcott, Viola Klein, Alva Myrdal, Judith Hubback, Nancy Seear, Hannah Gavron and Ferdynand Zweig in order to argue for the importance of taking ideas seriously in accounts of women’s changing post-war lives. It demonstrates how the shifting conceptualisation of women’s paid work, traceable through social-scientific ideas and their effects, offers an illuminating lens through which to write the history of gender in the twentieth century.

For centuries, Englishmen and women believed that any misfortune, from the smallest malady to a natural catastrophe, signified divine “justice.” Scholarship on providence and miracles has shown that beliefs in divine intervention were enhanced by the political and religious conflicts of the mid-seventeenth century. This article seeks to refine our understanding of the role of providence in confessional identity formation through an examination of Quaker providential interpretation between 1650 and c.1700. It explores the ways in which Quakers appropriated accounts of divine judgement, circulated them within their community and memorialised them for the benefit of future generations. The discovery of an attempt to create a nationwide record of judgements to befall Quaker persecutors shows that providential stories had a significant role in uniting, and ensuring the survival of a disparate and heavily persecuted religious community.

This article explores animal tales in two modern Libyan novels: Sarīb (2001; A Long Story) by Aḥmad al-Faytūrī and La compagnie des Tripolitaines (2011; Under the Tripoli Sky) by Kamal Ben Hameda. The article argues that the tales, interwoven with other layers of history in the narratives that frame them, represent ways of recuperating collective memory from experiences of vulnerability within war, deprivation and oppression, while also testifying, more broadly, to the violence that underlies nation, empire and civilization. Examining the context of 1960s’ Libya, in which the tales are told, as well as their female tellers and young recipients, it relates them to notions of creaturely memory and deep history, which serve to destabilize accepted narratives of nation, and uncomplicated notions of human progress and ascendency.

In October 1659 a Quaker from Lancashire, William Caton, found himself ‘moved of the Lord’ to travel to Leith and Edinburgh. While he was there he reported ‘good service, sometimes Among the souldiers, sometimes among the Scots and often among friendes’, and he hoped that his ministry had done some good in this ‘time of tryall’. Caton’s visit to Edinburgh was undertaken at a moment of high political drama, as General George Monck was preparing to march his troops to London in the final unravelling of the British republic. Caton noted the significance of these events, commenting that the Lord was ‘ariseing in his almighty power, to breake his enemies to peeces like a potters vessel’. But this apocalyptic vision was underpinned by a more worldly assessment of the political crisis, which, as Caton stated, was ‘not the Lords doeing’. Caton's letter, indeed, epitomized a remarkable commitment to human political intervention. Since his arrival in Edinburgh, Caton had ‘endeavoured to speake’ on a number of occasions with General Monck, but because he ‘could not have accesse’ to him, had spoken instead to his secretary, William Clarke, who promised to pass on Caton’s concerns, not only to Monck, but also to his officers. Caton was so encouraged by William Clarke and his colleagues, whom he found ‘prettie moderate and civill towardes mee’, that he arranged to have his address to Monck printed in Newcastle for wider distribution among officers and soldiers. Yet, despite the apparent cordiality of William Clarke, Caton knew that these were dangerous times, and recommended that a fuller account should be had verbally from the bearer of his letter, George Collison: ‘Many thinges I might write of but not knowing in whose handes this may come I shall therefore be spareing’.

The intellectual career of William Stukeley (1687–1765) has received much attention. However, one manuscript by Stukeley has never been discussed. In 1757 he composed a short treatise, ‘On the Philosophy of Pleasure’, in which he argued an unusual case, namely, that a man and woman ought to feel entitled to consummate their philosophic friendship with kissing. The manuscript illuminates an interesting episode in Stukeley’s private life, but it also has a broader significance. Firstly, it incorporates many of the themes developed elsewhere by Stukeley, showing how contemporary historical and scientific understanding could be synthesised with a mystical account, of ancient derivation, of the physical and social universe. Secondly, the manuscript sheds light on the changing relations of men and women. Social and cultural developments among the literate in eighteenth-century Britain were facilitating heterosocial interaction, outside the framework of courtship and marriage, in ways that enhanced both the possibilities for heterosocial friendship and the risks attached to it. In his manuscript, Stukeley sought to expand the physical expression of amicable affection between a woman and man: he was looking for ways to move beyond the constraints of Platonic love without falling into libertinism. His position accords with the idea that the pursuit of happiness in the eighteenth century had a sexual dimension. However, while Stukeley sought greater latitude in erotic expression, his effort illustrates the challenge of doing so without undermining the contemporary norms of social order.

