The study of early modern diplomatic history has in recent decades expanded beyond a bureaucratic, state-centric focus to consider the processes and personal interactions by which international relations were maintained. Scholars have begun to consider, among other factors, the role of diplomatic gifts, diplomatic hospitality, and diplomatic culture. This article contributes to this discussion from an East Asian perspective by considering the role of ‘brush talk’ – written exchanges of classical, literary Chinese – during diplomatic missions from the Korean Chosŏn court to the Tokugawa Shogunate in Japan during the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. Drawing upon official records, personal diaries, and illustrations, I argue that brush talk was not an official part of diplomatic ceremony and that brushed encounters with Korean officials even extended to people of the townsman classes. Brush talk was as much about ritual display, calligraphic art, and drawing upon a shared storehouse of civilized learning as it was about communicating factual content through language. These visual, performative aspects of brush talk in East Asian diplomacy take it beyond the realm of how a lingua franca is usually conceived, adding to the growing body of scholarship on how this concept applies to non-Western histories.

The debate over counsels of perfection was a crucial aspect of the formation of political and ethical thought in the sixteenth century. It led both Protestants and Catholics to consider the status of law and to consider how far it obliged human beings, rather than simply permitting particular actions. From Luther onwards, Protestants came to see God's standards for human beings in absolute terms, rejecting any suggestion that there were good works which were merely counselled rather than commanded, and therefore not obligatory. This view of ethics underpinned the Protestant theological critique of Catholic doctrines of merit but it also shaped the distinctively Protestant account of natural law. It enabled Luther and his allies to defend magisterial control over the church, and it also formed a crucial element of Protestant resistance theory. By examining the Lutheran position on counsels, expressed in theological and political writings, and comparing it with contemporary Catholic accounts, this article offers a new perspective on Reformation theology and political thought.

Richard Hooker's understanding of political society has engendered significant debate. Does he hold that society is natural, in keeping with his commitment to aspects of Aristotelianism? Or does he believe that society is conventional, leading somehow to a social contractarian conception of society? My contention is that he is a political naturalist, though his naturalism is tempered by his Augustinian theological anthropology. Hooker emphasizes human sin in his account of the nature and purpose of civil government, and gives humankind agency in the establishment of society. But, ultimately, he considers political life to be natural to the human condition. In this way, Hooker navigates a via media between Aristotelian naturalism and conventionalism.

This article assesses the role of memory, interiority, and intergenerational relations in the framing of early modern experiences and narratives of travel. It adopts as its focus three generations of the Clerk family of Penicuik, Scotland, whose travels through Europe from the mid-seventeenth century onward proved formative in the creation of varied ‘cosmopolitan’ stances within the family. While such widely studied practices as the ‘Grand Tour’ have drawn on discourses of encounter and cultural engagement within the broader narratives of the ‘long’ eighteenth century, this article reveals a family made deeply anxious by the consequences of travel, both during and after the act. Using diaries, manuscript correspondence, memoirs, and material objects, this article reveals the many ways in which travel was fashioned before, during, and long after it was undertaken. By shifting focus away from the act of travel itself and towards its subsequent afterlives, it explores the ways in which these individuals internalized what they experienced in the course of travel, how they reconciled it with the familiar, quotidian world to which they returned, and how the ‘cosmopolitan’ worldviews they brought home were made to inform the generations that followed.

During the old poor law, many paupers had their possessions inventoried and later taken by authorities as part of the process of obtaining poor relief. Historians have known about this for decades, yet little research has been conducted to establish how widespread the system was, what types of parishioners had their belongings inventoried and why, what the legal status of the practice was, and how it affected social relations in the parish. Using nearly 450 pauper inventories, this article examines these historiographical lacunae. It is argued that the policy had no legal basis and came from local practices and policies. The system is found to be more common in the south and east of England than in the north, and it is argued that the practice gradually became less common from the late eighteenth century. The inventorying of paupers’ goods often formed one of the many creative ways in which parishes helped the poor before 1770, as it guaranteed many paupers assistance until death. However, by the late eighteenth century the appraising of paupers’ goods was closely tied to a negative shift in the attitudes of larger ratepayers and officials, who increasingly wanted to dissuade people from applying for assistance and reduce expenditure.

Medical provision in Civil War armies has generally suffered a poor reputation. Medical matters have been excluded from assessments of how far Civil War armies confirm evidence of the so-called ‘Military Revolution’, whilst Harold Cook argued that it was not until after the Glorious Revolution that the medical infrastructure of the armed forces was brought in line with continental practices, particularly those of the Dutch army. Despite the recent rehabilitation of early modern practitioners elsewhere, frontline military practitioners continue to be dismissed as uneducated, unskilful and incompetent. This is largely due to the lack of a fresh perspective since C. H. Firth published Cromwell's Army in 1902. This article argues that the English were well aware of current medical practice in European armies and endeavoured to implement similar procedures during the Civil Wars. Indeed, almost all the developments identified by Cook for the later seventeenth century can be found in Civil War armies. Whilst failures may have occurred, most of these can be attributed to administrative and financial miscarriages, rather than ignorance of contemporary medical developments. Moreover, there is little to suggest that medics mobilized for Civil War armies were any less capable than those who practised civilian medicine in this period.

