This commentary article explores some of the problems encountered by independent scholars seeking to get their work published in peer-reviewed journals and in particular the difficulties they face in accessing online resources. Though often hidden, these issues are nevertheless very real for aspiring historians and those who have returned late to the historical fold. The article acknowledges the efforts of a number of journals to encourage different voices, but highlights how the limitations of current licensing and Open Access arrangements hinders this ambition.

This article provides a conceptual framework that fills a critical gap at the intersection of Chinese art and cultural history. It focuses on the Yongzheng emperor's ‘Illustrated Inventory of Ancient Playthings’ (Guwantu) and its significance within the context of the collecting and courtly elite culture of the High Qing. Through a comprehensive examination of scroll B/C.8–V&A of the Guwantu itself, as well as the relevant source material, this study elucidates the dynamics that shaped the connections between artist, collector and object in the context of the scroll. Furthermore, this contribution throws light on the multiple entangled relationships that underpinned imperial collecting practices of the period, ultimately offering new insights into the socio-cultural milieu of collectors and connoisseurs in early eighteenth-century China.

The tombstone of an Italian woman, Caterina Vilioni, in Yangzhou (1342) is a rare and important testimony to Christianity in Yuan China. By exploring the visual language and the multicultural geopolitical context of Caterina's funerary monument, this article sheds light on the dynamic processes behind how cultural and religious barriers were negotiated in the premodern Eurasian world. Despite the increasing scholarly interest in the European import of Asian luxury merchandise along the Silk Roads, movement of objects, persons, and ideas the other way around from Europe to Asia is much less explored. Moreover, the expansion of European networks towards the east was written from the perspective of men: friars, diplomats and merchants. Yet, the Yangzhou tombstone directs attention to the overlooked presence of non-elite Christian women in the cosmopolitan port cities of south-east China well before the era of modern global maritime exchange. While previous scholars traced the tombstone to Buddhist and Christian art, I argue that the visual language intentionally projected cultural ambiguity. By comparing it to the Mongol paiza (safe conduct pass), this article proposes that Caterina's burial marker functioned as an ‘otherworldly passport’, which invoked spiritual protection and facilitated the passage between two realms.

Civil War allegiance has long been a preoccupation of early modern British historians. They have weighed geographical, religious, political, and pragmatic reasons for British people to choose sides in 1642. A study of the changes of allegiance in the years that followed is just as important. Side-changing reveals the fractures and difficulties that war, regime change, and an uneasy peace created. Most scholarship has examined figures whose ideas and beliefs remained consistent as the world around them changed. This article argues that others changed their minds (and their side) because their ideas fundamentally shifted, through an engagement with oppositional literature, a royalist social environment, and relationships built with royalist agents. Through a case study of the parliamentarian Major-General Sir Thomas Myddelton it examines this process of change. The article takes the study of allegiance into the Interregnum and beyond to the Restoration, tracing the impact of Myddelton's reading, experiences, and actions upon his declared loyalty. To do this, the article proposes a methodology that cuts across historical approaches, using evidence from financial accounts, libraries, and legal cases alongside surviving correspondence and printed pamphlets to build a composite image of a changing mind.

Recent years have seen a vast expansion of scholarly interest in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Black British histories, and increasing calls to support the work of early-career scholars (ECRs) in this field. Yet ECRs continue to face several specific challenges in conducting this crucial research. This section consists of a brief introduction and two case studies based on the research and experiences of Ph.D. students Annabelle Gilmore and Montaz Marché. Gilmore aims to amplify the connections between the lives and labour of enslaved people on plantations in Jamaica and the wealth and art collection of William Thomas Beckford, now held at Charlecote Park, from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. Marché seeks to trace the presence of Black women in eighteenth-century London, drawing on archival documents that provide traces of who these women may have been, and confronting the limitations of the traditional archive. Together, these pieces offer a glimpse into how these ECRs are positioning themselves within the historiography as well as considering how they hope to contribute to the field.

This article explores the 1932 visit to India of a delegation of Labour party figures associated with the India League, a prominent anticolonial organisation based in London, charged with investigating the colonial state violence unleashed by ‘Ordinance Rule’. It also examines efforts taken by the Government of India, India Office and Indian Political Intelligence to suppress their findings, through which it explores a dialectic between anticolonial knowledge-making and agnotological imperialism, which often took the form of the latter ‘exceptioning’ examples produced by the former of excessive colonial state violence. It offers the conclusion that the contradictions between liberal imperialism and the rule of colonial difference and repression in the age of mass nationalism in India and mass democracy in Britain meant that liberal imperialism in India increasingly flowed, paradoxically, from illiberalism in Britain.

