William Tyndale's The obedience of a Christian man has been credited with influencing the Henrician regime's thinking and propaganda on the subject of obedience to royal authority. According to an anecdote first recorded by the archdeacon of Nottingham, John Louthe, Henry was so delighted by Tyndale's tract that he called it a book ‘for me and all kings to read’, and historians have argued that Henry tried to recruit Tyndale as a royal propagandist or diplomat in 1531. This article argues that Louthe's anecdote was probably a later invention, and that Henry disapproved of the Obedience and its author. There is little evidence that the king tried to recruit Tyndale, but wanted instead to silence him and force him to abjure his heresies. The Obedience contained very little that would have pleased Henry, presenting him as a mere ‘shadow’ of a king, manipulated by evil prelates. While Tyndale rejected rebellion against even tyrannical rulers, this should not be confused with advocating obedience of the kind that Henry might approve of, and the Obedience sanctioned disobedience of various kinds. From the outset, remarkably radical ideas were contained within an apparently ‘conservative’ tradition of English evangelical political thought.

This article uncovers a sodomy scandal that took place in the Benedictine abbey of Morigny, on the eve of the French Wars of Religion, in order to tackle an apparently simple yet persistent question in the history of early modern criminal justice. Why, despite all of the formal and informal obstacles in their way, did plaintiffs bring charges before a criminal court in this period? The article investigates the sodomy scandal that led to the conviction and public execution of the abbey's porter Pierre Logerie, known as ‘the gendarme of Morigny’, and situates it in the wider patterns of criminal justice as well as the developing spiritual crisis of the civil wars during the mid-sixteenth century. Overall, this article demonstrates how criminal justice in this period could prove useful to plaintiffs in resolving their disputes, even in crimes as scandalous and difficult to articulate as sodomy, but only when the interests of local elites strongly aligned with those of the criminal courts where the plaintiffs sought justice.

Henry Valois (1551–89) was elected king of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1573 and arrived in Poland in January 1574. After five months, Henry fled Poland–Lithuania upon inheriting the French throne from his brother, Charles IX. As Henry III of France, he was branded a violent tyrant, who allowed his mignons to run the kingdom and isolated himself from his subjects. Historians have done much to rehabilitate Henry's reputation, but his first experience of kingship in the Commonwealth has been neglected in these reassessments. This article uses the previously unstudied treasury accounts of Henry's Polish court to re-examine his experience of the Polish–Lithuanian elective, parliamentary monarchy as crucial to the development of his characteristic style of kingship and court. Some of these practices were a response to the challenges posed by the Polish political system to a newly elected king. This allows us to recover a lost political connection between Poland and France. Secondly, the article demonstrates Henry's active engagement in the Polish–Lithuanian politics, challenging the narrative that he was a passive king anticipating his return to Paris. Instead, Henry planned to cement his rule in Poland by mounting his own faction and pursuing a bold diplomatic agenda.

The Polish Brethren, usually known as Socinians, were perhaps the most infamous Christian sect belonging to the so-called ‘Radical Reformation’. Renowned for their anti-Trinitarian beliefs and their rationalistic approach towards religion, the Brethren also discussed theological-political concepts such as the legitimacy of magistracy and warfare. Relevant literature on the Brethren's socio-political views underestimates their participation in contemporary debates on the ius belli, describing them as pacifists who generally opposed politics and violence until the 1650s, when some of them began defending a more conventional approach towards magistracy and warfare. This article proves that this shift toward a more standard Protestant position occurred as early as the 1620s, when Johannes Crell and Jonas Szlichtyng, two of the most prominent spokespersons among the Brethren, reconciled politics and the Brethren's faith in their writings. The article highlights how the historical situation of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth urged them to revise their views on magistracy and warfare, and it argues that they were assisted in this by their education in European universities, especially the Lutheran Academy of Altdorf near Nuremberg, which provided them with different perspectives on the legitimacy of defensive warfare.

