Beginning in 1689, England was struck by not one but three economic shocks. First, the war against France – Europe's greatest military power – attracted swarms of hostile warships and privateers that heavily damaged English maritime trade, while military expenses also led to a doubling of the tax burden. Second, wartime conditions and government mismanagement sparked a currency crisis in 1695–7 that halted much domestic commerce and caused a run on the recently founded Bank of England. Third, William III's reign brought rapid inflation in the cost of the necessities of life, especially food and fuel, which resulted in prolonged widespread hunger from 1693 onwards. Yet, these hardships have rarely received more than a passing mention in political histories of the Glorious Revolution and do not fit easily into the narratives of economic expansion in the later Stuart period. Close analysis of these ‘hard times’ demonstrates the limits of histories that emphasize long-term developments over short-term crises. Using evidence from a wide range of local and national archives, this article shows the impact of these shocks on the lives of ordinary people.

This article recognizes the significance of commercial entertainment producers in early modern England operating outside of London. In doing so, it offers fresh methodological approaches for understanding pre-modern social status. I explore the geographical and social places of independent bearwards – individuals who kept bears for the commercial sport of baiting. Regional figures involved in entertainment production have been little explored and left behind frustratingly few biographical details. Yet three generations of one family – the Whitestones of Ormskirk in Lancashire (1610s through the 1630s) – do leave substantial surviving documentary evidence about their activities, assets, and networks. I use the Whitestones's probate inventories and wills and their and their neighbours’ court depositions and petitions to offer for the first time a holistic appraisal of the material, economic, and cultural circumstances of the bearward. By stepping inside the households and communities of several generations of independent entertainment producers, we can appreciate their complex and variable social status and the role of commercial recreation in social mobility. I finish by considering the human–animal relationships that underpinned the bearward's place in early modern England, offering fresh evidence of bears’ living arrangements and a theoretical framework for discussing their exploitation in the blood sport industry.

Taking a global approach to the American Civil War from the vantage of China, this article explores the nineteenth-century transnational connections and disconnections that linked the American community there to distant diplomatic crises unfolding in the Atlantic. Such episodes as the raiding of the Confederate privateer Alabama and the Trent Affair reached China's Americans through newspaper articles and correspondence that described an Atlantic theatre dominated by the spirit of war. Such reports had an ambiguous effect in China. On the one hand, they undermined American mercantile enterprises that had been poised to expand into China's interior. On the other, they created only ephemeral ripples of discontent amongst a wider Anglo-American community ultimately bound together by common interests and a sense of racial and cultural solidarity. I argue that while rumour and speculation were powerful forces capable of crippling the United States’ merchant marine, colonial society in ports such as Hong Kong proved surprisingly resistant to metropolitan socio-political crises. Through the central case-study of the Alabama and related debates sustained in 1860s China, this article accordingly explores the extent to which (semi)colonial societies were susceptible to or insulated from metropolitan crises.

This article argues that projects to make Britain's imperial history visible to the public through the display of statues, the establishment of a history museum, and the renovation of historical markers solidified a colonial narrative about the British empire's permanence in India during the first two decades of the twentieth century, decades in which anticolonial unrest threatened the British occupation of the subcontinent. The monumental scale expressed permanence. An imperial aesthetic linked the cities important to showcasing the empire in Calcutta, New Delhi, and London. Contrary to mainstream assumptions that commemorations should be preserved for the sake of documenting history, these markers enacted a British story of triumph at a moment when mass campaigns against British rule were occurring. Coming at the end of a long nineteenth century of statue mania, when many European nations installed memorials to national heroes, the installation of monuments in India presented a colonialist public history of events such as the Black Hole incident of 1757 or the rebellions of 1857. Drawing from Viceroy George Curzon's ambitions in historical preservation and monumentalizing, the article shows how he stabilized a British narrative of India amid anticolonial campaigns of protest.

The first two decades of the twentieth century saw the development of a meaningful transnational movement to employ birth strikes in the fight for women's rights. In an Anglo-American context, this movement was intimately tied to the women's suffrage campaign. It was led by a network of suffragists, Neo-Malthusians, and birth control campaigners who shared literary and personal ties which allowed their ideas to criss-cross the Atlantic between 1911 and 1920. Although the transatlantic birth strike was never implemented on a significant scale, explaining its almost total absence within existing historiography, this article uses a gendered intellectual history framework to piece together the ideas behind the movement which, the article argues, disrupt established understanding of Neo-Malthusianism and socialist-feminism within intellectual histories. Support for birth striking was predicated on faith in the power of working-class collective action, scrutiny of the economic exploitation of both productive and ‘reproductive’ workers, and a corresponding mistrust in the efficacy of state involvement with these issues. The birth strikers wove together strands from collectivist, individualist, socialist, and feminist thought, undermining traditional historiographical depictions of binaries between socialism and suffragism and collectivism and individualism in early twentieth-century political thought.