The Bad Bridget project centres on Irish-born female criminal suspects in North America from 1838 to 1918. Its title derives from the common occurrence of the forename Bridget in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Ireland, and its application as a collective name to Irish women in the US. The ‘Bad Bridget’ title seemed to capture our focus on the individual, as well as the diverse experiences of the girls and women on whom the project is based. While we hesitated about using the title initially, lest ‘bad’ suggest a shaming of behaviour or individuals, or ‘Bridget’ a judgement on Irish heritage, we decided that the benefits of the collective name outweighed potential drawbacks. This article expands on the idea that a name can imply shame. It focuses on our use of real forenames and surnames instead of pseudonyms (or other anonymisation alternatives) to identify individual girls and women in our project outputs to date. The article makes the case for the use of real names in this context, exploring in turn our roles and responsibilities as historians, archival and scholarly expectations, our responsibilities towards our subject matter, and our audiences (including the descendants of the Irish girls and women suspected of criminal behaviour).

The range of digital sources available to historians has expanded at an enormous rate over the last fifty years; this has enabled all kinds of innovative scholarship to flourish. However, this process has also shaped recent historical work in ways that have not been fully discussed or documented. This article considers how we might reconcile the digitisation of archival sources with their materiality, with a particular focus on the probate records of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury (PCC). The article first considers the variety of digital sources available to historians of the United Kingdom, highlighting the particular influence of genealogical companies in shaping what material is available, how it has been digitised and how those sources are accessed. Secondly, we examine the PCC wills’ digitisation, what was gained and what was lost in that process, notably important material aspects of the wills. This article does not seek to champion archival research in opposition to digitally based scholarship; instead, we remind historians of the many ways in which the creation of sources shape their potential use, and call on historians to push for improvements in the United Kingdom’s digital infrastructure to avoid these problems in future.

In 1927 Lejaren à Hiller (1880–1969) produced a series of black and white art photographs entitled Sutures in Ancient Surgery evoking scenes from the distant past of surgery and medicine. Commissioned and distributed in North America by Davis & Geck, Inc. to promote sales of its surgical sutures (stitches), several depictions were erotic owing to the centrality and poses of nude female models. The first series appeared as ads in professional technical journals, then as packets assembled in paper portfolios distributed to doctors who were primarily men. The creation of Hiller's oeuvre in different forms over almost a century – journal advertisement, portfolio, book, exhibit, magazine features and textbook illustration – highlights his enduring broad appeal, although his work has since been subject to criticism because of its perceived sexism. At its root, Sutures was an advertising medium that connected a seller to a potential buyer. The content and presentation of the project also connected medicine present with medicine past, which also may have helped physicians to connect with the then blossoming field of medical history. The appeal Sutures may have had for a past male medical culture would not resonate with the more gender-inclusive and less overtly sexist medical profession of today, which also prompts discussion of the associations across art, obscenity, medicine and society. My reassessment of Hiller's work based on analysis of his artwork, contemporary interviews, published critiques, Hiller's own writings and DG company records extends previous analyses as it is more comprehensive in scope and also considers more fully works by Hiller antecedent to Sutures that probably greatly influenced it, such as photopoetry books, other advertising projects and his silent movie films.

Early modern London was multilingual, and early modern urban life was shaped by linguistic diversity. This article draws on the multilingual archives of Elizabethan London's ‘stranger churches’ – Protestant congregations which catered to the needs of French-, Dutch- and Italian-speaking migrants (among others) – to explore how linguistic diversity shaped social relations. These sources offer insights into the everyday multilingualism of the early modern city. They demonstrate London's migrant communities’ intense interest in what people said and why, and show how different languages and their speakers interacted on the streets and in the spaces of later sixteenth-century London. By charting how linguistic diversity was part of the lives of ordinary Londoners in this period, including close examination of incidents of multilingual insult, slander, and conflict, this article argues that the civic and religious authorities relied on the stranger churches’ abilities to carry out surveillance of speech in languages other than English, and that urban social relations and urban spaces were shaped by multilingualism. It ends by arguing that linguistic diversity played an essential but understudied role in the social history of early modern cities.