The launch of the East India Company in 1599 relied on the engagement of an investing public. Despite this, little is known about how and why ordinary individual investors chose to invest in the corporation or what institutional frameworks supported them. While the later ‘financial revolution’ would radically alter the relationship between the state, investors, and financial organizations, this process does not adequately explain the earlier development of an investing public. Using a newly developed dataset of members’ familial, neighbourhood, civic, and business connections, this article reconstructs the social networks of East India Company investors in 1599. This analysis reveals that the company was formulated within an intensely interconnected investment environment – linkages that were used to distribute information and provide access to seemingly illiquid markets. Social networks played a key role in how people decided about where, when, with whom, and how much to invest during the expansion of investment opportunities in early modern England.

The Congress system that arose in Europe after the Napoleonic Wars facilitated European imperial expansionism throughout the nineteenth century. Yet, the ties between that system and expansionism have rarely been unwound and studied in detail. Taking the French invasion of Algiers in 1830 as a case in point, this article shows how the Congress system's shared discourses of security and threat perceptions as well as its common practices of concerted diplomacy fostered European imperialism in North Africa. The article emphasizes obscured continuities and understudied multilateral diplomatic efforts. It uncovers the ways in which the post-1815 system decisively shaped the aims, justifications, and execution of the French war against Algiers. European, North African, and Ottoman actors each furthered or contested the idea that the invasion was part of an international legacy dating back to the Congress of Vienna, related to the concerted repression of North African ‘Barbary piracy’. In bringing these connections to light, it becomes apparent that the post-1815 international system cannot be understood in isolation from nineteenth-century imperialism.

The traceless disappearance of the Holy Roman Empire from the map and the minds of nineteenth-century Germany was until recently a pervasive historiographical trope. Revisionist scholarship has since uncovered the empire's modern afterlife as a model for federative political order and archetype of the greater German (großdeutsche) nation. This article identifies a different kind of legacy, by examining the empire's role in shaping the constitutional configuration of an individual successor state – Prussia. In a debate over Prussia's unwritten historical constitution unfolding in the 1840s, narratives of the empire's constitutional history became the basis on which the juridical structure of the kingdom's sovereignty was negotiated by jurists and political actors. These included, among others, King Frederick William IV and his brother William, the leaders of the German historical school of jurisprudence Savigny and Eichhorn, and the Prussian statesman Kamptz. The article contrasts two rival interpretations of the imperial legacy: a teleological narrative focusing on the evolution of state sovereignty within the imperial constitution and a genealogical narrative highlighting the origins of sovereignty as a hereditary fiefdom. In doing so, it questions the rigid distinction that historians have drawn between the empire and the statehood that replaced it in 1806.

One of the most famous public figures in later nineteenth-century Australia was Giuseppe Garibaldi. The man known as the ‘hero of two worlds’ – Europe and South America – was in fact also the hero of a third. The nature of Garibaldi's iconic status in the Australian colonies was complex, multi-faceted, and fractured and it occurred at a moment when the notion of celebrity was being transformed amid what was effectively a fundamental democratization of the public sphere in the Anglophone world. As such, it provides an important opportunity to ponder the implications of what has been called ‘intimacy at a distance’.

This article examines economic nationalism in India, specifically the role of capitalists in late colonial Bombay. It shows how swadeshi was the fulcrum that supported the expressions of nationalism and capitalism. The notion that Indian capital needed to be used for the benefit of Indian nationals became established as nationalist thought by the 1930s. Such swadeshi capitalism – Indian capital for Indian industries – recasts the notion of swadeshi as a broader, more sophisticated cultural response to colonialism and globalization. As capitalism transitioned from mercantile activities to capital-hungry industrialization, nationalism was itself reframed from being anti-colonial in 1905 to being anti-globalization by the 1950s. Swadeshi capitalism helped to overlay a radical, grittier form of economic nationalism over the intellectually driven version of the nineteenth century. Swadeshi, as a form of economic patriotism, can be distinguished from similar expressions of nationalism within the British empire and dominions. This article is an effort to decolonize the narratives of modern capitalism by shifting the focus away from the global West. It will appeal to readers interested in South Asian history, and those interested in cultural responses to globalization, the contested nature of economic nationalism, and histories of capitalism in the global South.