Historians of the Women’s Liberation Movement have long stressed its decentralised form, with a deliberate refusal of the infrastructure of leaders and formal institutions. Instead, like other social movements of the 1970s and 80s, periodicals, networks of friends, and informal meeting places tended to provide the impetus for the development and diffusion of feminist ideas and strategies of protest. This article examines the significant role that bookshops played in this process, as politicised and commercial spaces. Feminist bookselling is situated within a longer tradition of bookselling, and understood as part of a wider process of attempting to bring social justice concerns to bear within capitalist settings. The feasibility and effect of women-only principles in bookshop settings is explored; bookshops emerge as contentious sites of activism in their own right.

This article examines surviving notes from interviews conducted by Michael Young and Peter Willmott in the London Borough of Bethnal Green and the Essex ‘overspill’ estate of ‘Greenleigh’ (Debden) in the mid-1950s to ask how far they support the central arguments about kinship, community, and place advanced in their classic 1957 book Family and kinship in East London. These interviews are used to suggest that Young and Willmott's powerful a priori models about ‘community’ and working-class kinship, and their strong political investment in the idea of a decentralized social democracy based on self-servicing, working-class communities, led them to discount testimony which ran counter to their assumptions as ‘aberrant’ or ‘exceptional’. Though it is difficult to draw strong conclusions from thirty-seven interviews, it is suggested that the snippets of personal testimony that survive in Michael Young's papers reinforce the arguments of historians who seek to question cataclysmic accounts of the consequences of working-class suburbanization in the mid-twentieth century. Culture and lifestyle changed much less with the move out to suburban Essex than Family and kinship would suggest, partly because Bethnal Green's family and neighbourhood networks were considerably less cohesive than they claimed.

This article explores the effects of the growth in married women's employment upon the dynamics of British marriages in the post-war period. Drawing on popular sociology, newspapers and women's magazines from the 1950s and 1960s, it shows how shifting patterns of women's labour, linked to longer term demographic and socio-economic trends, prompted considerable debate about the stability and future of marriage. Whilst some argued optimistically that the employment of wives strengthened marriage through the material security guaranteed by a second wage and by building greater commonality of interests between spouses, other sources point to a more complex picture. Working wives were seen to imperil marital harmony because of the challenge they posed to men's ‘traditional’ identity as providers and to the legitimacy and modernity of the full-time housewife-worker in the home. The article concludes that paid work made a significance difference to marital power relations in this period; women's wages did not free them wholly from economic dependency, but they nonetheless offered a small slice of financial autonomy and elevated wives' status within the marriage relationship. Paid work thus offers historians an analytical thread of continuity linking the 1950s to later decades of change in women's lives.

1816 and the Resumption of «Ordinary History» Writing in his memoirs, Prince Klemens von Metternich depicted the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 as a return to «ordinary history». As the chaos of revolution subsided, political and temporal order was resumed, inaugurating a perception of historical time that Metternich believed would be sparse, uneventful, stable and slow. This article examines the failure of this vision to be realised within the context of the first full year of the post-revolutionary era: 1816. The temporal strategies devised and implemented in the wake of Waterloo and the Congress of Vienna to stabilise the experience of historical time were themselves undermined by the ambiguous, often contested interpretations of what constituted the «ordinary» course of history. Although the geographic scope is transnational, stretching from Piedmont to Barbados, this article focuses primarily on France and America, and the contemporary chronopolitical disputes that saw those societies struggle to comprehend the new historical and temporal realities established by their respective revolutions. The chronopolitical controversies of 1816 were dominated by the belief that history, which was accelerated beyond control during the revolutionary era, could not be stabilised, or rendered «ordinary».

This article examines the nature of petitioning to the Westminster Parliament from the beginnings of the “rage of party” to the establishment of the whig oligarchy. It uses the largely unused archive of the House of Lords, which survived the parliamentary fire in 1834, to provide systematic evidence of public subscription to petitions produced in response to legislation. A total of 330 “large responsive petitions,” signed by fifty-six thousand people, were presented to the Lords between 1688 and 1720. This enabled a wide range of social and geographical groups to lobby Parliament. Parliamentarians actively sought to direct the public into voicing opinion through petitioning on matters of policy. The intervention of the language of “interest” from the mid-seventeenth century helped to legitimize and control public involvement in politics in the eyes of elites, and offered an alternative to political mobilization based on party allegiances and conceptions of society organized by ranks or sorts. The participation of the public through a regulated process of petitioning ensured that the whig oligarchy was porous and open to negotiation, despite the passage of the Septennial Act and declining party and electoral strife after 1716.

