The transformation of nineteenth-century governing classes remains one of the greatest themes of European history. This article focuses on the social and familial life of 116 high-ranking treasury clerks offering a different perspective on the development of the nineteenth-century state and the transformation of its governing classes. Instead of conceptualizing the formation of this new administrative elite exclusively in terms of administrative reform, career advancement based on individual merit, educational networks, or the result of connections with cabinet officers – as hitherto has been commonplace in the literature – this article will show that treasury clerks’ marriage ties, familial networks, and intergenerational support sustained their careers, families, and status during middle life and old age. By using class, life-cycle, and family lenses, this article argues that the consolidation, coherence, and cohesion of the new ‘administrative elite’, that is, the men who attained the top positions in the treasury and from there moved to other public establishments from 1850 to 1914, was also the result of transitions in their life cycle and family life. Apart from recasting the ascent of this group in social terms, this approach produces significant insights into the development of the nineteenth-century state, the transformation of governing classes, social classes, and family.

Asianism, the idea that Asian nations should unite and overcome Western imperialism, was thought to have faded as the Second World War ended. At that point, China appeared embroiled in a civil war, India in Partition. Yet their visions for Asia’s future have been overlooked. This article examines how they envisioned Asia’s economic revival through the UN Economic Commission for Asia and the Far East (ECAFE). It argues that the Chinese diplomat P. C. Chang, frustrated with a Eurocentric UN, led UN members in the Global South to advocate an institution that supported Asia’s developmental aims. Although China and India believed that ECAFE should help Asian economies surpass their pre-war levels, they disagreed on how to achieve that object. ECAFE was not simply an example of the neglected post-war Asianism and non-Japanese Asianism. Chinese and Indian ideas about ECAFE helped redefine Asia’s self-identity: from a shared cultural heritage to prosperity and ‘modernity’. However, despite the rhetoric of unity, the disagreements between China and India over ECAFE indicate that Asia in the late 1940s lacked international solidarity. As Nationalist China declined, India supplanted its leadership of Asianism. The competition between different strands of Asianism helped lead to alternative post-war visions, such as Afro-Asian internationalism.

In this article, we first explicitly argue that disability associated with poor eyesight was a socially constructed category dependent on the needs of the Post Office as an employer and its ability to construct workplaces which ameliorated the impact of vision impairment. The second part of the article addresses the institutional responses and technological landscapes of work which comprised the contexts within which visual impairment needs to be interpreted. This involves examining the importance of medical inspection by Post Office doctors which worked to exclude those with significant sight loss from postal employment. However, what was understood to constitute significant or irreparable sight loss varied across different government agencies, and different definitions of what constituted significant sight loss served as a point of contention between Post Office management and the Civil Service Commission. .

The Easter 1916 rebellion occasioned significant civilian casualties. Having initially resisted the idea of compensating bereaved or injured civilians, the British government relented by establishing the Rebellion (Victims’) Committee (RVC) which assessed 550 compensation applications for death and injury. Utilizing these applications as well as Dublin Castle, Treasury, press, and parliamentary records, this article examines five aspects of the state’s treatment of civilian casualties: why the government’s initial opposition to compensation was eventually reversed; the establishment of the RVC, the bureaucratic compensation process, and the surveillance of working-class claimants; what the compensation claims reveal about the nature and circumstances of civilian casualties during the rebellion; how the Workmen’s Compensation Act (1906) was used to determine compensation awards and, consequently, how this minimized the state’s financial liabilities by treating civilian casualties not as victims of war but on a par with injured workers; and, lastly, why the workmen’s compensation legislation was an inadequate means of treating civilian war casualties. The RVC compensation records enable a unique case study of how the 1916 rebellion adversely affected the lives of ordinary men, women and children, and how the British state endeavoured to limit its obligations to make reparations to them.