This article examines the political theory of the late nineteenth-century American Populist movement, with a particular focus on its theories of state and corporation. Recent scholarship on populism has tended to present the phenomenon as a variant of direct democracy intrinsically opposed to intermediary bodies, a feature consistently traced back to American Populism as well. In this account, American Populists opposed new discourses of corporate personhood and free incorporation in the late nineteenth century owing to their tendency to distort natural bonds between peoples and leaders and to disperse the popular will. This article questions the tenability of this opposition through a close contextual engagement with original Populist texts. As the first self-declared ‘populist’ movement in modern history, Populists theorized about the usage of corporate personality for their own co-operatives and put forward ambitious visions of American statecraft, breaking with the proprietary individualism that characterized Jeffersonian agrarianism before. The article focuses on two particular genres of Populist thinking: first, their advocacy of the corporate form for their co-operative farm organizing and, secondly, a specifically statutory vision of state reform. It concludes with reflections on how these findings destabilize assumptions governing the current populism debate in political theory and American historiography.

By examining the experience of rape in Spain in the 1930s and 1940s, this article explains how the Spanish Civil War and Franco's dictatorship dramatically increased the likelihood of women becoming victims of sexual assault. Contrary to what historians often assume, this phenomenon was not the result of rape being deliberately used as a ‘weapon of war’ or as a blunt method of political repression against women. The upsurge in sexual violence was a by-product of structural transformations in the wartime and dictatorial contexts, and it was the direct consequence, rather than the instrument, of the violent imposition of a fascist-inspired regime. Using archival evidence from numerous Spanish archives, the article historicizes rape in a wider cultural, legal, and social context and reveals the essential albeit ambiguous political nature of both wartime and post-war rape. The experience of rape was mostly shaped not by repression but structural factors such as ruralization and social hierarchization, demographic upheavals, exacerbation of violent masculinity models, the proliferation of weapons, and the influence of fascist and national-Catholic ideologies. Rape became an expression of the nature of power and social and gender relations in Franco's regime.

In Bolton's pubs at the end of the 1930s, the research organization Mass Observation pursued answers to big abstract questions about time by studying small concrete actions. Drawing on field notes, draft manuscripts, and published works, this article sets out the different understandings and experiences of time documented by the team of investigators. Outside the ‘time-clock factory-whistle dimension of living’ and inside ‘pub-time’, individuals bought drinks for their companions, drank at the same pace, and engaged with everyone around them on an equal footing. Mass Observation presented such behaviours as proof that the pub fostered a socially harmonious, egalitarian community from a pre-industrial age. However, this article shows that the pub study's archive contains material that goes against the published findings. Observers turned in reports about authoritarian conduct, hierarchical power structures, and the intrusion of contemporary politics. Blurring the research subject and object, it was sometimes the investigators themselves who broke the spell of the pub. These moments of tension, confusion, and contradiction offer insights into the observers’ own perspectives on modern temporalities and subjective experiences of time. All the people in the pubs were caught up in a state of flux.

Over the last thirty years, historians have made several important contributions to our understanding of the short but dramatic restoration of Catholicism in 1550s England. United by a shared rejection of the hitherto dominant interpretation of Mary I's reign as a retrograde and unfortunate interlude in the history of the English Reformation, so-called ‘revisionists’ have convincingly argued that Mary in fact presided over a remarkably dynamic and innovative revival of Catholicism. Whilst this scholarship has been extremely valuable in tackling the teleological assumption that Marian Catholicism was predestined to fail, this review suggests that the revisionist programme continues to be preoccupied by somewhat ill-conceived and unhelpful questions about how ‘successful’ Mary's church was in providing for a Catholic future. Such questions demonstrate just how far the historiography of Marian religion continues to operate within a framework still subtly shaped by sixteenth-century, confessionally charged polemic. This review suggests that, rather than debates about ‘successes’ or ‘failures’, we need to start working outwards from the valuable findings of revisionists regarding the dynamism of Marian religion, exploring their broader implications for how we understand the long-term development of Catholicism in England, as well as the Marian church's place within European Christendom more broadly.

This review outlines some of the key interventions in the literature on Latin America's Cold War produced since the early 1990s, concentrating largely on broad shifts in anglophone historiography. With questions of periodization and definition in mind, it offers a new, multi-layered model of the Cold War in the region, though with wider application. Using the example of Mexico, it then demonstrates some of the weaknesses of the current literature's assumptions and argues for the potential usefulness of a new way of seeing the period and its interconnected conflicts.