This article analyses the relationship between imperial expansion and popular visual culture in late seventeenth-century Venice. It addresses the impact of the military on the marketplace of print and examines the cultural importance of commercial printmaking to the visualization of colonial motifs during the 1684–99 war with the Ottoman Empire. Through a broad array of single-sheet engravings and illustrated books encompassing different visual typologies (e.g. maps, siege views, battle scenes, portraits of Venetian patricians, and representations of the Ottomans), the article re-examines key questions about the imperial dimensions of Venetian print culture and book history. In particular, it shows how warfare and colonial politics militarized the communication media, and highlights the manner in which prints engaged metropolitan viewers in the Republic's expansionist ventures. In so doing, the analysis demonstrates how the printing industry brought the visual spectacle of empire onto the centre stage of Venetian cultural life.

Clement Coke was a minor figure of the early Stuart period, especially in comparison to his brilliant and prominent father, Sir Edward Coke. People seem to have taken note of ‘Fighting Clem’ only when he engaged in a duel or punched another member of parliament. In the parliament of 1626, however, he briefly gained notoriety when he faced an unusually formidable adversary, Charles I, who accused him of making a seditious speech. A close analysis of this episode reveals much about the broad concept of sedition and the unstable atmosphere in the House of Commons. Coke's case also had repercussions later in this parliament and perhaps even in the next parliament where his father championed the Petition of Right. Yet the most interesting aspect of Coke's case is what it reveals about the mindset of the king. In contrast to the stereotypical view of Charles as prickly and paranoid, he appears here to have been both perceptive and prescient. Thus, this article, like work by the late Mark Kishlansky, concludes that we should take Charles I's view of the political landscape more seriously.

John Graunt's analysis of the London Bills of Mortality of 1662 is famous as a pioneering contribution to the study of human populations. But comparatively little attention has been given to his highly influential discovery that the numbers of men and women were evenly balanced. Why did Graunt think that what we now call the sex ratio was important, and why did he see it as essential to contradict received opinion? What can we deduce about Graunt's own attitudes to women? Why was he concerned to discredit polygamy? Further investigation suggests, not that Graunt shared the misogyny of many of his contemporaries, but that he was motivated by the dangers inherent in his own shifting religious views, which included Socinianism and anti-Trinitarianism. The religious controversialist Bernardino Ochino can be detected as a dark influence behind Graunt's thinking. An exploration of Graunt's cultural hinterland confirms that men did indeed believe that they were outnumbered by women, a conviction accentuated by the unnerving upheavals of religious conflict, plague, and civil war, and apparently confirmed by prophecy. Seventeenth-century misogyny seems to present itself to us as qualitative, but it included a numerical dimension which was in effect culturally determined.

While the introduction of central-government inspectors for prisons in a British act of 1835 has been seen as a key Whig achievement of the 1830s, the Irish precedent enacted by Charles Grant, a liberal Tory chief secretary, in the early 1820s, has gone unnoticed by scholars. The article sets out to trace the Irish prefiguring of this measure and, in the process, to consider prison reform in the United Kingdom in the early nineteenth century in a more transnational manner. A new analysis of the critical years between 1823 and 1835 in both Britain and Ireland based on a detailed examination of parliamentary inquiries and legislation shows how developments in the two countries overlapped and how reforms in one jurisdiction affected the other. This article explores the channels through which this exchange of knowledge and ideas occurred – both in parliament and through interlinked penal-reform philanthropic societies in both countries. This article also highlights inadequacies with the theory supported by some scholars that Ireland functioned as a laboratory for British social reform at this time, and instead suggests a more fluid exchange of ideas in both directions at different times.

This article argues that political considerations, economic theory, attitudes toward public finance, and concerns about regional development all influenced contemporary responses to the Galway packet-boat contract of 1859–64. Though historians have conventionally depicted the dispute over the contract as an episode in Victorian high politics, it maintains that the controversy surrounding the agreement between the Galway Company and the state cannot be understood solely in terms of party manoeuvre at Westminster. In the context of the Union between Britain and Ireland, the Galway contract raised important questions about the role of the British government in fostering Irish economic development through public expenditure. Politicians and opinion-makers adopted a variety of ideologically informed positions when addressing this issue, resulting in diverse approaches to state intervention, often across party lines. While political calculation and pressure from interest groups certainly affected policy, the substantive debate on the contract helped to shape the late Victorian Irish policy of both British parties by clarifying contemporary ideas about the economic functions appropriate to the Union state.