John Evelyn (1620–1706), in Tyrannus, or, the mode in a discourse of sumptuary lawes (1661), decried the foreign fashions that threatened the English economy and symbolized Restoration extravagance. He supposedly instilled these beliefs in his daughter Mall (1665–85), with whom he co-authored the Mundus muliebris: or, the ladies dressing-room unlock’d (1690), a remarkable satire that expressed contempt at the frivolous new modes of apparel adopted by elite women. Yet, incongruously, many of these same ridiculed styles appear in the family’s accounts and correspondence. Indeed, the purchasing habits of Evelyn’s wife, Mary (1635–1709), and daughters reveal a firm commitment to maintaining a fashionable appearance. This article recovers the unexplored attitudes of the Evelyn women towards clothing consumption and the varied ways they maintained their wardrobes. A close reading of the Mundus muliebris alongside the family’s accounts, bills, and correspondence reveals the seminal, paradoxical role of dress as highly contentious yet socially ubiquitous. Through its biographical framework, the article highlights how private consumption practices within elite households like that of the Evelyns challenge the prevalence of published narratives attacking elite women’s fashion. In turn, it reveals the dangers of taking these polemical texts at face value.

This article provides a close study of ‘Nice pickings’, a short piece of political disinformation generated within the London radical press. It examines the means and methods by which this became a viral text and reconstructs its pattern of circulation. It argues that, by passing rapidly and widely around a range of different media and audiences, by being susceptible to revamping and adaptation, and by providing a gateway onto a series of powerful stories already in circulation, this single paragraph illuminates some of the ways in which a national reform movement was forged in 1830.

Studies of petitioning activity in the early years of the Long Parliament (1640–2) have often focused on the large-scale petitions which engaged with issues of high politics and religion in the charged atmosphere prior to the outbreak of Civil War. However, many subjects were drawn to petition the Commons and the Lords for relief in much more particular economic disputes. Utilizing overlooked manuscript petitions in the parliamentary archives and papers of the MP Bulstrode Whitelocke, this article re-examines petitioning activity between 1640 and 1642. It finds that, despite the absence of parliament during the Personal Rule, subjects eagerly embraced the calling of a new parliament, their perceptions of it shaped by its contemporary history. As MPs and peers increasingly utilized and preserved records, petitioners too evoked and confronted the parliamentary past. While some like the Merchant Adventurers’ Company glossed its presentation tactically, others including London-based glassmakers and merchants were driven by ideological beliefs in the historic role of parliament as a protector against arbitrary fiscal policies. This article contributes to post-revisionism by showing that subjects viewed parliament not as an event, but as an institution, fostering connections between past and present sessions as they petitioned for redress.

In the context of increasing historiographical attention to the emotional content of French revolutionary politics, the essentially unprecedented nationwide consultation that produced the cahiers de doléances of 1789, now available as a searchable digitised corpus, offers a route into exploring the hopes, fears, and concerns of thousands of French people who participated directly in the cahiers’ composition. Mapping their uses of the concept of ‘trust’, and its manifold implications, offers new evidence on the nature and contours of the political relationships they believed they inhabited, and on the extent to which they were enacting agency over the prospect of change. It also provides material to contemplate the implications of the highly centralized, top-down reform processes actually initiated from the summer of 1789 onwards, and the violent complexity of their reception.

By investigating 321 smuggling vessels that travelled between the Faroe Isles and the British Isles between 1775 and 1785, this article explores the regionality and seasonality of illegal trade in the north Atlantic. The article centres on a neglected oceanic region, thereby inverting historical geographies, shifting the focus from port centres like London and Copenhagen to the Scottish Northern and Western Isles, as well as the Faroe Islands. Epitomizing the ‘dichotomy of insularity’, in the eighteenth century these areas were located along maritime highways of global trade, and illegal trade flourished there, despite their challenging location. The article demonstrates that this illegal trade had different seasonal cycles from those of legal trade. While legal trade halted in the winter season, illegal trade continued throughout. Linking illegal maritime activities to more lawful ones, like fishing, the article suggests that the recurring nature of the contraband trade ought to be understood in relation to the broader coastal culture, in which maritime knowledge was circulated and the local relationship to the sea defined. The study suggests that illegal trade should be viewed not merely as an extension of globalization but as a rooted phenomenon, which developed in unison with the local environment.

