In her Inaugural Lecture, Alison Bashford, Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History, introduces the concept of ‘terraqueous histories’. Maritime historians often stake large claims on world history, and it is indeed the case that the connections and distinctions between land and sea are everywhere in the many traditions of world history-writing. Collapsing the land/sea couplet is useful and ‘terraqueous’ history serves world historians well. The term returns the ‘globe’ to global history, it signals sea as well as land as claimable territory, and in its compound construction foregrounds the history and historiography of meeting places. If the Vere Harmsworth Chair of Imperial and Naval History has recently turned from ‘imperial’ into ‘world’ history, so might its ‘naval’ element become terraqueous history in the twenty-first century.

Europeans have long justified a right to something or other by invoking ‘prescription’ (that is, the creation of a legal entitlement by the passage of time). Yet for all the importance of prescription in the creation of international geopolitical order, no genealogy of the idea has emerged from historical or legal scholarship. This article will explore the relationship between prescription and empire within private, public, corporate, and ecclesiastical legal contexts. The idea of prescription is then considered within the specific ideological context of European imperialism between 1580 and 1640, when a series of diplomatic disputes and intellectual debates were had in Europe principally regarding maritime navigation and foreign dominion by ‘donation’. The metamorphosis of prescription in legal and political thought from Justinian (483–565) to Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) is therefore explored. Additional colour is given to this intellectual history by contrasting how corporate interests in North America attempted to justify their foreign land holdings in forts, ports, and hinterland by invoking ‘prescription’ during the early stages of colonial expansion. The case will be made for historians of early modern imperialism and international law to take closer notice of the opportunism of those prepared to justify prescription in theory and practice.

Most historians now acknowledge that Catholic recusancy existed in small pockets throughout 1560s and early 1570s England thanks to the sporadic efforts of a handful of former Marian priests. However, it is widely agreed that the influx of continentally trained seminarians and missionaries from abroad after 1574 was responsible for transforming the ‘curious and confused’ activities of these Marian clergymen into a fully fledged, intellectually justified campaign in favour of nonconformity. This article challenges this consensus through investigation of a neglected group of clerics – the cathedral clergy of Mary I's reign. Drawing on insights emerging from recent research into the nature of Mary's church, it demonstrates how these clerics became key agents in the so-called ‘invention of the Counter-Reformation’ in Marian England. It suggests that this ‘upbringing’ gave these priests the determination and skills to become leaders of a co-ordinated campaign in favour of principled nonconformity following Elizabeth's accession. Far from lacking the zeal of their seminary and missionary counterparts, this article sees the former cathedral clergy imitating the practices of their adversaries and anticipating the strategies of the later English mission in order to promote recusancy throughout England from as early as 1560.

This article reconsiders the significance of an episode of monstrous birth in Fisherton Anger, Wiltshire, in 1664. Tracing the influence of natural philosophical, spiritual, and providential impulses in extant accounts of the Fisherton birth, it suggests that in order wholly to comprehend this material it is necessary to move beyond debates about the ‘rise of science’. It therefore explores the contemporary claims made about the Fisherton monster against the backdrop of the aftermath of the Civil Wars and Interregnum, suggesting that the rampant politicization of monstrosity after the outbreak of war in 1642 provides the key to understanding the emphasis on different kinds of natural, spiritual, and moral truth in accounts of physiological abnormality after 1660. A case-study of early Restoration efforts to negotiate the instability of past events, this article further argues that the impulse to forget which underpinned the Indemnity and Oblivion Act (1660) found different expression elsewhere in the form of censorship and beyond the political sphere in the field of natural philosophy. Considered in light of this early Restoration culture of amnesia, the Fisherton monster embodies a series of attempts to forget the passions of a turbulent political past.

This article examines the Scottish philosopher and historian James Mill's views on the freedom of the press, predominantly as they are expounded in his unpublished commonplace books, and argues that not only were these ideas very radical, they were critical to Mill's wider political thought and, by extension, to that of the early Philosophic Radicals. By virtue of the use of manuscript material, this article also presents evidence for various intellectual influences upon Mill, and argues that whilst Jeremy Bentham is of central importance to Mill's ideas, he takes inspiration from a wide range of other authors, both modern and ancient, in part as a way of normalizing his views in the context of the reactionary and conservative political climate that he was writing about them in: early nineteenth-century Britain.

The recent bicentennial commemorations of the Napoleonic empire have witnessed a proliferation of new studies. Scholars now possess much more sophisticated conceptual tools than in past decades with which to gauge the problems faced by French imperial administrators throughout Europe. Well-trodden concepts, like centre/periphery or collaboration/resistance, have been reinvigorated by more sophisticated understandings of how rulers and ruled interacted in the early nineteenth century. This article argues that, while much progress has been made in understanding problems of ‘resistance’, there is more to be said about the other side of the same coin, namely: ‘collaboration’. Using the micro/local history of a scandal in Napoleonic Bologna, this article wishes to reaffirm that collaboration was an active agent that shaped, and often shook, the French imperial project. The biggest problem remained that, despite ‘good intentions’, collaborators sometimes simply did not collaborate with each other. After all, imperial clients were determined to benefit from the experience of empire. The centre was often submerged by local petty squabbles. This article will use a specific micro-history in Bologna to highlight the extent to which Napoleonic empire builders had to thread a fine line between the impracticalities of direct control and the dangers of ‘going native’.

