The years between 1890 and 1914 saw several prominent studies from statesmen-administrators comparing British India with the Roman empire. These were not the self-congratulatory comparisons of earlier decades, but serious comparative studies aimed at learning practical lessons from Rome's successes and failures. To gain a clearer picture of the significance of these analogies and how they were used, the Indian Civil Service (ICS) examination papers from the same period are analysed. It is argued that, following a move in 1892 to make the ICS a fully graduate service, the Civil Service commissioners showed a sustained interest in asking candidates to compare India (and the wider British empire) with the empires of Rome and Greece. Rome was considered particularly relevant for the directly ruled parts of the empire, with a focus on provincial administration and frontier defence, while Athens was preferred for questions of colonial federation. In the final section, the spread of subjects and weighting of marks within the examination are considered. It is argued that a series of changes post-1892 were designed to favour candidates who had studied Classics at university enabling them to obtain a higher proportion of the overall marks than those specializing in other subjects.

Eric Hobsbawm's account of the fin de siècle of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and its post-First World War aftermath, raises the questions of how historians place themselves autobiographically in their histories, and how personal history informs their interpretations. A focus on the fin de siècle reveals Hobsbawm exploring a cultural social democracy as an alternative to the market capitalism that provided the turbulent dynamics tipping towards twentieth-century catastrophe. From the past Hobsbawm offered the people of his present potential alternative models of a more politically harmonious and culturally richer future, a story in which he placed himself. Elements of Hobsbawm's life story emerge in his histories and autobiography, highlighting the personal significance of memory and material objects that Hobsbawm retained – family photos, a school atlas, and his copy of Karl Kraus's Last days of humanity – reflecting an enduring presence of the past that Hobsbawm drew attention to in his work, and helping to shape significant narratives in Hobsbawm's response to the lost realm of fin de siècle Vienna; a ‘twilight zone’, in Hobsbawm's description of that pre-war world, ‘still part of us, but no longer quite within our personal reach’.

This article argues that our understanding of the sixteenth-century Jesuit encounter with Japan is improved by taking into account the role gender played in cultural translation. Recent histories of the mission and the writings it produced have highlighted the strategies adopted by Jesuits to rely on and manipulate knowledge of local cultures to facilitate conversion. Yet, few scholars have used gender as a lens to read the actions and ethnographies performed and produced by Jesuits in overseas missions. Using Luís Fróis's Tratado das contradições e diferenças de costumes entre a Europa e o Japão (Treaty on the contrasts and differences between Europe and Japan), I argue that skilled cultural interpreters used gender as a determining lens to approach the primary task of conversion, but also the secondary task of cultural mediation. Unlike the invasion of the Americas, the ephemeral infiltration of Asia was accomplished through European accommodation of Asian political vocabularies and conduct. Examining the epistemological tools Fróis used to build knowledge of the Other sheds light on the initial stages of the unequal encounter between the Japanese and the Jesuits and how it changed based on a growing understanding of Japanese politics, class, and society.

This article argues that refugees and the Christian humanitarian organizations supporting them, particularly Catholic ones, helped to construct the Cold War West. Christian NGOs valued these refugees, not only for their needs or their suffering, but for the power of their stories. Refugees’ stories served to encapsulate and dramatize the horrors of communism, transforming it from an abstract ideological threat to a vivid personal danger. Their suffering and sacrifice, and the efforts to relieve this suffering, helped to forge ties of solidarity across Western Europe and North America. Christian groups fuelled this solidarity through the dissemination of information about communist persecution and the courage of refugees seeking to escape it, mobilizing the faithful to contribute through donations, prayers, and relief campaigns. The vision of the West which emerged from these campaigns emphasized religious freedom as the cornerstone of Western societies. It promoted solidarity across national borders by emphasizing Christian unity, although there were tensions between different denominations and Catholics were often the most active supporters of anti-communist humanitarianism. It also, strikingly, had little to say about democracy, something that becomes particularly evident when we examine the participation of Franco's Spain in Christian refugee relief.

