From the mid-seventeenth century, the problem of human sociability, long a staple of natural jurisprudence, became even more central to political thought. Faced with Hobbes's insistence on man's natural unsociability, Protestant thinkers continued to treat the question from within natural law. For reasons we do not yet understand, however, Catholic thinkers did not. Instead, it is argued here, they turned to sacred history, and in particular to the Old Testament, as the earliest record of the formation of human societies, Hebrew and gentile. The materials for this enquiry were provided by new critical scholarship on the Bible and the peoples of the ancient Near East. Despite the hostility of the authorities in Rome to its findings, this scholarship was widely available in the Catholic world, notably so in contemporary Naples. Two of the most remarkable applications of sacred history to the problem of sociability were by the Neapolitans Pietro Giannone, in his ‘Triregno’ (1731–3), and Giambattista Vico, in the Scienza nuova (1725–44). These works explored the ways in which family relations, religious practices, and war enabled the ancient Hebrews and their gentile neighbours to form and maintain societies, notwithstanding the unsocial tendency of human passions.

Processes for the identification of criminal suspects tell us a great deal about wider cultural assumptions and social prejudices regarding somatic difference; its causes, relative degree, and consequence. If early modern Europeans had something approaching a forensic science, it was astrology, which has recently garnered renewed attention from historians of ideas. Rather than assume astrology's seventeenth-century decline in the face of revolutionary natural philosophy, what follows suggests that English astrology remained significant for mundane bodily discrimination, in the context of both a more deliberate, gradual reform and the tenacity of centuries-old humoral physiology. More importantly, scrutiny of astrological practice, and the logic underpinning its lasting currency, can reveal much about the significance of bodily contrasts and the meanings ascribed to them by Tudor-Stuart folk.

During the wars of the eighteenth century, French prisoners on parole in Britain were placed in a paradoxical situation of captives with privileges. Instead of studying these men as if they dwelt in a world apart, this article focuses on captivity zones as a social laboratory, where people of different status would socialize. These spaces accordingly provide a lens through which to glimpse the repercussions of international conflicts at the level of local communities. The disputes which opposed these captives to the English population, which were the object of letters of complaints sent by the French prisoners to the authorities, shed light on the normative and moral resources which were used by eighteenth-century Englishmen and Frenchmen to legitimize themselves in situations of social conflict. As a configuration characterized by shifting social relations, the parole zone brought together local, national, and international issues, intertwined primarily in the rhetoric of honour. In these incidents, there was no systematic alignment of class and national discourses and actions, while the precise standing of these Frenchmen on the social ladder was constantly challenged and debated. The resulting quarrels therefore reveal a series of social inversions: dominant groups in France were in many respects dominated in England. Rather than being a mere reflection of pre-existing social hierarchies, such micro-incidents reinvented them.

Robert Darnton's acclaimed 1995 work on the late eighteenth-century francophone illegal book trade, The forbidden best-sellers of pre-revolutionary France, has become one of the most cited and studied texts in its field. The culmination of thirty years' archival research and reflection, it roots Darnton's previous case-study-driven articles and monographs in a wide-ranging empirical survey of the order books of the Swiss printer-booksellers, the Société typographique de Neuchâtel. It claims to offer readers a picture of what illegal books went into bookshops everywhere in pre-revolutionary France. The first fruits of the French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe project, a digital humanities initiative that has created an on-line database revealing the STN's entire trade, this article challenges Darnton's interpretation of the nature and utility of the Neuchâtel archive. It demonstrates that the STN's order books are an unreliable gauge of general French demand. It goes further. It argues for a nuanced polycentric understanding of the eighteenth-century Francophone book trade, and outlines a bibliometric digital humanities pathway that might lead us there.

The French state expropriated an enormous quantity of cultural property from across Europe during the Wars of the Revolution and Napoleon, but much was returned in 1815 after the fall of the Empire. This article examines contemporary attitudes to the displacement of works of art, antiquities, scientific specimens, and rare books. The seizures were controversial: since they occurred at a time when plundering the vanquished was already considered questionable behaviour, they attracted opposition and needed to be justified. The article identifies the resulting repertoire of attitudes, arguing that this repertoire evolved with changing circumstances and was more varied than hitherto maintained. By situating this repertoire in a larger historical context, the article also reassesses the extent to which attitudes were derivative and innovative. It contends that the disputation as a whole did not amount to a decisive rupture in the treatment of foreign cultural property during wartime, but that it was nevertheless remarkable in two respects: concepts from hitherto unrelated subjects were applied to considerations about cultural property; and the perceived conditions under which cultural property could be legitimately transferred were revised.

