By focusing on the history of white ants in colonial South Asia, this article shows how insects were ubiquitous and fundamental to the shaping of British colonial power. British rule in India was vulnerable to white ants because these insects consumed paper and wood, the key material foundations of the colonial state. The white ant problem also made the colonial state more resilient and intrusive. The sphere of strict governmental intervention was extended to include both animate and inanimate non-humans, while these insects were invoked as symbols to characterize colonized landscapes, peoples, and cultures. Nonetheless, encounters with white ants were not entirely within the control of the colonial state. Despite effective state intervention, white ants did not vanish altogether, and remained objects of everyday control until the final decade of colonial rule and after. Meanwhile, colonized and post-colonial South Asians used white ants to articulate their own distinct political agendas. Over time, white ants featured variously as metaphors for Islamic decadence, British colonial exploitation, communism, democratic socialism, and, more recently, the Indian National Congress. This article argues that co-constitutive encounters between the worlds of insects and politics have been an intrinsic feature of British colonialism and its legacies in South Asia.

The present article aims to analyse the role played by US neo-Malthusians in the construction of overfishing as a global environmental issue. Its main argument is that this group of thinkers and militants made decisive contributions, between the 1950s and 1970s, to the formulation and dissemination of the diagnosis of a global fisheries crisis threatening the planet's stocks. These warnings about a global fishing crisis paved the way for present-day concerns about a planetary decline of marine life. By assessing the role played by the neo-Malthusians, this article analyses the history of the post-Second World War debates on ocean productivity, ‘unconventional’ fisheries, and fisheries exhaustion, showing how they were marked by highly optimistic expectations regarding the exploitation of the ‘ocean frontier’. For the neo-Malthusians, it was crucial to discredit this cornucopian vision of the ocean as a horn of plenty, itself a result of contemporaneous euphoria in the world of industrial fishing. In conclusion, this article sheds new light on the history of debates about (over)population and world resources, and on the rise of an ‘environmentalism of the oceans’ in the second half of the twentieth century.

In 1938, the Reverend Digby Bliss Kittermaster, who became chaplain at Rochester Borstal after retiring as a housemaster at Harrow public school, started a diary in which he recorded everyday interactions with inmates and staff. The reputation of the borstal system was at its height in the 1930s owing to Alexander Paterson's reforms, based on the structures and character-building ethos of British public schools. Young people's voices were rarely heard in this progressive discourse of borstal reform and Kittermaster is unusual for articulating them, recording what he heard, teasing out the contradictions of Paterson's reforming aspirations and the reality of humiliation and intimidation that borstal boys often experienced. Kittermaster's public school background made him well placed to question the rhetoric of the public school reform model. His complex personal perspective suggests how humane emphasis on individual potential was subverted at Rochester by coercive structures of traditional prison improvement. Kittermaster's growing frustration at his own powerlessness supports a more nuanced interpretation of how the borstal system has usually been depicted in the Paterson era of reform, especially in relation to damaging mental and emotional costs to inmates and staff, which have been largely neglected in the scholarship of borstal in the 1930s.

This article uses Churchill's defeat in Dundee in 1922 to examine the challenges to liberal political economy in Britain posed by the First World War. In particular, the focus is on the impact of the war on reshaping the global division of labour and the difficulties in responding to the domestic consequences of this reshaping. Dundee provides an ideal basis for examining the links between local politics and global economic changes in this period because of the traumatic effects of the war on the city. Dundee depended to an extraordinary extent on one, extremely ‘globalized’, industry – jute – for its employment. All raw jute brought to Dundee came from Bengal, and the markets for its product were scattered all over the world. Moreover, the main competitive threat to the industry came from a much poorer economy (India), so that jute manufacturing was the first major British industry to be significantly affected by low-wage competition. Before 1914, the Liberals combined advocacy of free trade with a significant set of interventions in the labour market and in social welfare, including trade boards. The Dundee case allows us to examine in detail the responses to post-war challenges to these Liberal orthodoxies.

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.