This article explores the potential for the greater infusion of well-being concerns into the teaching of history in UK HEIs. Drawing upon results from a survey of over 100 current undergraduates in one UK History department, alongside a scoping study of well-being provision provided by history departments or their equivalent in about ninety UK HEIs, this article considers ways in which well-being can be promoted through the teaching and learning strategies of historians. The article discusses the meaning of the term ‘well-being’ and asks why historians have sometimes been reluctant participants in the ‘eudaemonic turn’. The negativity bias of history as an endeavour, and the potential for understanding the past to enhance or diminish an individual's sense of well-being is discussed, as is the value of historicising the concept of well-being itself. The case for integrating well-being as a key element in the degree-level study of history is made, and the article concludes by urging all HEI history practitioners to consider the value of curricular infusion and mapping the design and delivery of their modules onto the New Economics Foundation's ‘five ways to well-being’.

This article posits that team sports can provide fresh insights into the place of leisure pursuits in the lives, networks and outlooks of historical literary figures. The social and literary role of the Authors Eleven, a cricket side of London-based writers active between 1899 and 1912, is explored through three case studies. George Ives was a pioneering campaigner for gay rights, who used cricket to bolster his homosexual identity. E. W. Hornung, creator of the famous cricketer-thief Raffles, saw cricket as the ideal training – and analogy – for imperialism. And P. G. Wodehouse, author of the Jeeves and Wooster stories, first made his name writing cricket-filled magazine pieces. All three writers saw their involvement in cricket, particularly the Authors Eleven in-group, as an essential component of their social status. The Authors Eleven thus presents a potent example of embodied sociability, whereby the specific nature of what these individuals were doing together (in this case, playing cricket) has a bearing on their friendships and their intellectual outlooks. As ways of understanding the lives and cultural significance of historical figures, shared physical activity and embodied sociability need to be accorded much more importance than they have been hitherto.

Between the 1960s and early-1980s the museum sector in the United Kingdom (UK) was rapidly professionalised and systematised. A crucial moment in this transition was the creation in 1967 of the Information Retrieval Group of the Museums Association (IRGMA), and the subsequent launch of its system for the machine encoding and communication of museum catalogue records. The rise of IRGMA marked an inflection point in museological practice and the normalisation of computerised work within the UK museum profession, a moment when the desire for a ‘layman's guide to the scheme’ began to give way to new professional personas and forms of documentary labour. This article asks how cultures of museology and professional labour shifted in response to IRGMA. It argues that between the late 1960s and mid-1980s both the implementation of and the debate around computerised cataloguing disrupted the function of UK museums and how museum professionals imagined their labour. And by tracing the emergence of these cultures and their intersections with professional identity and labour practices, this article seeks to tease out the ways museum history can resonate with wider narratives of labour, expertise and technological innovation in contemporary British history.

This article explores the temporality of revolution in 1848. It argues that what united the various revolutionary movements of that year was a sense of participating in a common European ‘present’, in which old imperial hierarchies collapsed and every cause and people seemed to exist in the same historical moment. The significance of that sense of the present was visible across the continent, but it was of greatest significance in the revolutionary theatres beyond the core imperial centres, and it was those places that would suffer first when that present passed. Too much ‘history’ was taking place at once, and as events in different settings followed their own particular courses, minds turned away from a European project. As European unity faltered, it was the representatives of imperial counter-revolution who demonstrated their ability to think strategically on a continent-wide level. They defeated the various movements, which had promised a better European present, and deferred improvements to the future. By doing so, they returned the peoples of the continent to their own particular – rather than common European – ‘nows’.

Recently, there has been a growing discussion concerning the way historians should approach the study of Indian revolutionaries both within and outside the subcontinent. Described as ‘the revolutionary turn’, this area of research has not only explored the porosity and ambiguity in defining individuals as revolutionaries but has also questioned the way such revolutionaries sought to write themselves into history as a political act. Continuing this line of interrogation, this article examines the retrospective political claims of heroic revolutionary belonging by analysing the autobiographical notes left by Pandurang Khankhoje, a peripatetic Indian who left his country pursuing dreams of revolution. While in the last decade Khankhoje has become an iconic character in writing histories about global solidarities and anti-colonial resistance, this article asks to what extent can historians believe self-described revolutionary narratives. As this article shows, these narratives privilege what Pierre Bourdieu has called ‘biographical illusion’, the organisation of life as a history that unfolds coherently and chronologically from beginning to end. Political or ideological differences and inconsistencies are flattened in the name of global ideologies or solidarities. As an attempt to disrupt these narratives, this article will focus on the silences, absences and ‘unreliability’ of the experiences and sources used to understand the work and lives of Indian revolutionaries abroad, such as Khankhoje, Lala Har Dayal and M. N. Roy. This article argues that the story of revolutionaries reveals important details about how they understood the racial, political and gender structures of different societies in the early twentieth century.

