Iconic early European maps of the Caribbean depict neatly parcelled plantations, sugar mills, towns, and fortifications juxtaposed against untamed interiors sketched with runaway slaves and Indigenous toponyms. These extra-geographical symbols of racial and spatial meaning projected desire and design to powerful audiences. Abstractions about material life influenced colonial perceptions and actions upon a space, often to deleterious effects for the Indigenous and African people who were abused in tandem with the region's flora and fauna. The scientific revolution curbed these proscriptive and descriptive ‘thick-mapped’ features that offer historians an underexplored record of early colonial Caribbean life beyond the geographically descriptive. Before this shift from mystery to mastery, the early correlation of colonization and cartography in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries provides a fascinating glimpse into the process of creating the Americas. This article offers ideas for deconstructing old maps as new sources for historians of the early Atlantic World. As digital readers may explore through the roughly fifty maps linked via the footnotes, their informative spectacle naturalized colonialism upon lived and imagined race and space, created an exoticized, commodified Caribbean, and facilitated wealth extraction projects of competing empires made profitable by African labour on Indigenous land.

This article argues that parliamentary debates over the access to and control of the crown jewels from 1641 to 1644 were intrinsic to the emergence and proliferation of revolutionary ideas about political sovereignty in the earliest stages of the English Civil Wars. In combining the methodologies of parliamentary history with theoretical scholarship on the material foundations of power, it demonstrates that shifting attitudes toward the royal regalia were indicative of more general developments in parliamentary thinking on the origins and limits of monarchical authority. In so doing, it contributes to recent scholarship on the problem of ‘ideological escalation’ at Westminster, demonstrating how quickly an initially radical proposal for access to the crown jewels became sufficiently popular in the House of Commons to authorize the melting down of the royal regalia only a year later. By emphasizing the centrality of the crown jewels to ongoing debates over the ‘ancient constitution’, it suggests that their destruction was understood as a step towards the abolition of monarchy per se.

This article examines the rate and nature of female representation before the board of trustees for the forfeited estates in Ireland, established by the Act of Resumption in 1700. The legislation was introduced by a discontented English parliament to nullify William III's grants of forfeited Irish land, which he awarded after victory over James II in the War of the Two Kings (1689–91). The act's remit extended well beyond the resumption of freehold land, incorporating real property, judgements, securities, obligations, debts, and goods and chattels forfeited by outlawed Jacobites. It was also retroactive, as all parties with a legitimate title to a property that predated 13 February 1689 were entitled to enter a claim. Using a printed list of 3,140 claims submitted to the trustees, this article analyses the commonality of female claimants, considers their economic, social, and marital status, and identifies the legal or equitable basis for their representation before the trustees. In doing so, it examines prenuptial and familial practices in post-Restoration Ireland, underlines the economic importance of marriage and inheritance as means of conveyance, and suggests that women's and female minors’ successful claims provided a number of Catholic families with a lifeline in the early eighteenth century.

The importance of print in the ‘rage of party’ of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Britain is well known, but scholars have paid insufficient attention to the press phenomenon that provided the most persistent and undiluted partisan voices of the era, the comment serial. Comment serials – regular printed publications designed explicitly to present topical analysis, opinion, and advice – were fashioned as powerful weapons for partisan combat. Due to their regularity and flexibility, they could be more potent than other forms of topical print, especially pamphlets and newspapers. Although many publications have been individually recognized as comment serials, such as Roger L'Estrange's Observator (1681–7), Daniel Defoe's Review (1704–13), and Jonathan Swift and others’ Examiner (1710–14), their development as a holistic phenomenon has not been properly understood. They first appeared during the Succession Crisis (1678–82), and proliferated under Queen Anne (1702–14), supporting both tory and whig causes. Through widespread consumption, both direct and indirect, they shaped partisan culture in various ways, including by reinforcing and galvanizing partisan identities, facilitating the development of partisan ‘reading communities’, and manifesting and representing party divisions in public. This article focuses on John Tutchin's Observator (1702–12) as a case-study of a major comment serial.

This article re-examines Burke's doctrine of intervention by analysing his decades-long interest in the ‘Polish question’. Contrary to the main thrust of existing scholarship, it argues that the French Revolution did not fundamentally transform Burke's assessment of the European state system. Rather, Burke's most famous and controversial 1790s positions on the topic were rehearsed in the previous decades through his practical engagement in long-running eighteenth-century discussions about the Polish state, which acted as a lightning rod for disagreements surrounding the nature and future of European politics. Burke was interested in the Polish state because it raised fundamental questions about the nature of European civilization, the rules of progress, and the conditions for long-lasting peace. The Polish crisis of 1772 led him to reflect on the relationship between internal and external politics, and crystallized his analysis of the Balance of Power as not only the guarantor of continental peace, but also as the very source of the unique ‘spirit’ of European civil society. It was this same framework of analysis that he applied to France in the 1790s, to argue that the expansionist ambitions inherent to democratic republicanism warranted intervention because they threatened the unique nature of European civilization.

Between 1885 and 1891, the Liberal statesman William Ewart Gladstone debated the scientific status of the Book of Genesis with the natural historian Thomas Henry Huxley in a series of articles published in the Nineteenth Century. Viewed in isolation, this episode has been seen as a case of a professional scientist dismissing an amateur interloper. This article repositions this familiar dispute as one chapter in Gladstone's lifelong engagement with the concept of historical ‘development’, the unfolding or evolution of Providence to human reason over time, a concept which came to prominence in the 1840s, in both Tractarian theology and in natural history. Gladstone consistently advocated an accommodation between transmutation and natural theology based on a probabilist ontology derived from the eighteenth-century Anglican churchman Joseph Butler (1692–1752). That understanding of historical truth to which Gladstone credited his ability to discern when political issues became ripe for agitation demanded a humble, Christian moral temper that embraced doubt and salutary suffering, rather than certainty and whiggish celebration of progress.

Debating was an important part of schoolgirls’ political education in late Victorian and Edwardian England that has been overlooked in the scholarship on female education and civics instruction. Debates offered middle- and working-class schoolgirls an embodied and interactive education for citizenship. Considering both the content of discussions and the process of debating, this article argues that school debates provided a unique opportunity for girls to discuss political ideas and develop political skills. Debates became intertwined with girls’ peer cultures, challenging contemporary and historiographical assumptions of girlhood apoliticism. