Scholarly interest in early modern sweets has focused on the central role of these food products as markers of social distinction and conspicuous consumption in elite contexts, mainly centred on northern Europe and Italy. Less fully understood are the ways in which the increasing demand for sugar and sweets informed their production and marketing at local levels, in particular in non-courtly urban areas. This article examines the legal case against the baker Josep Cortés, accused of making and selling sponge biscuits in violation of the privilege of confectioners in late seventeenth-century Barcelona. It addresses how confectioners and bakers materially and discursively defined their products based on the use of certain ingredients, utensils, and skill. This article also illustrates a shift from a generic idea of sweetness to one which was explicitly linked to sugar in the period when sugar was becoming a semi-affordable commodity in Europe. By addressing diverse source materials including court records, printed cookbooks, handwritten recipes, and inventories, this case study exemplifies the significant material and cultural dimensions that sugar adopted during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Frederick II's writings have conventionally been viewed either as political tools or as means of public self-fashioning – part of his campaign to raise the status of Prussia from middling principality to great power. This article, by contrast, argues that Frederick's works must also be taken seriously on their own terms, and interpreted against the background of Enlightenment philosophy. Frederick's notions of kingship and state service were not governed mostly by a principle of pure morality or ‘humanitarianism’, as argued influentially by Friedrich Meinecke. On the contrary, the king's views were part and parcel of an eighteenth-century vision of modern kingship in commercial society, based on the benign pursuit of self-love and luxury. A close analysis of Frederick's writings demonstrates that authorial labour was integral to his political agency, publicly placing constraints on what could be perceived as legitimate conduct, rather than mere intellectual window-dressing or an Enlightened pastime in irresolvable tension with his politics.

There is a fine timber moulded cornice in a front room of the building that was once the House of Industry at Gressenhall, Norfolk, while along the eastern wing of the building one can still see the architectural features of an elegant open arcade. Why were such features included on a structure built to keep the poor at work, where residents spent their days making sacks, spinning, and working in the farm fields that surrounded the institution? Creating a digital 3D model of the 1777 House of Industry has allowed us to peel back the historical residue of the post-1834 Poor Law Union workhouse and re-engage the building's architectural features in their original context. The resulting building's peculiarly elegant characteristics reflect the emerging ambitions and defensiveness characteristic of the newly constituted ‘guardians of the poor’ who constructed it, while its permeable walls indicate considerably lower barriers between the workhouse and the outside world than is generally thought. By applying an innovative, digital humanities methodology to a significant social history topic, this article argues that virtual modelling and traditional archival research can together shape a new approach to the history of the Old Poor Law's institutions for the poor.

Historians have recently shown how the concept of ‘sustainability’ (Nachhaltigkeit) first emerged through statist ambitions to enfold nature into political economy in eighteenth-century Germany. Shifting the focus from forestry to mining, this article draws upon the case of Prussian mining official Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) and the ‘Mining School’ he founded in Bad Steben to argue that sustainable resource management also entailed the strict discipline of labour relations and a programme of ‘psychological policy’. Humboldt's Mining School sought to address administrative concerns about ‘Raubbau’ – the rash exploitation of mineral resources ‘without consideration for the future’ – by cultivating a new generation of mine foremen loyal to the state and schooled in its protocol. Ostensibly, Humboldt wished to purge the industry of ‘superstitious’ folk knowledge that undermined the state's commitment to long-term exploitation. Yet analysis of mining songs and sagas suggests a striking analogy between official and vernacular understandings of resource extraction as an ethical matter. Thus, the environmental alarms sounded by German miners around 1800 were triggered by transgressions of a social nature; and political concerns about social order in the ‘mining state’ were constitutive of material concerns about natural resources.

This article offers a new interpretation of the Wallachian revolution of 1848. It places the revolution in its imperial and European contexts and suggests that the course of the revolution cannot be understood without reference to these spheres. The predominantly agrarian principality faced different but commensurate problems to other European states that experienced revolution in 1848. Revolutionary leaders attempted to create a popular political culture in which all citizens, both urban and rural, could participate. This revolutionary community formed the basis of the government's attempts to enter into relations with its Ottoman suzerain and its Russian protector. Far from attempting to subvert the geopolitical order, this article argues that the Wallachians positioned themselves as loyal subjects of the sultan and saw their revolution as a meeting point between the Ottoman Empire and European civilization. The revolution was not a staging post on the road to Romanian unification, but a brief moment when it seemed possible to realize internal regeneration on a European model within an Ottoman imperial framework. But the Europe of 1848 was too unstable for the revolutionaries to succeed. The passing of this moment would lead some to lose faith in both the Ottoman Empire and Europe.

As the sport that purportedly enhanced martial conditioning of the ‘dominant’ race, pig-sticking assumed critical importance for the survival of the British in India. When numerous local insecurities and large-scale anxieties threatened the empire, hunting pursuits involving the wily Indian pig, it was said, made soldiers out of boys; the attendant spectacles of masculinity aimed to exert symbolic dominance over the restive Indian masses. The sport also served as an avenue for upward mobility for the subaltern soldier attempting to upstage aristocratic hunting performances in England and India. While masculinity and symbolic governance have been analysed repeatedly in critiques of hunting, sportsmen's contributions to natural history have seen limited analyses. Here, I show that the local intricacies of pig-sticking motivated a superlative understanding of the Indian wild boar, a tricky, unpredictable customer with a vile temper, and a ready propensity to attack its pursuers. Pig-sticking entailed a multi-faceted immersion with both land and people, incorporating hybrid knowledge-making, shaped within the contact zone of indigenous and colonial encounter. Further, while agreeing with post-colonial critiques on sport and imperialism, I propose looking beyond colonial exceptionalism to situate big-game hunting within the larger scholarship on costly signalling and hunting for prestige among human societies.

Across monsoon Asia, salt is of such vital necessity that controlling its production or supply has historically been connected to the establishment and expression of political authority. On the one hand, rulers maintained the allegiance of their subjects by ensuring their access to salt of suitable price and sufficient quantity. On the other hand, denying rebels their salt was a strategy of conquest and pacification, while the necessity of salt meant it could reliably be taxed to raise state finances. This article first sets out this connection of salt and sovereignty, then examining it in the context of colonial Burma, a province of British India from its annexation until its ‘divorce’ in 1935 (effected in 1937), and thus subject to the Government of India's salt monopoly. Focusing on salt brings into view two aspects of the state (while also permitting analysis of ‘Upper Burma’, which remains rather marginal in the scholarly literature). First, the everyday state and quotidian practices constitutive of its sovereignty, which was negotiated and contested where indigenes were able to exploit the chinks in the state's administrative capacity and its knowledge deficits. Second, in turn, the lumpy topography of state power. The state not only failed to restrict salt production to the extent it desired (with the intention that indigenes would rely on imported salt, whose supply was easier to control and thus tax), but conceded to a highly complex fiscal administration, the variegations in which reflected the uneven distribution in state power – thicker in the delta and thinnest in the uplands.

European empires experienced widespread anti-colonial rebellions during the First World War. These rebellions occurred for many different reasons, reflecting the diversity of context and history across colonial societies in Africa and Asia. Religion naturally played a strong role in most of the anti-colonial rebellions during the First World War, most prominently Islam. This article looks at the role Islam played in two key anti-colonial rebellions in North and West Africa: the rebellions in Batna, Algeria, and the Kaocen War in Niger, respectively. The article examines how Islam was instrumentalized by rebels, imperial collaborators, and French officers and administrators to further their own ends. Rebels called upon Islam to help inspire anti-colonial movements, to bind together diverse populations, and to contextualize their actions in wider socio-political conflicts. Imperial collaborators likewise called on religious authority to assist with European imperial recruitment efforts. French officers and administrators used Islam both as a justification and a target for collective punishment and repression after the rebellions were put down from 1917. This repression is still under-studied in a period usually portrayed as evidencing broad imperial harmony, rather than violent extraction and oppression.

This article reassesses the electoral decline of British Liberalism in the 1920s, especially the catastrophic defeat of 1924. A leading explanation for this disaster is that the Liberals were ‘fighting to lose’ by leaving nearly 250 constituencies uncontested. David Lloyd George is widely seen as deliberately seeking to destroy his party by refusing to finance candidates through his infamous ‘fund’, so he could lead what remained after electoral evisceration. His actions are widely credited with stymieing prospects of a Liberal recovery in the next election, 1929, which confirmed the party's permanent replacement by Labour. Through a wide-ranging statistical reanalysis, supported by a study of grassroots constituency campaigns, this article argues that the lack of candidates was a negligible contributor either to Liberal annihilation in 1924, or to Liberal failure to recover in 1929. The sharply deteriorating health of the party was already felt keenly at the grassroots before, not after, the seemingly freak result of 1924 was known. We thus argue that, contrary to the judgement of historians and contemporaries, the 1924 result represented the truer reflection of the party's fundamental interwar strength, with 1923 the exception. The inaction of Lloyd George in 1924 thus can be interpreted as pragmatic rather than Machiavellian.