Very little has been published on British political activity in the province of Baghdad in the nineteenth century. Indeed, those formally responsible for it – officials in India – considered the region insignificant. This article argues, however, that it was not insignificant either to men on the spot or to influential British public figures in London and Constantinople. These men argued for its strategic and commercial potential, based on an inter-continental rather than a narrowly Indian view of policy, and optimism about the transformative material and moral power of steamships. Their pressure was responsible for the introduction of British armed steamers to the Mesopotamian rivers in 1835 and their retention throughout the century. This helped to ensure that the British had greater power in the region than any rival. The British also cultivated good relations with Arabs, expecting Ottoman rule to collapse in favour of something more progressive. The case of Baghdad shows the value for diplomatic historians of seeing Britain's European and Indian strategy as connected. It also raises doubts about the importance to British officials of promoting specific commercial interests abroad: the British in the region were much more concerned with the projection of power, reliability, and even-handedness. For the early Victorian mind, the key to progress was surely not the making of particular tariff arrangements, but the dynamic potential of steam itself.

Based on hitherto unused archival material, this article reconstructs the genesis of a clandestine mission to Germany by Sir Edward Grey's private secretary, Sir William Tyrrell, planned for the summer of 1914. The mission remained abortive, but it offers fresh insights into a growing sense of détente in Great Power relations on the eve of the First World War. Although the episode involved key officials in London and Berlin, the article emphasizes that, pace many recent scholars of the period, the Anglo-German antagonism was not the central concern of British policy-makers. Rather, relations between the two countries were a function of Anglo-Russian relations, and the revival of Russian power after 1912 provides the proper context to the attempts by British and German officials to place relations between their countries on a friendlier footing. The article thus also calls into question criticisms of the British foreign secretary as irrevocably ententiste, and provides an antidote to assumptions of the First World War as somehow inevitable.

This article analyses a key reformist gesture by General Smuts's Second World War South African government – the May 1942 order suspending enforcement of the pass laws in major cities. Hated by Africans for curbing their mobility, employment opportunities, and urban residence rights, the pass laws were a fundamental instrument of white supremacy. What then did the suspension order signify? Reconstructing debates and divisions within and beyond the state, the article traces the steps leading to the suspension order, and discusses the responses to its implementation resulting in its later withdrawal. The account considers common explanations for the suspension order's genesis: industry's demand for labour, the wartime state's reduced policing capability, and official anxieties about Africans’ loyalty at a time of vulnerability to invasion. Of these, only the last has clear merit. The real puzzle is the relaxation's continuance beyond the emergency situation of 1942. For this, the credit belongs to the momentum of liberal organization and opinion in encouraging advocates of reform within the state to hold their nerve. Only gradually could the opposition Nationalists, the party of apartheid, mobilize whites’ hostility to black urbanization, thereby enhancing the influence of restorationist elements within the state calling for renewed coercion.

The importance of political assassination lies in the response of the state. That response takes place within a specific culture. This article analyses the assassination culture of the British imperial state. Most studies of assassination in British history concentrate on specific events. On the basis of detailed archival investigation the current article argues that long-term trends are discernible, in particular that the imperial state had a recurrent reflex in characterizing the conspiracies that threatened it. This reflex, in turn, governed the nature of the response to assassination.

The growing interest in citizenship among political theorists over the last two decades has encouraged historians of twentieth-century Africa to ask new questions of the colonial and early post-colonial period. These questions have, however, often focused on differential access to the rights associated with the legal status of citizenship, paying less attention to the ways in which conceptions of citizenship were developed, debated, and employed. This article proposes that tracing the entangled intellectual history of the concept of ‘good citizenship’ in twentieth-century Tanzania, in a British imperial context, has the potential to provide new insights into the development of one national political culture, while also offering wider lessons for our understanding of the global history of political society.