This article explores sex and romance as under-examined aspects of wartime masculinities through a focus on letters from servicemen recipients of woollen ‘comforts’ to girls and women who knitted for them during the Second World War. It examines the tension between the cultural ideal of ‘temperate heroism’ that formed the hegemonic masculinity during the Second World War and evidence of predatory male sexuality and sexual violence, both in combat and on the home front. Servicemen's letters to anonymous knitters reveal many aspects of their emotional lives, including the widespread deployment of romance as a mechanism for maintaining morale. They also reveal that some men were able to manipulate their image as ‘heroes’ and make use of the comforts fund as a vehicle for engaging in sexually explicit correspondence and transgressive and deviant behaviours. A foregrounding of romance and sexuality suggests that we need to look again at arguments relating to the contiguity between military cultures and middle- and working-class civilian codes of respectable masculinity and male heterosexual expression. The article further engages with critiques in the history of masculinity of the neglect of working-class masculinities and the tendency to focus on cultural scripts about masculinity rather than what men actually did or felt.

This article analyses the curious development and subsequent refinement of the Photo-FIT system for the identification of criminal suspects, used by police forces around the world from the 1970s. Situating Photo-FIT in a succession of other technologies of identification, it demonstrates that, far from representing the onward march of science and technology (and the way in which both were harnessed to the power of the state in the twentieth century), Photo-FIT was the brainchild of an idiosyncratic entrepreneur wedded to increasingly outmoded notions of physiognomy. Its adoption by the Home Office was primarily determined by the particular context of the later 1960s, and its continued use owed more to vested interest and energetic promotion than to scientific underpinnings or proven efficacy. It did, however, in the longer term, provide the impetus for the development of a new sub-field of psychology and pave the way for the development of increasingly sophisticated facial identification technologies still used today. Overall, the article demonstrates the long persistence of physiognomic thinking in twentieth-century Britain, the way in which new technology is socially constructed, and the persuasive power of ‘pseudo-science’.

This article examines the memory of the Great War and the underexplored topic of morale during the Phoney War, and contributes to, and connects, their historiographies. Analysis of previously unexamined Mass Observation (MO) material confirms and qualifies some of the concerns about morale that MO expressed at the time. It also reveals that many Britons looked backwards to the Great War during the Phoney War, whether they had lived through the Great War or not, and their memories and understandings of the Great War informed their attitudes to the Second World War. Memories of wartime trauma were just one facet of the varied legacy of the Great War that Britons drew upon. Importantly, Britons of different ages drew upon post-war representations and personal and vicarious experiences to different extents, but those who were able to typically ascribed influence to personal rather than cultural memories of the Great War. This complicates the assumption that the latter determined Britons’ responses to the outbreak of the Second World War and contributes to understandings of both the reception and influence of cultural representations of the Great War, and the place of the Great War in the subjective worlds of Britons during the Second World War.

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.

How can we explain rising levels of pre-marital sex in post-war Britain? Focusing on the experiences of young women growing up in Britain between 1950 and 1980, this article argues that changes in sexual practice were brought about by shifts in the social value of sexual knowledge and experience. While the figure of the ‘nice girl’ was still central to understandings of respectable femininity, across this period social status and reputation became linked to demonstrations of attractiveness and sexual knowing. For girls of the post-war generation, discussions of sex were central to how they related to those around them, and the decisions that teenagers made about their own sexual practice were informed by their perceptions of what their friends and peers would think of them. The article argues that, by considering the history of sexuality at a ‘local’ scale between the macro-level of culture and the micro-level of individual sexual selfhood, we not only gain an important new perspective on the everyday sexual experience but also uncover new processes of socio-sexual change.

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.

This article examines the place of class and religion in discourses of voluntary action in mid-twentieth-century England, focusing on an overlooked Mass-Observation survey of the district of Aston in Birmingham. It situates Lord Beveridge's Voluntary Action report in its intellectual and social context, through utilizing the qualitative findings of the Mass-Observation district survey of Aston, elements of which were repurposed for the Voluntary Social Services Enquiry from which Voluntary Action emerged. The article takes a thematic approach, investigating how class and religion was seen and reported by Mass-Observers in the context of Aston. Two key arguments are made: that contrary to overarching narratives of post-war secularization, Christian churches actually remained in a relatively dominant position in terms of voluntary action; and that conceptions of voluntary action fundamentally misread working-class understandings of voluntarism, as well as the wider priorities of the post-war working classes. Drawing attention to the importance of class and religion to patterns of voluntary action evident in the Aston survey, yet less considered in historiographical terms, the construction of elite narratives of voluntary action and civil society are more discernible.

