This article is a revised and expanded version of my inaugural lecture as Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History at the University of Cambridge, delivered on 12 March 2014. It highlights the evolution of Ecclesiastical History to include the study of Christianity in the global south and shows how recent developments in the study of African and world history have produced a dynamic and multi-faceted model of religious encounter, an encounter which includes the agency of indigenous Christians alongside the activities of missionaries. Investigating the contribution of faith missionaries to the production of colonial knowledge in Belgian Congo, the article challenges stereotypes about the relations between Pentecostalism and modernity, and between mission and empire. Throughout, consideration is given to the range of missionary sources, textual, visual, and material, and their utility in reconstructing social differentiation in African societies, particularly in revealing indigenous African criticism of ‘custom’.

This article examines travel within a group of Protestant families from Ireland over three generations after the Restoration. It offers both a case-study through which to reassess continental educational voyages, exploring a neglected period between the royalist exile of the 1650s and the mid-eighteenth-century heyday of the Grand Tour, and a contribution to current work on Irish elite formation. Histories of travel often begin as undifferentiated Englishmen or Britons arrive on the French or Dutch coast, but this study is the first to prioritize where travellers came from. Backgrounds, outlooks, and networks from home shaped experiences abroad. The article uses manuscript journals, letters, and financial accounts to locate travel within family educational strategies and to reconstruct preparations and advice. It explores how connections and identifications from home informed interactions with fellow travellers, expatriate communities, and foreign hosts. Travellers pursued two-sided interactions with hosts and destinations, returning with objects, accomplishments, and connections that fed into Irish elite formation. Continental links often feature in explanations of how Catholic Ireland survived, but this article shows that European encounters also contributed to Protestant hegemony. It demonstrates the importance of origins, as well as destinations, to understandings and experiences of educational travel.

The article reconstructs the seventeenth-century Dutch debate about the proper method to reconstruct the biblical temples of Jerusalem. It examines the involvement of Willem Goeree (1635–1711), an expert in architectural theory, in this debate which was dominated by philologically trained scholars. The article suggests that the clash between professional exegetes and a lay theologian like Goeree allows us to see hermeneutical debates of the early Enlightenment in a new light. While the skilled professional aspired to make arcane Temple scholarship accessible to a wider lay audience, theologians denied him the competence to do so, insisting on the primacy of sacred philology in interpreting the Bible. This case thus moves outside of the dogma vs reason dichotomy which dominates historiography concerning early modern biblical interpretation.

The entrance of women into the male-dominated spheres of the professions and the arts has been a major theme of women's and gender history in nineteenth-century Britain. In general, historians have located this development primarily in the second half of the century and depicted it as an important corollary to the political aims of the wider women's movement. In contrast, this article contends that an overlooked earlier context for the formation and emergence of ideas of female professionalism and artistry were the debates surrounding female singers in the press between c. 1820 and 1850. In this era, writers in newly emerging specialist music periodicals increasingly advocated a view of female singers as both professionals and artists. Such views did not dominate discourse, however. There remained a great deal of ambivalence even in specialist publications about just how far female singers should pursue the lifestyle of the professional artist, while in the mainstream press very different attitudes towards female singers prevailed. Although female musical professionalism and artistry therefore remained contested concepts, this article highlights the significance of these debates about female singers as an important source for the new ideas about women's professional and artistic work emerging in nineteenth-century British society.

This article explores whether the British decision-makers and public were conscious of the habit-forming nature of opium at the time of the Chinese war of 1839–42, the First Opium War. While most political historians have assumed that the British authorities understood the nature of the drug, social historians argue that notions of addiction only arose, in Britain, at the end of the nineteenth century. Examining the abundant press, pamphlet, and parliamentary literature generated by the war debate, this article examines in what terms opium use was characterized. It considers the groups that intervened on both sides of the debate and draws lessons from the arguments they deployed for and against the war. Situating the source literature within the context of early Victorian values and mores, finally, it argues that the British leaders and political nation were aware of the drug's habit-forming properties. Not only was it widely recognized that it was something dangerous that was being introduced, at the point of a gun, into China, but there can be said to have existed, in Britain, a layman's notion of drug addiction.

The article analyses the processes that preceded the construction of sanctuaries in the Holy Land through the prism of the Church of Gethsemane in Jerusalem, deconstructing and uncovering layers of political power struggles which led to its formation and present shape. This study, based on extensive archival research and a field survey, demonstrates how the reconstruction of the basilica of Gethsemane, and hence the concretization in stone of some of the most depicted evangelical traditions, was not merely the result of an ecumenical consideration. In fact, it reflects the narrow, and sometimes very down-to-earth, interests of various denominations and political forces. The study also demonstrates how the unique setting of the Holy Land encouraged simultaneous multi-layered political processes, comparing the case-study of the Church of Gethsemane to those of other symbolic and national religious monuments: the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the basilica of Sacré-Coeur in Paris, and the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow.

