In his inaugural lecture, Saul Dubow, Smuts Professor of Commonwealth History at Cambridge University, discusses the modern history of science in South Africa in terms of ‘deep time’ and space, drawing links between developments in astronomy, palaeontology, and Antarctic research. He argues that Jan Smuts's synthetic discussion of South African science in 1925, followed by J. H. Hofmeyr's discussion of the ‘South Africanization’ of science in 1929, has parallels in post-apartheid conceptions of scientific-led nation-building, for example in Thabo Mbeki's elaboration of the ‘African Renaissance’. Yet, whereas the vision of science elaborated by Smuts was geared exclusively to white unity, Mbeki's Africanist vision of South African science was ostensibly more inclusive. The lecture concludes by considering South Africa as one of several middle order countries which have used national science and scientific patriotism to address experiences of colonialism and relations of inequality and to assert their influence in regional contexts.

Rebuilding plans submitted after the Great Fire of London in 1666 have been widely treated by historians of the Great Fire and in wide-scope histories of London and modern city planning. However, few attempts have been made to assign an overarching logic to all of them, while paying attention to their texts as well as to their maps. The following article highlights certain common features in these abortive efforts to plan London, assigns a common logic to all of them, and traces the origins of this logic. Such an analysis illuminates the economic principles in plans that are usually examined for their architectural features, and places them in a different historical context. Rather than seeing them as manifestations of contemporary architectural trends, or as a continuation of ongoing attempts to regulate London's cityscape, the plans are presented here as a response to emerging ideas in mid-seventeenth-century England about the nature of value and the economic function of cities within the world of commerce. Such a view reveals the complex interplay between London's early modern growth and the emergence of new forms of knowledge in seventeenth-century England and reasserts the importance of these plans as forerunners of present-day city planning.

The construction and distribution of books containing large copperplate images was of great importance to practitioners of natural history during the eighteenth century. This article examines the case of the botanist and president of the Royal Society Sir Joseph Banks (1743–1820), who attempted to publish a series of images based on the botanical illustrations produced by Georg Forster (1754–94) on Cook's second voyage of exploration (1772–5) during the 1790s. The analysis reveals how the French Revolution influenced approaches to constructing and distributing works of natural history in Britain, moving beyond commercial studies of book production to show how Banks's political agenda shaped the taxonomic content and distribution of this publication. Matters were complicated by Forster's association with radical politics and the revolutionary ideologies attached to materials collected in the Pacific by the 1790s. Banks's response to the Revolution influenced the distribution of this great work, showing how British loyalist agendas interacted with scientific practice and shaped the diffusion of natural knowledge in the revolutionary age.

Historians of empire are well aware of the importance of finding moments and spaces of connectedness between empires. The question of how to do so meaningfully remains open. This article brings to light a significant moment of imperial connectedness, through imperial contest. It tells the story of the humiliating expulsion of the British consul John Falcon from the strategic Mediterranean port of Algiers, during the Napoleonic wars. Both France and Britain sought to establish an informal imperial presence in the regency of Algiers, for access to the grain that both needed – France for its southern regions and armies, and Britain for the supply of its Mediterranean base in Gibraltar. The consuls of both powers were obliged to deal with a Jewish trading house that acted as middleman, both in trade and in diplomatic relations in the regency: the House of Bacri and Busnach. As the two powers competed, and sought to shut one another out, they attributed failures and frustrations to this trading house. Through French and British perceptions of Falcon's expulsion, and both powers’ understanding of the role of the trading house in events, this article offers a picture of imperial connection, bringing together middlemen, diplomacy, and international relations.

Based on long-term oral historical research in the Mandara Mountains, this article traces the ways in which memories of slavery have been preserved in songs which are usually not part of the more formal oral historical narratives. It historicizes this process by focusing on the selective memories of different generations as well as on the influence of colonial and post-colonial politics, particularly post-1990 democratic politics in Cameroon. The major change over time is the shift from the shameful memory of slavery to be repressed – or treated only obliquely – to its public claim as a political resource after the democratic transition of the 1990s. In retelling the history of being sold as slaves, the residents of the Mandara Mountains reversed the negative meaning of slavery to use it to celebrate their resistance to Islam and to voice political claims. This new narrative congeals around being kirdi, a new regional and trans-religious identity claimed by Christians and pagans in the mountains.