Manchester has long been a model for the class divisions characteristic of British Victorian cities, and this segregation has largely been attributed as a spatial phenomenon as informed by qualitative sources from the period. The digitization of historical source material, however, allows for quantitative assessments of residential differentiation. By analysing patterns of residential distribution using nineteenth-century, individual-level census data, it is revealed that early Victorian Manchester was characterized more by residential heterogeneity than segregation. In light of this finding, this article revisits the source base for early Victorian Manchester in order to reconcile the differences in the physical and social dimensions of segregation for a more accurate and holistic understanding of urban dynamics and the mechanisms of class formation. It explains this dissonance by exploring the city’s architectural, occupational, and cultural structures: while rich and poor lived cheek-by-jowl in the industrial city, temporal rhythms of employment, institutionalized cultures of class, and emerging modes of urban maintenance and discipline all produced practices which differentiated and isolated one class from another.

This article – arising from an ERC-funded project on the lived experiences of dictatorship – explores the development of and approaches to the history of everyday life under repressive political systems, presenting the historiographical, conceptual, and contextual points of contact, synergy, and divergence between historians working in and on Europe, Southern Africa, and Latin America. As a historiographical review article, this piece provides both a critical assessment of and novel intervention in these respective literatures, making the case for ‘decentring’ European histories and historiographies, to encourage greater engagement and collaboration between those working on different historical and geographical contexts.

George III was a family man, a modest eater, and a thoughtful ruler who wrote about the big questions of the day, from royal sovereignty to the best methods of agriculture to feed a modern nation. His writings provide a glimpse of his version of monarchy, which placed him at the head of a national family, where he embodied the habits of self-regulation and temperance in keeping with the sensibilities of late eighteenth-century manhood. This article brings together George’s meals and his essays, considering the histories of food, masculinity, and self-fashioning, to argue that George was a monarch who embodied a new form of masculinity, as marked by his agricultural interests and insistence on a modest diet. His eating habits, along with his intellectual interests and public persona, bring us to the intersection between the private man and the public monarch. Drawing on newly digitized data, alongside contemporary caricatures and descriptions, and George’s own writing, we argue that moderation was central to George’s creation of an image that appealed to the emerging British nation of the late eighteenth century; food was central to this image, highlighting both his masculine self-control and his ability to be useful to the nation.

Herbert Butterfield’s The Whig Interpretation of History (1931) is universally received as sceptical of ‘whig’ teleology in historical accounts and, therefore, of politically charged narratives of history. This view stands in need of a basic correction. Butterfield’s work targets teleological accounts which involve a determinate conception of progress such as would arm a partisan politics. He calls this the politics of the ‘general proposition’. Nevertheless, he does defend a conception of progress involving an indeterminate concept. The historian finds, intimated in the detail of the past, that progress is the fruit of interactions between opposing parties. The imperative for the statesman in the present, then, is to facilitate such interactions. In short, The Whig Interpretation of History is a positive work of political thought. Looked at this way, Butterfield’s later, controversial work, The Englishman & His History, does not appear to be in contradiction with the earlier book so much as a polemical expression of it. The two books together present what may be called Butterfield’s politics of historiography. Histories which present progress as a straight line, to be co-opted by one party, encourage precisely the political action which impedes progress. Butterfield, in short, is still a kind of ‘whig’.

Reflections on the legacy of ‘Jacobin egalitarianism’ in post-Thermidorian France can be seen as following one of three strands: conservative, communist, or democratic. By shedding light on the democratic trajectory, this article addresses the historiographical imbalance that has disproportionately focused on conservative and communist perspectives. This study thereby pursues a renewed understanding of the relationship between the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the evolution of political economy. Through an analysis of Étienne-Géry Lenglet’s treatise, De la propriété (1798), the contexts and content of democratic political economy during the revolutionary decade are identified. Lenglet’s politics formed an intervention in the debates during the Directory on the dynamics of property, morality, the franchise, and the principles of modern polities. His thought exemplifies a Condorcetian egalitarianism that grappled with the dilemmas posed by the rise of commerce and standing armies. This analysis of Lenglet’s work challenges the notion that the radicals of the French Revolution operated outside of Enlightenment political economy: De la propriété was deeply rooted in Enlightenment and revolutionary rhetoric. Lenglet’s politics emerges as a crucial component of diverse reform projects that contradicts reified depictions of Enlightenment political thought.