Scotland was unique in Western Europe in continuing to accord legal validity to irregular marriage until 1939 with one form of irregular marriage remaining legal until 2006. This article examines official attitudes to irregular marriage in Scotland in the period 1855–1939 as well as its incidence and popularity amongst the populace. The article argues that irregular marriage was narrowly defined by the authorities as meaning those irregular marriages that had been registered. Other forms of irregular marriage were often deemed to be cohabitation or concubinage which was regarded as morally reprehensible. However, authorities, including Poor Law officers, could also be flexible and sympathetic in their treatment of couples who lived together where the law was perceived to be rigid. Although it is impossible to quantify the numbers of couples who lived in non-registered informal unions, the evidence suggests that there were significant numbers but that in the majority of cases couples cohabited because they were unable to marry for legal, religious, or financial reasons.

This article compares the rhetorical justifications surrounding two landmark instances of Western imperialism. In 1882, the British occupied Egypt, ousting indigenous proto-nationalist forces that supposedly threatened British and other foreign interests. The consequences of this intervention were still being worked out in 1956 when, in the wake of the Cairo regime's nationalization of the Suez Canal, the British again invaded. France participated on this occasion, with serious but differing political consequences for both. We suggest that comparing how the British and French argued about these issues, and also examining how the rhetoric of the later crisis contrasted with the earlier one, offers useful insights into the two nations' respective imperial cultures. Specifically, we suggest that the latter-day imperialists Anthony Eden and Guy Mollet couched their actions in internationalist rhetoric reminiscent both of the Gladstone government's justifications for intervention in 1882 and of French official explanations for their takeover in Tunisia a year earlier. Each claimed their actions were taken both to uphold better standards of governance and to restore regional order, itself a highly loaded concept. The language of imperial domination was eschewed; but the ends of empire were served by the use of this rhetoric of ‘liberal order’.

This article addresses the reputation of Edmund Burke and his transformation into the ‘founder of modern conservatism’. It argues that this process occurred primarily between 1885 and 1914 in Britain. In doing so, this article challenges the existing orthodoxy which attributes this development to the work of Peter Stanlis, Russell Kirk, and other conservative American scholars. Moreover, this article historicizes one aspect of the construction of C/conservatism as both an intellectual (small-c) and political (capital-C) tradition. Indeed, though the late Victorian and Edwardian period saw the construction of political traditions of an entirely novel kind, the search for ‘New Conservatism’ has been neglected by comparison with New Liberalism. Thus, this study explores three main themes: the impact of British debates about Irish Home Rule on Burke's reputation and status; the academic systematization of Burke's work into a ‘political philosophy of conservatism’; and, finally, the appropriation of Burke by Conservative Unionists during the late Edwardian constitutional crisis. The result is to show that by 1914 Burke had been firmly established as a ‘conservative’ political thinker whose work was directly associated with British Conservatism.

This article examines the final years of French rule in India. It questions the established narrative of the merger of the French settlements, which implied that they were always a ‘natural’ part of the Indian Union. It argues, on the contrary, that a full merger was only one of several possibilities for the various actors involved in the negotiations that took place between the independence of India in 1947 and the French withdrawal in 1954. Even those who supported a merger did so for different reasons, while a significant proportion opposed the merger on economic, social, and historical grounds. By examining more closely the opposing positions in the merger debate, we can locate them within the larger tensions of early post-colonial India – a new state that was struggling to define its geographical and ideological boundaries. This suggests that the decolonization of French India was not simply another chapter in French imperial decline; it was also an important example of Indian nation-building.

The connection between ideologies of nation, alcohol abuse, and social engineering have not received systematic attention from historians. This article offers a case-study from the history of apartheid South Africa. Working around a fragment of apartheid history, a bureaucratic panic that excessive white drinking threatened the stability of the racial order, it explores geneaologies of state responses to white drinking in South Africa. It then concentrates on the role of Geoffrey Cronje, an intellectual / bureaucrat who not only drove the panic but then used it to implement new forms of social engineering in white South African society. Drawing on penal and welfarist traditions as well as medical models of treatment, he introduced a system for the discipline and correction of whites who drank heavily that drew on both state and private resources. I examine how the defiance of those incarcerated for drinking helped shaped subsequent, lighter-handed responses that managed the drinking of greater numbers of whites. This article may provide avenues for investigating alcohol abuse, state intervention, and social engineering in a range of mid-twentieth-century societies.

Early modern groups did not necessarily proclaim themselves. When they did, they were not necessarily groups. The historian must decide when to analyse people as separate individuals and when their commonalities were great enough that they should be considered together. These judgements have been the source of frequent debate. At times, the disagreement has been over the proper label for a group – whether, for instance, ‘puritans’ should instead be called ‘the godly’. In other cases, the very existence of a group has been called into question, with some doubting whether there was a ‘Ranter’ movement in the 1650s. Often, historians debate the coherence of a group, with one prominent scholar questioning whether the first whigs in the late 1670s were organized enough to deserve the appellation of a ‘party’. The vigour of these debates suggests that some of our most important intellectual labours are done when we assign people to groups.