This article explores how the late nineteenth-century British historian J. R. Seeley was ‘used’ in Japan. The focal points are three translations of his The expansion of England, published in 1899, 1918, and 1942. By placing each translation in context, I attempt to clarify the ideological moves made by those who produced the translations. In the context of the first translation, Seeley was a historian who offered a vision of Japan's future. In the second context, however, he became a lens through which present-day British policy could be understood. In the third context, he became an unintentional detractor of Britain's past colonial policies in India. Through a comparative examination of these three translations, this article uncovers both the ‘potential’ of Seeley's imperial history, which anglophone reception of his work had not exhausted, and the ‘creative’ aspect of translation, thus contributing to intellectual history on both the local and global levels.

While discussion of eugenics and biopolitics during the Third Reich has largely focused upon the regime's most destructive and genocidal policies, this article concentrates on Nazi ‘special schools’ and ‘elite schools’ as a crucial sphere of quasi-eugenic thought and praxis, drawing attention to education as a previously under-researched category of intervention in the history of modern biopolitics. The article also sheds new light on the racialized nature of the Nazi ‘national community’ (the Volksgemeinschaft), and contributes to recent debates on the Third Reich's status as a ‘racial state’ which suggest that the National Socialist regime was driven less by fanatical adherence to racial ideology, and more by a mixture of anthropological and eugenic racism, combined with productivist pragmatism. The two case-studies draw attention to less familiar corners of the National Socialist pedagogical landscape, covering both extremes of the spectrum of biological selection in education, from the negative, eugenic policies applied to supposedly ‘abnormal’ pupils at the so-called ‘special schools’ (Hilfsschulen), to the ‘positive’ biological selection of elite-school applicants at the National Political Education Institutes (Nationalpolitische Erziehungsanstalten, NPEA), the regime's principal training institutions for the future elite of the Third Reich.

Scholars have often considered twentieth-century sovereignty in colonial contexts as increasingly connected to the modern, territorially bounded state, stimulated by the influence of European rule. Yet there remained more malleable and amorphous sovereign configurations well into the twentieth century. Focusing on the case of Indore, a ‘minor’ state in late colonial central India, this article reveals the ongoing dynamism of ḍakait (‘bandits’) within such configurations. By approaching the state as a disaggregated entity, it captures how such communities held complex reciprocal relationships with local state representatives. These interactions challenge older histories, both in South Asia and beyond, that understand banditry primarily as evidence of state evasion or resistance, rather than reflecting an interlocking web of relational and gradated jurisdictions. By exploring connections between ḍakait and the state at the ‘everyday’ level, this article also takes issue with existing emphases on the wider institutional frameworks that classified such communities as ‘criminal tribes’. Such connections could engender local responses that undercut their ethnographic categorization and complicate postcolonial critiques of the essentialization of caste and ‘tribe’ in South Asia. Reconceptualizing sovereignty ultimately provides us with a compelling analytic tool to reconsider wider scholarly axioms relating to colonial knowledge, marginality, and state–society relations.

Was Kim Il-sung's desire to have nuclear weapons the sole reason for North Korea's quest for nuclear power? The answer, I argue, is highly unlikely given that extensive economic considerations played the most fundamental role in North Korea's pursuit of atomic energy from 1945 to 1965. With original, creative research on previously unexamined North Korean publications and Soviet archival materials, I demonstrate how the ‘peaceful’ impetus steered North Korea's early nuclear enterprises in the Cold War period. While previous studies draw only upon circumstantial evidence to argue that North Korea's going nuclear was predestined due to its security concerns, this article revises this teleological assumption by reconstructing historical contexts wherein the two driving factors that formed early North Korea's nuclear programme were mostly emulating how the Soviets harnessed nuclear power for economic gain, and aversion to the Americans’ use of nuclear power for atomic weapons to a lesser degree. That is, North Korea, like other countries in what later would be termed the Global South, sought to master nuclear technology for industrial ends in the first place, which turned out to be economically burdensome to continue, long before September 1965 when its first research reactor went online.

The literature on monetary history has tended to present as ‘revolutionary’ the switch from barter and slave money to the introduction of paper money in regions like West Africa, while describing monetary reform processes in Britain, North America, and other Western capital markets as ‘evolutionary’. In part, the resulting tension comes from believing that colonial currency systems were imposed by the colonial states, while those that emerged elsewhere did so as a result of private transactions involving individual market participants. When read concurrently, four books published recently advance our understanding of the differences between theories that explain the emergence of money as a result of private transactions and those which describe the importance of state involvement in introducing and maintaining currency systems. These works highlight how closely similar the emergence of a modern currency system was in Britain, the United States, and several parts of Africa. By ‘modern’, I am referring here to currency systems that ultimately led to single national currencies which eventually came to be managed by central banks.