Dadabhai Naoroji's ‘drain theory’ of British imperialism described the way in which a colonial government could abscond with the wealth of a dependent country, leaving it impoverished. This theory conceptualized ‘poverty’ as the negation of liberal ‘citizenship’. As such, through an exposition of Naoroji's thought, this article offers an insight into both the origins of the Indian political subject and Indian anti-colonialism. In doing so, it opens up an avenue for investigating how Indian thinkers locally adapted modular concepts of a Western provenance and then reintroduced them into the metropole, contributing to the heterogeneity of the Victorian liberal canon. Finally, Naoroji's imperial critique is compared to that of prominent British anti-imperialists, especially John Hobson, in order to demonstrate that Dadabhai's economic account of empire not only pre-dates Hobson's thesis but that it was more expansive in its criticism and more hopeful about the ‘progress’ of indigenous peoples.

The three imperial durbars held in Delhi for the coronation of British monarchs as the rulers of India were gatherings of royalty, administration, and the military, organized in the years 1877, 1903, and 1911. As impressively invented, improvised, and self-styled orientalist representations of the late Victorian tradition, these durbars were pageants of power, prestige, and authority, creations of their organizing viceroys: Robert Lytton (1877), George Curzon (1903), and Charles Hardinge (1911). But, as this article shows, they were also commemorative exhibitions of the triumphant memory of the event of 1857 (variously called the Indian Mutiny, Sepoy war, War of Independence), especially in Delhi which had to be emphasized regularly for perpetuating myths about British superiority and invincibility. Spread over a period of thirty-five years, these rituals of commemoration were performed through four illustrative choices. These were the selection of site, selection of mutiny veterans as participants, the construction of mutiny memorials, and contribution to the growth of mutiny pilgrimage tours. Drawing attention to the successive formation of 1857 as a seminal ‘cultural moment’ through its periodic commemoration, the present article brings to focus the enduring significance of the event for the British empire in India, which had to be re-visited time and again for purposes of legitimation and cultural appropriation.

This article explores the impact of immigration on the social history of Derby, England, after the Second World War. In particular, it studies the changes in the city's religious culture associated with the decline of Christianity as the city's civil religion and the increased religious pluralism due to immigration. This local study challenges assumptions about the nature and timing of secularization, and the characterization of religion in late twentieth-century Britain as militant. As new communities from South Asia and the West Indies settled in Derby, their politicization resulted in a growing emphasis on their religious identity that countered interethnic conflict and fostered civil society. The Christian churches are an important part of this story as they found new ways of remaining relevant, sometimes in concert with members of other faith traditions. Between 1930 and 2000, Derby experienced a shift from a civil religion to an array of religions that were civil to each other and concerned for the good of society. Religion continued to play a constructive role in English society at the end of the twentieth century.

Eugenics and sociology are often considered polar opposites, with the former seen as a pseudo-science that reduces everything to genes and the other a progressive social science focused on the environment. However, the situation was not quite so straightforward in mid-twentieth-century Britain. As this article shows, eugenics had a number of important formative intellectual, institutional, and methodological impacts on ideas and practices that would find a home in the rapidly expanding and diversifying discipline of sociology after the Second World War. Taking in the careers of leading individuals, including Alexander Carr-Saunders, William Beveridge, Julian Huxley, and David Glass, and focusing on the relationship between eugenics, ‘population research’, and the emerging field of social mobility studies, the article highlights the significant but underappreciated influence interwar biosocial thinking had on intellectual, scientific, and political cultures in post-war Britain. In so doing, the article draws on recent scholarship on the ‘technical identity’ embedded in mid-century British social science, which, it is suggested, provided the link between the research under consideration and the progressive politics of those who carried it out.

Using recently available archival material, this article examines Lake's key beliefs and the part they had in shaping US grand strategy in the first Clinton administration. Lake operated as one of the major architects of the administration's foreign policy. His intellectual influence commenced in the 1992 presidential campaign, when he served as candidate Bill Clinton's principal foreign policy adviser, and continued through the first presidential term, reaching its most concrete manifestation in the Clinton administration's 1994 National security strategy. The article analyses Lake's ideas and his overarching concerns about national purpose, his strategic vision, and his definition of national security policy objectives using the analytical framework known as a mental map. Likewise, it considers his role in articulating a new grand strategy during a period of strategic adjustment, one in which the cold war doctrine of containment no longer applied.

This paper assesses the historical validity of the famous tale that, near the beginning of the Greek War of Independence (1821–32), the Hellenic revolutionary army offered lead ammunition to their Ottoman enemies who they were besieging on the Athenian Acropolis. This gift was presented to the Turks in an effort to halt their quarrying of the Parthenon and the other classical monuments on the hill-top, within the masonry of which the Ottoman defenders were searching for the ancient lead clamps which could be melted down and recast into ammunition. This paper will, however, demonstrate that there is a lack of contemporary evidence to support the tale and the earliest recorded references to the story only occur some four decades after the event was claimed to have taken place. Yet despite this lack of eyewitness evidence, from the early 1980s onwards, the tale has been frequently passed off as historical fact and referenced with regularity by campaigners lobbying for the return of the Elgin Marbles from the British Museum.