Like many nineteenth-century sciences, phrenology had global aspirations. Skulls were collected in Egypt and Ceylon, societies exchanged journals between India and the United States, and phrenological bestsellers were sold in Shanghai and Tokyo. Despite this wealth of interaction, existing accounts treat phrenology within neat national and urban settings. In contrast, this article examines phrenology as a global political project. During an age in which character dominated public discourse, phrenology emerged as a powerful political language. In this article, I examine the role that correspondence played in establishing material connections between phrenologists and their political concerns, ranging from the abolition of slavery to the reform of prison discipline. Two overarching arguments run throughout my case-studies. First, phrenologists used correspondence to establish reform as a global project. Second, phrenology allowed reformers to present their arguments in terms of a new understanding of human character. More broadly, this article connects political thought with the global history of science.

Textile manufacturing in India and the Ottoman Empire transformed fundamentally in the nineteenth century, when mass-produced goods imported from Europe permeated local markets. Faced with increasing competition from abroad, local producers changed their techniques, materials, designs, and target customers. At the same time, processing industries emerged in places with intense mercantile activity, introducing new meanings, relations, and patterns of work. This article investigates the role played by gender in the shaping of labour markets and class politics in two export-oriented industries that developed simultaneously: the silk-reeling industry in Bursa and the cotton-spinning industry in Bombay. It shows that the secondary economic value attributed to women's work, combined with rural connections of workers, brought down wages and subsidized capitalist profits in both sectors. Within the emerging industrial workforce, ideas about appropriate roles for women and men provided the vocabulary and constituted boundaries of class politics. Bringing gender into the debate of industrial development and class, the article reveals parallels and contrasts in two non-European settings that are rarely compared in the existing historiographies.

Since the Nazi seizure of power in Germany in 1933, German Zionists initiated a public debate about the racial meaning of Judaism. Drawing on scientific racial, sociological, and anthropological definitions that emerged within Zionism since the late nineteenth century, these Zionists tried to counter Nazi accusations against Jews. However, as the Nazi propaganda against Judaism became widespread, aggressive, and dehumanizing, Zionists responded by traversing the academic outlines of racial categories, and popularized a constructive racial image of Jews, thus hoping to rehabilitate their status and consolidate Jewish identity.

From the 1920s through the 1940s, European and Anglo-American Protestants perceived a crisis of humanity. While trying to determine religion's role in a secular age, church leaders redefined the human being as a theological person in community with others and in partnership with God. This new anthropology contributed to a personalist conception of human rights that rivalled Catholic and secular conceptions. Alongside such innovations in post-liberal theology, ecumenical Protestants organized a series of meetings to unite the world churches. Their conference at Oxford in July 1937 led to the creation of the World Council of Churches. Thus, Protestants of the transwar era supplied the two main ingredients of any human rights regime: a universalist commitment to defending individual human beings regardless of race, nationality, or class and a global institutional framework for enacting that commitment. Through the story of Protestant thinkers and activists, this article recasts the history of human rights as part of a larger history of critical reappraisals of humanity. Understanding why human rights came into prominence at various twentieth-century moments may require abandoning ‘rights talk’ for human talk, or, a comparative history of radical anthropologies and their relationship to broader socio-economic, political, and cultural crises.

This article argues that the myth of ‘the sexual revolution’, increasingly accepted in Britain's national media between 1963 and 1967, played a central role in causing the real transformation of British sexual culture that occurred from the late 1960s. It also argues that Christian agency played an important role in the framing and the legitimation of this myth. Until 1963, British debates about sexual morality had been dominated by Christian arguments. In 1963 and 1964, the existence of a rapid, widespread, inexorable, secular, and antinomian transformation of sexual mores was prominently proclaimed by Christian commentators, who thought it an inevitable consequence of ‘secularization’, whereas secular commentators usually objected that this narrative was insufficiently evidenced. After its initial discussion in the mainstream media in 1965, the ‘sexual revolution’ narrative was increasingly articulated without explicit reference to Christianity, but it usually retained theologically inspired structural features inherited from earlier religious discussions. In the late 1960s, elite perceptions of inexorable sexual liberalization decisively legitimated rapid decensorship, wider access to the pill, and the reimagination of ‘normal’ sexual behaviour, thereby importantly shaping real popular change. In this way, Christian clergymen made a significant, early, unwitting, and hitherto unacknowledged contribution to Britain's sexual revolution.

Within the expanding field of global history, historians often conceive of distinct integrated ‘worlds’: discrete if permeable cultural units capable of coherent study. Some are defined exogenously through factors such as oceanic geography, others are conceived of endogenously through the cultures and identities of their adherents. In this context, this article critically assesses the recent voluminous literature on the British world: a unit increasingly distinguished from British imperial history and defined by the networks and identities of global Britishness. The article argues that the British world, while making valuable contributions to the historiography of empire and of individual nations, fails ultimately to achieve sufficiently clear definition to constitute a distinctive field of study and neglects the crucial concerns of imperial history with politics and power, while flattening time, space, and neglecting diversity. While highlighting many key concerns, other methodologies such as settler colonialism, whiteness studies, or revivified imperial history are better placed to take these on than the nebulous concept of a world. More broadly, an analysis of the British world highlights the problems inherent in attempting to define a field endogenously through a focus on identity.