In the Andes, the pastoral visitation of Indian parishes usually evokes the idea of a strongly oppositional relationship between the Church and local society. This vision, lacking in nuance, has been widely disseminated both within the academy and outside it. Although it derives from a serious academic interest in discovering and analyzing the common thread of the Church's evangelization policy in Peru, this stance, centered on the problem of the “extirpation of idolatry,” has been progressively emptied of content and today tends to serve as the standard means of filling gaps in the understanding of the history of Andean peoples during the colonial period.

What was the role of the family in individual reproductive decisions during state socialism? Can the family help to understand regional variations in fertility decline? This study provides an in-depth analysis of family relationships and their influences on individual reproductive decisions during the transition from first to second birth in Soviet Ukraine. Life history interviews are used to compare the western and eastern borderland cities of Lviv and Kharkiv, respectively, around 1950–1975. The findings reveal that regional differences in intergenerational ties and spousal cooperation shaped two reproductive strategies of transition to second birth, specifically postponing in Kharkiv and spacing in Lviv.

Examining the political thought of the Irish Revolution poses two distinct problems. First, we need to establish how we should date the Revolution for the purposes of intellectual history. There is no doubting that the 1916 Easter Rising was an event in British and Irish politics, but it was also an event in the world of ideas. Any serious consideration of this episode and its aftermath therefore needs to trace its origins to patterns of thought as well as shifts in affairs, and the two processes do not necessarily coincide. The second requirement for understanding the role of political thought in the Revolution is to reconstruct carefully the actual doctrines articulated and deployed. Irish historians have been reluctant to engage in this process of interpretation. Yet a more searching account of political ideas in the period has the potential to change our approach to the Revolution as a whole.

This article traces the evolution of history-writing practices in two distinct settings of the British Empire, late seventeenth-century Ireland and late eighteenth-century India, in order to analyse the progression of imperial thought over the course of a century and a half. In doing so, it argues that these British-produced histories demonstrate global patterns towards colonial subjects throughout this period. Moreover, the specific points addressed by these histories with regards to religion and forms of government, as well as the position of the British within colonial societies, suggest that Britons looked for universal elements in all of their colonies.

The rule of conquest came to receive different applications for different parts of the British Empire. How this happened, and who was responsible for it happening, are the interests of this article. Calling upon court reports, parliamentary records, and correspondence between various officeholders in the early Hanoverian government, attention will be drawn in particular to the attorney general and the solicitor general (the law officers of the crown) and the advice they offered upon the governance of colonies between 1719 and 1774. Focusing upon the conventions that pertain to war and conquest in Ireland, the Caribbean, India, and North America, this article reveals inconsistency in doctrine, but consistency in the procedures by which law officers of the crown acquired influence over proceedings in the houses of parliament and in the courts of common law and equity. Just as often in their formal capacities as in their informal capacities, the attorney general and the solicitor general were pivotal to the development of the imperial constitution, in constant response, as they were, to the peculiar demands of various colonies and plantations in the British Empire.

This article examines William Cavendish’s two treatises on horsemanship printed in 1658 and 1667, respectively. It argues that a close reading of these works in their discursive and iconographic contexts reveals their engagement with a markedly unstable idea of the cavalier as horseman during this period and evinces a far greater degree of self-conscious anxiety concerning questions of governance than previous critics have acknowledged. In particular, it explores Newcastle’s grappling with notions of the cavalier as frivolous man of pleasure and as a figure of monstrosity, conceived of in terms of a troubling hybridity with his horse. This leads to a specific consideration of the ambivalent role played by the figure of the centaur in Newcastle’s equestrian writings, a figure whose contradictory antecedents are played out in its recurrence in the contemporary literature of political controversy.

This study presents the results of an investigation into fine-ware production in the eastern Maya lowlands during the Classic to Postclassic transition (ca. AD 800–1250), a pe- riod characterised by the collapse of the Maya dynastic tradi- tion. A selection of fine-ware ceramics—Ahk’utu’ vases and Zakpah ceramics—from various sites across Belize was ex- amined by thin-section petrography and SEM-EDS analyses. The resultant compositional and technological data reveal that fine-ware production exhibited varying degrees of continuity and change in potters’ choices of raw materials and manufacturing technologies. The most significant change oc- curred in craft organisation. Fine-ware production shifted from the co-existence of two ceramic traditions, which guided potters regarding the raw materials used and technical prac- tices followed in making Ahk’utu’ vases during the earlier phase of transition (ca. AD 800–900/950), to the dominance of one broad tradition with greater liberty accorded producers in their execution of Zakpah fine-ware production during the later phase (ca. AD 950/1000–1200/1250). Such a shift is ar- gued to have been stimulated by a change and increase in the demands for fine-ware ceramics during the later phase of the transition, corresponding to the emergence and proliferation of a new elite stratum in the Maya lowlands.