This article explores continuities and discontinuities in Polish Catholic discourses on family planning across a time span that tends to be divided in the historiography on Poland and political history in general. The period we analyse begins in 1930, with the pivotal encyclical Casti connubii defining church doctrine on contraception, and ends with the legalization of abortion in 1956, and a state-sponsored family planning campaign the following year. In order to reconstruct Catholic teachings on marriage and family planning we examine advice publications that received official church approval, paying particular attention to their gendered dimensions, the emphasis placed on marriage, and the ‘calendar’ method. Although our research includes three politically and socially distinct periods, we argue that the content of Catholic teachings on family planning in Poland was consistent throughout. We also show that, although there were some distinct national characteristics, the Polish Catholic discourse on family planning resembled to a great extent the developments in other countries, particularly in regard to visions of marriage and sexuality. As we delineate, by engaging in the discussion on family planning, Catholic authors acted as active constructors of modernity, construed in both periods in relation to science and nationalism.

This article analyses the biggest pilgrimage event of the Napoleonic era, showing how Catholics used imperial opportunities and imperial loopholes to progress on their path toward religious revival. In September 1810, more than 200,000 pilgrims rushed to the small provincial city of Trier to venerate one of Christianity's most important relics, the Holy Coat of Jesus. This pilgrimage could take place and grow to such gigantic dimensions because both clerical elites and laypeople deftly navigated territorial frameworks created by the Napoleonic state. In the Rhenish borderlands to which Trier belonged, French hegemony enabled the return of the relic to the city in the first place, but pilgrims subsequently exploited the malleability of public order that also characterized imperial governance. The great pilgrimage of 1810 represented neither a form of exclusively top-down mobilization orchestrated by the church and controlled by the state, nor an act of overt, politicized opposition – even as state officials, in turn, proved undeniably hostile to pilgrim mobility and ‘superstition’. The article therefore argues that, in the more peaceful parts of Napoleon's empire, pilgrims and pilgrimage organizers accelerated post-revolutionary Catholic renewal by using that empire rather than either resisting or collaborating with it.

Beer was a staple of early modern diets across northern Europe and the Atlantic World. While its profound social, economic, and cultural significance is well established, little is known about the nature and quality of the drink itself, particularly its nutritional characteristics. Until now, attempts to estimate calorie and alcohol content have been monodisciplinary in approach, involving either theoretical calculations based on grain content, or a rough approximation with modern equivalents. Using sixteenth-century Ireland as a case-study, this article describes an interdisciplinary approach to the problem of early modern beer. Exploiting a rich seam of unpublished archival material, the project recreates an early modern beer, using the most appropriate ingredients, equipment, and processes possible. Scientific analysis of the finished drink offers new perspectives on beer as a dietary staple. The project is a model for integrating practical or experimental approaches into mainstream historical study, and the practice of radical interdisciplinarity. It represents the most comprehensive effort to recreate an historic beer in any context to date, bringing together historians, experimental archaeologists, agronomists, microbiologists, brewing scientists, craftworkers, farmers, and maltsters to tackle problematic questions about the past.

This article assesses Indian activist V. K. Krishna Menon's early political thought, formed during his years in Britain prior to Indian independence. It argues that this was more nuanced than has been previously characterized, with a range of influences and foundations. To analyse the formation and evolution of Menon's political thought, it looks at his political actions from this period, which largely fall into three areas; the India League, his engagement with the British Left, and his publishing career. His editorial work is what often tied together these strands of political action and was where his political thought manifested and expressed itself. This article analyses Menon's publishing career from roughly 1928 to 1938, highlighting the engagement of the three strands of his political action, before undertaking a book history of the India League text Condition of India. The article is a continuation of the expansion of book histories of twentieth-century empire, and argues for a reassessment of anti-colonial texts and figures along these lines, whilst also contributing to the growing historiographical trend that seeks to recast modern Indian political thought, as well as the politics of internationalist activists in interwar Britain.

The Irish Land War was a pivotal conflict in the history of liberal political thought. With significant impacts on both sides of the Atlantic, events in Ireland were about more than Irish self-determination. Heavily reliant on a discourse of natural right, and asserting a relationship between land ownership and democratic-republican citizenship, the Land War provided a vehicle for popular radical opposition to an increasingly positivist liberalism. This article examines the rationales and political assumptions underlying the demand for land, and how such arguments catalysed an intellectual response among liberal political thinkers. Particular moral and metaphysical ideas about the distinctiveness of land allowed agrarian and labour radicals to reassert individualized but non-possessive rights to natural resources. Rooted in a materialist politics of the human body, this purposive conception of land posed a significant threat to claims for private property, social order, and the ameliorative authority of the state, pressing both liberal and conservative thinkers away from unstable notions of individual rights. The crisis over Irish land helped to shift the terrain of political argument away from questions of participation and popular power, and toward amelioration and public welfare.