The debate between Hythlodaeus and an English lawyer before Cardinal Morton in Book One of Utopia (1516) contains many proposals for socio-economic reforms. These have typically been interpreted as innovative proposals to counteract the corruption of Christendom which surrounds them. However, when placed into their legislative context, it is apparent not only that these reforms echo closely many socio-economic reforms passed in England in the decades preceding Utopia, but that corollaries for almost all of them were passed when Morton, in whose presence the debate took place, was lord chancellor. Recognizing this forces a reassessment of this debate, showing Hythlodaeus’s flaws, and reframing the contribution of the English lawyer. This very reassessment, however, realigns the entire dialogue before Cardinal Morton, which it is possible to identify as a mirror to the wider text. It is a Utopia within Utopia, or, a mise en abyme. By closing examining the reflection, it appears that this provides a structural indication of how Utopia should be read.

In February 1744 in Paris, the Swedish physician Abraham Bäck (1713–95), better known as Carl Linnaeus’s best friend, dissected the cadaver of an unidentified sub-Saharan man. In contrast to the widespread exploitation of the enslaved dead in North America, cadavers of dark-skinned Africans remained rare in the anatomical theatres of eighteenth-century Europe. Scarcity not only increased their market value in medical circles interested in skin colour: in Europe, empirical anatomists often used these rare remains for building their medical authority. This article explores the rise of an empiricist social culture of racial anatomy in the European Enlightenment by following the case of Bäck, whose research on ‘black’ skin also provides a little-known counterpart to Linnaeus’s racial anthropology. Bäck’s case illustrates not only how European anatomists often wrote accounts of skin colour which best showcased their medical skills but also how the production of racial pseudoscience became increasingly driven by the authoritative rise of empiricism, the expansion of the slave trade, and the Enlightenment’s fascination with human differences.

In the 1950s and 1960s, changes in the international situation, such as decolonization in Asia, led some Australians to question the usefulness of keeping the ‘White Australia Policy’, the basis for the country’s immigration system since Federation in 1901. Some argued that Australia’s international reputation, especially with newly independent countries in Asia and Africa, could be harmed by the maintenance of this policy. Events such as the Sharpeville Massacre in apartheid South Africa in 1960 caused further introspection into Australia’s racialized system. However, as pushes to reform the policy grew, others used international events to resist reforms. Using speeches by politicians and documents produced by policymakers, this article will show how events, such as the Notting Hill riots in Britain, the Little Rock controversy in the United States, and the Sharpeville massacre, were used as warnings about Australia potentially introducing similar ‘racial problems’ if it allowed more non-white migration. This article argues that these concerns tapped into a transnational whiteness that shared anxieties about decolonization, civil rights and non-white immigration in the post-war period, bringing a racialized solidarity forged at the turn of the twentieth century into the Cold War era.

Since its foundation in 1724, the regius chair has been held by twenty-two men. In this study, I consider a small selection of them, using a range of sources including a guard book in Cambridge University’s archives and portraits in order to reflect on their lives, works, and reputations and on ways of analysing the history of one specific post. The central role of the university’s registrary and the scope of incumbents’ intellectual concerns are also discussed. Implicit is a measure of scepticism about ‘professionalization’ as an explanation for the nature of historical practice over three hundred years and about existing interpretations of past claims that history is a science.

This study develops and expands some of the arguments of a lecture I delivered on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the foundation of Cambridge’s Historical Tripos. Its central proposition – that it is meaningful to talk about ‘Cambridge History’ and to discuss its distinctiveness – remains central to this published version of the lecture, as does the idea that the Tripos has always embodied that distinctiveness as a form of social memory. Both the Tripos as a structure and the Faculty archive as a source come into play in helping to make sense of the Cambridge trajectory over the past half century. The lecture lays stress on some persistent legacies from the Cambridge tradition, identifies some strands that developed internally after 1945, and considers the impact of external influences on Cambridge History. Taking the story up to the ‘new’ Tripos of 2022, the lecture concludes that the legacy has exercised more control than has innovation and that the Historical Tripos is best understood as a continuing conversation with its own past.