The idea of the school museum as an active resource for object-based learning played an important but now neglected part in programmes of educational reform during the closing decades of the nineteenth century and the opening decades of the twentieth. In this article we focus on the role of the Kew Museum of Economic Botany in supplying schools with botanical specimens and artefacts for their own museums during this period, to support a broad variety of curricular agendas, from nature study to geography and beyond. The evidence suggests that this scheme was remarkably popular, with demand among teachers for museum objects outstripping supply, and increasingly being met in other ways. Seen from the perspective of Kew, the distribution of specimens, artefacts, and visual materials to schools was a way of extending the ethos of economic botany into the classroom. For the teachers who requested specimens in large numbers, and the pupils who studied and handled them, however, such objects may have had other meanings and uses. More broadly, we propose new avenues for study that can help us to better appreciate the ways in which museum objects, expertise, and practices moved across professional, institutional, and increasingly global boundaries in this period.

This article contends that understandings of race and practices of racial differentiation underwent a significant epistemological shift around the first decades of the twentieth century. It reaches this conclusion via consideration of a dog breeding programme conducted by the statistician and hereditarian theorist Karl Pearson. In 1913, Pearson proclaimed that he, along with his collaborators Edward Nettleship and Charles Usher, had created a ‘new race’ of dog. Notable for its complete absence of hair pigmentation, this race appeared to demonstrate the potential that experimental animal breeding had for imperial policy-making. In differentiating his dogs from the Pekingese spaniels from which they had been produced, Pearson sought to show that ‘foreign’ animals could be made to approximate British racial standards. In Pearson's wake, animal breeding became an increasingly persuasive means by which scientists sought to legitimate racial contentions. By the 1920s, established anthropocentric approaches to human differentiation had begun to be replaced by new, animal-centred techniques and practices. Whereas nineteenth-century conceptions of race had primarily been articulated in relation to the study of human bodies, in the new race of the twentieth century, differentiation would involve study of and experimentation with bodies of all kinds – animal and human.

Republicanism has been one of the most influential political ideologies in modern Irish history; however, it remains conspicuously undertheorized by historians of the revolutionary period. While recent historiography has challenged representations of anti-Treaty Sinn Féin as a mindlessly destructive, anti-democratic force, the extent of ideological and rhetorical continuity linking the Provisional Government formed to assume control of the Free State on 7 January 1922 with the pre-Treaty republican tradition has not been understood. This article rejects the historiographical thesis that the Provisional Government abandoned republican ideas. Drawing from the Cambridge School's contextualist account of republicanism as a polysemic and contingent political language, it highlights the vigorously contested nature of republican thought in the intellectual firmament of revolutionary Sinn Féin and argues that the Free State leadership articulated its vision of politics and society through classical republican concepts of ‘civic virtue’ and the ‘common good’. It is suggested additionally that the colonial dynamics of the Anglo-Irish relationship helped to shape the vision of republican citizenship promoted by an administration possessed of a deep-seated determination to refute historical perceptions of the Irish people as congenitally ‘unfit’ for sovereignty.

While recent work has shown that interwar Asian civic associational culture was becoming more plural than previously understood, scholars focus mostly on transnational networks and neglect local associations co-existing in the colonial urban space. We also know little about how internationalist and liberal ideals interacted with notions of racial and national exclusion prevalent in the wider society. To overcome this, this article examines local organizations alongside transnational networks in interwar Hong Kong to understand fully how global trends in the interwar period affected colonial civic culture. Drawing on Freemasonry, Rotary, the League of Fellowship, and the Kowloon Residents’ Association, I discuss the aspirations of multi-racial urbanites in interwar Hong Kong and their limits. I argue that, while internationalism and colonial hierarchies allowed solidarity to be forged amongst multi-racial urbanites and encouraged their civic engagements, racism embedded in the society, rising nationalism, and constitutional constraints put limitations on their aspirations.

Conservatism claims to be a philosophy of common sense and everyday experience, in which sensation takes priority over reason. This article asks how this was understood by both Conservative thinkers and grassroots members in mid-twentieth-century England, and how it sat alongside other ways of understanding the feelings and experiences of ordinary people, in a period in which these came to be regarded as a privileged form of political authority. The article shows that the Conservative everyday was rooted in individual sensory experiences, but always underpinned by the collective evocation of reverence, majesty, and awe. It traces understandings of the everyday and the awesome through political texts and grassroots publications, showing that the tension between them is what gives Conservatism its distinctive character. This is conceptualized in Burkean terms as the beautiful and the sublime. The latter guarantees order, hierarchy, and allegiance, while the former works to soften and socialize power – making it seem a matter of custom and common sense. The article suggests that this combination enabled Conservatism to adapt to the challenges of mass democracy but became ever harder to sustain in the emotional culture of post-war England, when feelings became a marker of personal authenticity, rather than cultural authority.