In 1863, Emperor Tewodros II of Abyssinia (present-day Ethiopia and Eritrea) took a British consul hostage; five years later, the British sent a punitive expedition. This military expedition continued the brutal tradition of earlier ones and shaped later campaigns in Sudan and West Africa in the 1890s. Typically, a large contingent of non-military personnel accompanied these expeditions and the 1868 expedition to Maqdala was no different. What was unique for Maqdala was the inclusion of a member of staff from the British Museum. We argue that a letter from Charles Thomas Newton, keeper of the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities, to Sir Roderick Murchison, the president of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS), illustrates that the plunder of cultural heritage was planned. We also argue that the plunder did not go to plan. The inclusion of a man from the museum made this expedition unique in the museum's history. The acquisition of these objects through colonial violence constitutes a strong moral reason for their repatriation from the British Museum and the numerous institutions in which they are dispersed. Understanding the planning involved in their plunder illustrates the entanglement of politics and imperialism with scientific and cultural institutions that constituted the backbone of Victorian Britain.

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.

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.

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.

Laying the groundwork for a new way to think through the history of British anti-apartheid activity, this article examines the liminal space between anti-racist and feminist activity through a case-study of Leeds Women Against Apartheid. Founded in 1986, LWAA were comprised of a dedicated nucleus of activists, and were concerned with imbuing international solidarity with a tangible meaning. To LWAA, solidarity had a quantifiable basis that could be articulated through the collection of material aid and the raising of funds. The first attempt to ‘gender’ the history of the British Anti-Apartheid Movement, this article argues for the importance of reconceptualizing women's activism, whilst also reflecting on the ‘value’ ascribed to their political engagement. As the example of LWAA shows, by organizing from an ‘autonomous outside position’, the group did so as a prosaic reaction to the realities of working with a masculinist movement. Furthermore, as is shown, while the movement may have been united by a commitment to anti-racism, matters of sexual equality were certainly understood as secondary, and were seen – on both the national and local level – as an unwanted interpolation. In a broader sense then, the article also reflects on the ‘problem’ of gender in progressive social movements.

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.

In the European tradition, political emotion in the form of individual and collective glory was usually constrained by norms of legitimate political conduct defined by public virtue. This article describes an alternative relationship between glory and political reason by reconstructing the political thought of V. D. Savarkar, the architect of Hindu nationalism. The article argues that the relational concepts of glory and humiliation were at the heart of actualizing ‘Hindu-ness’ or Hindutva as a sovereign political category. The genealogy and development of Hindu nationalism is traced from the formative space of the colonial prison during Savarkar's incarceration from 1911 to 1937, the ideology's subsequent refining and dissemination, to its final form after Partition in 1947. Supplementing Savarkar's political treatises and histories, this article is the first to analyse his poetry as political thought. Together, these writings show how scriptural Hindu concepts like the gunas and prakriti were appropriated to justify a fraught majoritarian unity defined against endogenous shame sanctions and exogenous humiliation. In order to achieve this, political reason was yoked to a perspectivist history enabling Hindu self-overcoming, which was personified by communal heroes who embodied a passionate Hindu will to power.

The article explores the post-1945 discourse around Italian war crimes committed in Ethiopia from 1935 to 1942. Although Italians largely escaped prosecutions after the Second World War, the article demonstrates how an international controversy – the appointment and dismissal of a former general of the Italian army as governor of Somalia in 1949 – forced a reappraisal of Italy's imperial, fascist, and wartime past. Exploring this discourse is important for three reasons. First, it shows that, contrary to long-held assumptions, questions related to war crimes and empire were part of Italy's public debate after 1945. Second, it challenges the notion of national forgetting of the imperial past in post-war Italy. Third, it helps us better understand the multiple and subtle connections between empire and international legal order in the interwar and the early post-war period. It shows that arguments based on race, which drew heavily on fascist rhetoric and were made within rather than outside the law, served to justify violations of international legal conventions before similar issues were raised during the wars of decolonization of the 1950s and 1960s.