Interest in energy transitions has accelerated in recent years due to rising concerns about global warming and resource scarcity, but the drivers of these phenomena are not well understood. To date, scholars have primarily focused on commercial and technological factors, highlighting that oil was ‘better’ than coal – more powerful, cheaper, cleaner, and more practical to use – and that the internal combustion engine made it more advantageous to use in transportation. Yet oil was also a strategic commodity that powerful states sought to acquire for military reasons. This article contends that geopolitics, military decision-making, and energy security hastened the transition from oil to coal prior to the First World War. It argues that Britain, Germany, and the United States sought to transition their naval fleets from coal to oil to gain a military advantage at sea, which created, for the first time, the problem of oil-supply security. Through government-led initiatives to address oil-supply security, vast new supplies of oil came online and prices fell, the ideal environment for oil to eclipse coal as the dominant source in the global energy system.

This article draws on a collection of petitions by Palestinian Arabs and Jews to explore how families negotiated the admission of mentally ill relatives into government mental institutions under the British mandate between 1930 and 1948. In contrast to the conclusions of the existing literature, which focuses largely on the development of parallel Jewish institutions as establishing the foundations of the Israeli health system, these petitions reveal that the trajectories of both Arab and Jewish mentally ill were complex, traversing domestic, private, and government contexts in highly contingent ways. The second part of this article examines the petitions themselves as dense moments of engagement by Palestinian Arabs and Jews with the British mandate, in which the anxieties and priorities of the mandate were strategically re-deployed in order to secure admission into chronically underfunded and overcrowded institutions. Petitioners also sought to mobilize other actors, often within the state itself, as intercessors, a strategy which attempted to thread together state and society in a meaningful and advantageous way at a time when both seemed to be unravelling. Taken together, these pathways and petitions foreground the space of interaction between the British mandate and its subjects, thereby offering new perspectives on both.

The British general election of 1945 and the return of the nation's first ever majority Labour government was a profound turning point in Britain's political history. The scale of Labour's victory, and the belief in its inevitability, has, however, obscured important developments in British Conservatism. Historians have subsequently characterized the Conservative party as either unwilling to develop their own distinct plans for the post-war future, or divided between those who were willing to embrace the policies of social democracy and those with a neo-liberal approach to political economy. This article challenges this depiction by examining the thoughts and actions of those within what it terms the wartime ‘Conservative movement’: the constellation of fringe and pressure groups that orbited around the Conservative party during the period. In examining this movement, it identifies three major traditions of Conservative political thinking, and three sets of activists and parliamentarians all committed to developing radical Conservative plans for post-war Britain. The article demonstrates how these different traditions built upon but also radicalized pre-existing currents of Conservative thought, how the language of social democracy was co-opted and reinterpreted by those within the Conservative movement, and how the war changed Conservative perception of the British people.

Drawing on new archival findings, this article argues that shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War, Vladimir Jabotinsky, founder and leader of the right-wing Revisionist Zionist movement, had begun to advocate for the transfer of the Arab population from Palestine – an aspect of his thought previously unknown. Jabotinsky's support for population transfers runs counter to his lifelong political thought. Prior to the war, Jabotinsky was a staunch advocate of minority rights for Jews in Europe and for extensive autonomy for the Arab population in Palestine. This article argues that Jabotinsky's shift was a product of the war. Jabotinsky believed that millions of Jewish refugees would be prevented from returning to their pre-war homes in eastern Europe and would immigrate en masse to Palestine; to resettle these refugees, the Arab population, he argued, ‘would have to make room’. Attentively following debates on population transfers in Europe, Jabotinsky concluded that the era of minority rights had come to an end and envisioned an increasingly ethno-national Jewish state. By highlighting the eastern Europe context in Jabotinsky's thought, this article emphasizes the importance of studying the history of Zionism alongside the transformation of the nation-state in eastern Europe in the 1940s.

Recent scholarship discussing the ‘federal moment’ in world history after 1945 has re-examined alternatives to the nation-state in the years of decolonization, arguing against any inevitable transition from empire to nation. This article focuses on the case of East Africa, where federation seemed an attractive and likely prospect by 1963, yet never came to pass. Here, the politics of federation should be understood as a constitutive part of the contested nation-state-making process, rather than a viable alternative to it. For the leaders who initiated the politics of federation in the 1960s, regional unity promised the further centralization of power and a means of defeating ‘tribalist’ opposition. For their opponents, federation was seized on as a means of promoting the autonomy of provinces or kingdoms within a larger federal unit. Ultimately, regionalist aspiration was inseparable from national politics, and negotiations among the leaders of East African states demanded the definition of national interests which divided states rather than united them. Such conclusions suggest that historians of the federal moment might more productively focus on the functions of federalist discourse in the making of nation-states rather than debating the viability of federalist projects.

These newly discovered letters help to reconstruct the close association between two seemingly disparate eighteenth-century Britons in India. Moreover, they suggest that a fixation on clashes of ‘cultural attitudes’ has distorted modern assessments of the politics of scholarly patronage in that era. The long-lauded William Jones and the long-dismissed John Macpherson were not so different after all. The views of each ranged from the sublime heights of Enlightened philosophy to the grubby depths of imperial politics.

Recent scholarship across a range of historical sub-disciplines shows that uplands are where many forms of modernity are both crafted and overwhelmed. Maintaining multiple tensions – between assimilation and distinction, between projections of power and material and human resistance, and between knowledge and elusiveness – is essential to the modernities crafted in mountain spaces. This review highlights a number of common threads running through recent writings on modern mountains. These include heightened attention to the importance of mountains as arenas for the performance of gendered, racial, national, and class-based subjectivities, and the persistence of earlier attitudes and activities in avowedly disenchanted modern visions of uplands. For all of the successes of recent scholarship, more work remains in order to consider mountains in global contexts and to come to terms with our continued entanglement in modern ways of understanding and acting in high places. Looking ahead, it is vital that historians think with and about mountains in order to contribute positively and persuasively to discussions on the human and environmental impacts of global change.