There has been an undeniable interest in recent years in the history of humanitarianism. It is a field that has grown quickly, and, as a field of inquiry, it incorporates a vast spectrum of subjects: from the history of anti-slavery movements in the 18th eighteenth century, emergency relief in times of famine from in the 19thnineteenth, responses to refugee crises in the 20thtwentieth, through to longer term development and poverty eradication programmes during and after empire. It embraces both private philanthropy and public assistance, from individual states and intergovernmental agencies, and intersects with so many other broad themes, from histories of race and gender, human rights, conflict and security, and even the overall development of capitalist modernity. Each of these subjects in turn have their own historiographies, and all draw too on a vast and well established literature from across the social sciences and humanities.

The Diorisis Ancient Greek Corpus is a digital collection of ancient Greek texts (from Homer to the early fifth century ad) compiled for linguistic analyses, and specifically with the purpose of developing a computational model of semantic change in Ancient Greek. The corpus consists of 820 texts sourced from open access digital libraries. The texts have been automatically enriched with morphological information for each word. The automatic assignment of words to the correct dictionary entry (lemmatization) has been disambiguated with the implementation of a part-of-speech tagger (a computer programme that may select the part of speech to which an ambiguous word belongs).

Castigated as theoretically naive by Perry Anderson, or praised as culturally sensitive by later writers, the political thought of the “first New Left” has often been understood in relation to F. R. Leavis's cultural criticism. This article seeks to reframe the writings of E. P. Thompson, Stuart Hall, Charles Taylor and Alasdair Macintyre from this period as interventions in a fundamentally sociological debate about the nature of capitalism in the managed economy of postwar Britain.

This article presents a new interpretation of Richard Simon’s Histoire critique du Vieux Testament (1678). It argues that the initial prohibition of Simon’s work in 1678 has separated it from the debates and arguments that chiefly shaped its contents. It gives an account of the developments in seventeenth-century biblical criticism that preceded Simon’s work before offering a new account of the genesis and composition of the Histoire critique du Vieux Testament. Following this, it presents an examination--based in part on previously unexamined material drawn from Simon’s library--of three of the central and most innovative parts of Simon’s project: his definition of his approach as a ‘critical history’, his new history of the Hebrew text of the Old Testament, and his novel use of manuscript material. The study concludes with a reconsideration of Simon’s work immediately following the Histoire critique du Vieux Testament’s prohibition, arguing that in a series of Latin works Simon attempted to use the methods and shared assumptions of seventeenth-century biblical criticism to justify his work to his contemporary scholars.

This paper investigates a series of glyptic inscriptions attested on Crete at the end of the third and beginning of the second millennium BC, collectively referred to as the ‘Archanes Script’. These minute engravings are considered to represent the earliest appearance of writing west of Egypt, and the first ‘true’ writing in the Aegean. Though mentioned in passing in almost every study of Bronze Age Aegean writing, few scholars have ever offered a definition of what exactly they consider the ‘Archanes Script’ to be. No work or scholarly consensus exists delineating which signs constitute its signary, or even which documents comprise its corpus. Study of the seals as objects in their own right, examining script signs alongside associated iconography, material qualities and form, has been rare. This paper offers the first complete overview and re-definition of the Archanes Script since its discovery in the 1960s and initial definition by Paul Yule in 1980.

In many accounts, the Sharpeville emergency of 1960 was a key ‘turning point’ for modern South African history. It persuaded the liberation movements that there was no point in civil rights-style activism and served as the catalyst for the formation of the African National Congress's armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe. From the South African government's perspective, the events at Sharpeville made it imperative to crush black resistance so that whites could defend themselves against communist-inspired revolutionary agitation. African and Afrikaner nationalist accounts are thus mutually invested in the idea that, after Sharpeville, there was no alternative. This article challenges such assumptions. By bringing together new research on African and Afrikaner nationalism during this period, and placing them in the same frame of analysis, it draws attention to important political dynamics and possibilities that have for too long been overlooked.