This article explores how marginalized groups navigated the everyday politics of citizenship in Britain during the Second World War through a case-study of the Sorby Research Institute in Sheffield, a site in which pacifists and conscientious objectors participated in medical experiments as an alternative to military service. Examining the experiences of volunteers who were infested with parasites in a study of infectious disease transmission, this article traces the emergence of ‘somatic citizenship’ at the SRI: a distinctive kind of wartime service that was rooted in the everyday sensations, routines, and practices of the body. Ultimately, this article argues that the somatic labours of medical research offered a way of partially reconciling the conflicting demands of pacifism and national duty, allowing volunteers to reposition themselves as heroic wartime citizens. However, this was not a straightforward path to social rehabilitation, with various political, moral, and hygienic anxieties disrupting the pursuit of community acceptance. While contributing to ongoing work on citizenship, subjectivity, and emotion in wartime Britain, these findings also demonstrate how unconventional sources – in this case, medicalized descriptions of the body – can be redeployed to illuminate the politically saturated nature of everyday life under the conditions of total war.

This article reconstructs and analyses, for the first time, the Royal Ballet's state-sponsored tour of apartheid South Africa from February to April 1960. It traces the public outcry surrounding the company's decision to exclude its only dancer of colour, as well as the tour's planning, execution, and continuation through the Sharpeville massacre, local reception, and aftermath. In this episode of the post-war period, politics and high culture operated in tandem to sustain Britain's imperial connections amid decolonization and the Cold War. The article proposes a reframing of the ‘Wind of Change’ moment, analyses the role of ballet in Britain's cultural Cold War, and underscores the British state's willingness to set aside human and moral concerns for political advantage. Above all, it argues that, rather than being peripheral to, or merely reflecting, the British state's agenda, ballet enacted its politics.

This article seeks to shed light on the Lebanese Study Committee, an overlooked centre of intellectual production and political activity during the Lebanese Civil War. It was comprised of legal experts and Maronite monks of the Lebanese Maronite Order, and emerged at the Holy Spirit University of Kaslik in 1975. The committee was created at the initiative of the Catholic clergy in order to endow the Christian war effort with an ‘intellectual pole’ capable of studying recent developments and provide solutions aimed at defending the interests of the Christian society. By making use of hitherto inaccessible primary sources, its internal and external publications, the article elucidates the activities and ideas of the committee, which worked to counteract leftist discourse and propaganda. By paying attention to the context of the Lebanese Study Committee's emergence, the article also brings to light a history of interaction between lay, clerical, state, and para-military institutions. It concludes that its creation is the direct consequence of the grassroots mobilization of conservative agents, which is reminiscent of the ways in which Western conservatism was revived in the same years.

Recent developments in the history of modern Britain have led to the emergence of a history of intimacy, whether or not it is recognized as such. This historiographical review argues that intimacy is a useful category of historical analysis. Thinking in terms of inter-relationships between different forms of intimacy allows us to think with greater conceptual clarity about these forms, as well as types of intimacy that are difficult to categorize. The first section reviews recent and significant contributions to the literature and seeks to draw out existing connections and crosscurrents between subfields. The second section turns to recent work on the histories of selfhood and the emotions and considers what thinking about intimacy might add to these fields; it then builds on this recent work to propose that one way to ‘do’ the history of intimacy is to think in terms of ‘intimate practices’.

In the 1821 Preface to his Elements of the philosophy of right, Hegel famously claimed that ‘philosophy…is its own time comprehended in thoughts’. It is tempting to view history in equivalent terms. After all, historical research usually engages the past under the influence of contemporary concerns. Topics acquire pertinence on account of prevailing values and interests. And yet there is a clear difference between being roused to investigate a subject as a result of its ongoing resonance and interpreting its meaning in terms of current attitudes. This distinction, however, is often blurred, and with it appropriate relations between historical analysis and moral judgement. It may well be that, at the level of political philosophy, each of these activities can be reconciled; but first their respective provinces should be carefully delimited.