This article assesses the relationship between the imposed Central African Federation (1953–63) and the ways in which East and Central African thinkers and leaders conveyed and pursued the possibilities of decolonization. Existing literature on federalism in twentieth-century Africa fails to place regional projects in dialogue, studying in isolation East Africa and Central Africa, ‘utopian’ and oppressive regionalisms. But such clear dividing lines were not articulated in the four discursive ‘sketches’ of East and Central Africa that this article brings to light: those of anti-Federation organizations in Nairobi and Ndola in 1952; students at Makerere College (Kampala) in 1953; mobile Malawian activists in regional and pan-African forums around 1955–8; and East African party publicity representatives around 1958–60. At each of these critical moments, thinkers creatively constructed various relationships between geographical space and chronological change, through the lens of a broader, interdependent East and Central Africa, as a means to fend off perceived threats to a precarious advancement towards a democratic future. Attending to the evolution of these ideas shows not only how the Central African Federation placed material constraints on regional solidarity, but how ‘thinking regionally’ could support the case for national borders, even before decolonization.

With a formal colour bar on British championships operating until 1948, boxing had long been a site of racial discrimination. The abolition of the sport's colour bar was recognition of the wrongness of racial exclusion and it was followed by a celebration of black fighters as local and national heroes. The sport became a rare space where black men could be spoken about, discussed, and celebrated without primary reference to their colour. However, race was never irrelevant, especially as the number of black boxers rose with wider patterns of migration. Race was thus widely discussed in boxing, although there was rarely open discussion of racism. This absence, along with black successes in the ring, masked deep levels of both structural and interpersonal prejudice. Racial differences remained accepted as common sense by white Britons. Indeed, immigration intensified racism in Britain, changing the perceived position of people of colour from exotic novelties to threats to society. Boxing is thus a reminder of the contradictory dynamics of race. Formal mechanisms of exclusion could be removed, while informal mechanisms intensified. Individuals could be celebrated, while people of colour as a group were looked down upon. Black achievements could simultaneously reinforce ideas of black inferiority.

We are currently witnessing the emergence of global humanitarianism as a fully fledged historical field. Eighteenth-century transatlantic abolitionists, nineteenth-century imperial missionaries, twentieth-century aid workers, and twenty-first-century activists inhabit the pages of more and more published books and articles. Global humanitarianism denotes a sphere of action as well as an object of study. Questions as to where or what the global is persist. The books under review all operate within the sphere of Western influence: North America, the British empire, or former colonies. They also have similar protagonists. They are largely populated with practitioners of humanitarianism, rather than the objects of their beneficence. This raises some questions. Where does global humanitarianism take place and who does it encompass? Is global humanitarianism inherently enmeshed with Western expansionism and unequal power dynamics?

Will Irwin worked as a reporter and muckraker for ten years before he wrote The American newspaper (1911). Published by Collier's magazine over fifteen issues, it was a pioneering study of ‘journalism in its relation to the public’, and it has been much cited by historians. Irwin argued that American newspapers in the early twentieth century had come to possess enormous power; indeed, ‘no other extrajudicial force, except religion, is half so powerful’. Newspapers had been significant influences on public opinion since the early nineteenth century and had become even more important and popular with the rise of ‘yellow journalism’ in the 1890s. But Irwin worried about conflicts between ‘the business attitude’, which insisted that newspapers were commercial products above all, and ‘the professional attitude’, which identified journalism with civic education and the public interest. He was especially anxious about ‘the advertising influence’, on which newspapers depended for economic survival, and which necessarily damaged their journalism. For when advertisers wanted stories spiked or editorials altered, they generally had their way. And when publishers courted businessmen over drinks and dinner, they grew fat and corrupt. So ‘the perplexity of free journalism’ was that ‘so long as our American capitalism retains its insolence and its ruthlessness of method, commercial publishers of million-dollar newspapers must recognize this [advertising] influence whether they like it or no. And many of them do like it.’ Irwin's sense that newspapers claimed to be the people's tribunes but often served their owner's interests made him think that ‘the system is dishonest to its marrow’. Thus his study raised some enduring questions for historians: why were newspapers so powerful? How important were their publishers? Is free journalism ever possible?