This collectively authored article argues for a regional turn in the historical study of transnational activism. By considering not only pan-regional movements but also examples of borderland contexts, transregional connections and diasporic understandings of ‘region’, our discussion identifies fresh possibilities for investigating the evolution and functioning of transnational activism. Based on a Royal Historical Society-funded workshop held at and supported by Northumbria University, the article brings together insights from diverse locations and arenas of contestation. The first part considers literatures on three macro-regional settings – South Asia, Western Europe and Latin America – to illustrate the importance of distinctive regional contexts and constructs in shaping transnational activism and its goals. The second part turns to case studies of transnational activism in and beyond Eastern Europe, West Africa, the Caribbean and East Asia. In doing so, it explores very different notions of the regional to identify how transnational activism has both shaped and been shaped by these ideas. Taken together, the two parts highlight the role of regional identities and projects in challenging inequalities and external domination. Our analysis and examples indicate the possibilities of a regionally rooted approach for writing histories of transnational activism.

This article rediscovers the importance of food gifts in navigating the process of courtship in England during the long eighteenth century. Studies of courtship and gift-exchange to date have demonstrated how courting couples exchanged a wide range of gifts to produce and intensify feelings of love and advance their relationships toward the altar, from garters and gloves to ribbons, rings, portrait miniatures and locks of hair. Yet the edible gift has remained conspicuously absent from this picture. The article reinserts edible tokens into the historiography of love and marriage, revealing how they operated as an indispensable and unique part of the ‘gift mode’ during courtship. It demonstrates how courting couples exchanged a wide range of foodstuffs from cakes and sweetmeats to game, fowl, fish, exotic fruits and home-grown produce. In doing so, the article advances the burgeoning field of emotions and material culture by demonstrating how organic or perishable items could function as powerful emotional objects, able to nourish the human body, provide a source of sensual and gustatory pleasure and elicit feelings of joy, delight, love and desire. In turn, these gifts show courtship made everyday, transacted between couples and their families, and situated in gardens and squares, shops, theatres and around a family's tea table.

Studies of slavery increasingly refer to ‘enslaved people’ rather than ‘slaves’, and, to a lesser extent, to ‘enslavers’ rather than ‘slave owners’. This trend began with scholarship in the United States on plantation slavery but has spread to other academic publications. Yet ‘slave’ continues to be widely used, indicating not everyone is aware of the change or agrees with it. Despite this, few historians have justified their terminology. After surveying the extent of the preference for ‘enslaved person’, I discuss arguments for and against it. Supporters of using ‘enslaved person’ argue that this term emphasises that a person was forced into slavery – but this emphasis means it is less able to accommodate early medieval cases where people sold themselves into slavery. The accompanying preference for ‘enslaver’ over ‘master’ obscures dynamics of ownership and manumission. In addition, ‘enslaved people’ and ‘enslaver’ do not necessarily bring us away from the perspective of slaveholders to the perspective of slaves. Nor are they essential for readers to appreciate the humanity of slaves. Overall, historians should use this issue as an opportunity to reflect on the extent to which scholarship of transatlantic slavery should set the terms of debate for slavery studies in general.

Andrew Lownie recounts how he became the victim of state surveillance as a result of his successful efforts to secure the release of the personal diaries and letters of Dickie and Edwina Mountbatten – bought by the University of Southampton with public funds to be open to researchers – in what became the largest-ever release of material under Freedom of Information (FOI), 33,000 pages, but which personally cost him over £400,000 in legal fees. Drawing on his own research experiences, he also describes the failure of government departments to deposit records at the National Archives as required by statute, the techniques public authorities use to frustrate FOI requests and suggests how FOI could be improved. All of this curation, he argues, leads to a distortion of the historical record and the censoring of our history.

The history of internationalism has tended to focus on power centres in the Global North – London, Geneva, New York, Paris – and institutions like the League of Nations, United Nations and UNESCO. What happens when we flip our perspective, and view internationalism from the point of view of the decolonising South? What do we get when we shift our focus from world leaders to the internationalism of activists, intellectuals, feminists, poets, artists, rebels and insurgents operating in Asia and Africa? Moreover, how are our methods of researching and debating international history – in universities, archives and conferences in the Global North – structured by economic inequalities, colonial legacies and visa regimes that limit participation by scholars from the South? This paper considers how we might decolonise both the content and the methods of international history, focusing especially on leftist internationalism and South–South connections in Southeast Asia and the wider Global South.