To improve our knowledge of the parasite species affecting the inhabitants of Roman period Asia Minor, we analysed faecal material from Ephesus, Turkey. Mineralised material from the drain from a private house latrine (3rd c. CE), sediment samples from the sewer drain of a public communal latrine (6th c. CE), and sediment from the harbour canal (ca. 1st c. BCE to ca. 6th c. CE) were studied for the presence of intestinal parasites. Samples were viewed by light microscopy for helminth eggs, and commercial enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) kits were used to test for protozoal parasites that cause dysentery. Eggs of roundworm were found in the public latrine, whipworm in the house latrine, and both whipworm and roundworm in the harbour canal. Sequential sampling of the harbour core suggests that whipworm was by far the most common parasite throughout the Roman period, and there was no clear evidence for change in parasite species over the centuries. Whipworm and roundworm are both spread by the contamination of food and drink by human faeces. Despite the large number of travellers to Ephesus, as the capital of its province and a major port city in the Roman Empire, there was a surprising lack of diversity in parasite species found. This is especially apparent when we consider that ten species of intestinal parasite have been found across the Roman Empire. This is the first Roman site to be directly assessed for differences between infection in individuals using private latrines, public latrines, and mixed town effluent (in the harbour) at the same site.

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Established in 1662, the New England Company introduced the first crown-sponsored initiative for propagating the gospel among the native populations bordering English America. Under the leadership of Robert Boyle, its work influenced royal policy, but awakened contention over the practice of Atlantic colonization and, simultaneously, the making of the Restoration Church. This article examines the reception of the Company in England, showing how its architects sought to link the plantation process to the advancement of a global Protestant mission. The ambition drew Company leaders into debates over the reshaping of church institutions on both sides of the Atlantic. In England, the mission became a vehicle for the promotion of Protestant ‘comprehension’, as a bid to unite the different streams of the reformed religion, and widen the fold of the established church. However, the Company was frustrated by the confessional antagonisms that entered into domestic politics. Divisions between congregations thwarted missionary collaboration, and stirred doubts in England and America over the relationship between colonization and the ‘Protestant interest’. The article will identify the conflicts within the Restoration Church as a formative factor behind competing ideas of overseas expansion, and a substantial obstacle to the emergence of the Protestant mission as part of the colonizing strategies of the English Crown.

This essay reconstructs Hannah Arendt's reading of Marx and Hegel in order to elucidate her critique of comprehensive philosophies of history. During the early 1950s Arendt endeavoured to develop a historical epistemology suitable to her then embryonic understanding of political action. Interpretations of her political thought either treat historical narrative as orthogonal to her central theoretical concerns, or focus on the role of “storytelling” in her writing. Both approaches underplay her serious consideration of the problem of historical understanding in the course of an engagement with European Marxism, French existentialism and French interpretations of Hegel. This essay begins with her writings on totalitarianism and her ambiguous relation with Marxism during the 1940s, and then examines her critique of French existentialism before finally turning to her “Totalitarian Elements of Marxism” project in the early 1950s. Reconstructing Arendt's treatment of philosophies of history helps elucidate the themes of violence and the relationship between means and ends in her political thought, and places a concept of history at the centre of her thought.

This article explores the relation between proprietary drugs and state interests in early modern France by following the career of the medical entrepreneur Adrien Helvetius (1662–1727). Helvetius began as a private practitioner, but his successful remedy against dysentery and his access to the world of the French court enabled him to become a pharmaceutical monopolist and large-scale pharmaceutical contractor supplying the French army, and later, state-funded poor relief efforts. Rather than seeing his distribution system as an instance of proto-public health or a simple case of military “spinoff” into civilian medicine, I argue that his various roles are an outgrowth of “court capitalism” and that he tapped into existing infrastructures of military and charitable care to find a new market for his drugs. In this view, the state emerges as a bulk consumer purchasing drugs from a private entrepreneur, distributing them to civilian and military populations that do not have access to the urban medical marketplace. Resume analytique: Cet article decrit le rapport entre les specialites pharmaceuti-ques et les interets d’Etat de l’Ancien Regime en analysant le parcours de l’entrepreneur medical Adrien Helvetius (1662–1727). Helvetius a debute sa carriere comme medecin prive. Le succes de son remede contre la dysenterie et sa proximite avec la cour francaise lui ont aide a obtenir un monopole et a devenir fournisseur a grande echelle de medicaments pour l’armee francaise et, plus tard, pour les efforts d’assistance sociale financees par l’Etat. Au lieu de considerer son systeme de distribution comme un exemple de proto-sante publique ou d’un derive de medicine militaire employee dans le domaine civil, je maintiens, d’une part, que les divers roles qu’Helvetius occupa durant sa carriere sont le resultat de ce qu’on pourrait appeler un “capitalisme de cour,” et d’autre part, qu’il a exploite l’infrastructure militaire et du soin charitable. Dans cette perspective, l’Etat achetait les medicaments en gros d’un entrepreneur prive et les distribuait ensuite a des populations civiles et militaires qui eux avait peu d’acces au marche medical urbain.