The National Family Planning Programme (NFPP) was launched in Ghana in May 1970. It was a tool to implement the 1969 Population Policy Paper, which the military government, the National Liberation Council (NLC), had written with the aid of Ford Foundation advisers. The policy paper reiterated international ‘overpopulation’ discourses that pushed for national planning to stem population growth, especially in ‘developing’ countries. Indeed, it constituted an example of development planning. It discursively linked Ghana's prosperity, and modernity, to stemming rapid population growth through fertility limitation. When the NFPP was launched by the Progress Party (PP) government in 1970, its focus was to implement the population policy by limiting population growth through curbing fertility. International discourses of development and population, as well as the specific interventions of organizations such as the Ford Foundation, the Population Council, and the International Planned Parenthood Federation, shaped Ghana's family planning story. However, choices over the implementation of family planning were ultimately linked to governments’ modernization and development projects and ideologies. Different approaches to family planning by the Nkrumah, NLC, and PP governments highlight the fact that family planning was ultimately political, but legitimized by development discourses of global and local origin.

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.

This historiographical review focuses on the complex interactions between Nazi Germany, local populations, and east European Jews during the Holocaust. Braving fierce historical revisionism in eastern Europe and the Baltic states, recent studies have shifted the spotlight from Germans to Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, Lithuanians, and other ethnicities. As a result, the analytic categories with which most historians still work – notably ‘perpetrator/victim/bystander’ and ‘collaboration/resistance’ – have outlived their usefulness. A more complex picture of the Nazi-occupied territories in eastern Europe has emerged and now awaits new theoretical frameworks. This article argues that past paradigms blinded scholars to a range of groups lost in the cracks and to behaviours remaining outside the political sphere. Through four criteria that shed light on the social history of the Holocaust in eastern Europe, it draws connections between central and east European, German, Jewish, and Soviet histories, in order to engage with other fields and disciplines that examine modern mass violence and genocide. As Holocaust studies stands at a crossroads, only a transnational history including all ethnicities and deeper continuities, both temporal and geographical, will enhance our knowledge of how social relations shaped the very evolution of the Holocaust.

Chaos reigns – at least in the historiography of the Raj. It was once the consensus among historians that British imperial authority in the Indian subcontinent was secure for at least the century-and-a-half before the Second World War. Recently, however, this narrative has drawn a range of challenges. Prominently, Mark Condos and Jon Wilson have held that British imperial authority was chronically insecure. In their view, the irrational anxiety of generations of British officials produced a chaotic administration with minimal social purchase or ideological coherence. Instead of a confident state capable of acting as it chose, these historians have limned a psychologically embattled one incapable of acting except in the abstract, small scale, or short term. Their bold revision succeeds in dispelling the aura of indomitability that has often surrounded the Raj, and in directing attention to its overlooked discontents and weaknesses. Yet their characterization of the British regime as constantly and pervasively anxious is more an article of faith than a conclusion warranted by evidence. Nor do they explain how, if the regime suffered from permanent ‘chaos’ or ‘insecurity’, it managed to survive for some two hundred years. At the heart of Condos's and Wilson's approach is an effort to bypass texts that results, instead, in misreading them. It is largely by re-emphasizing rigorous textual methods, therefore, that Durba Ghosh offers a compelling alternative approach to the history of state vulnerability and disorder.

Edmund Burke is difficult to classify. Born in Ireland in 1730, he entered parliament in 1765 having already achieved literary distinction for several philosophical works, including On the origins of the sublime and beautiful (1757). His subsequent career as a Whig statesman, politician, and reformer spanned the tumultuous decades of the late eighteenth century and culminated, less than a decade before his death, in his famous polemic against the French Revolution, Reflections on the revolution in France (1790). Over the course of his life, Burke opined with such frequency on so many topics that the nature of his ‘philosophy’ remains an open question, and scholars continue to offer strikingly different interpretations of his life and legacies. ‘Burke's legacy to history’, historian Richard Bourke summarized, ‘has been a complicated affair’.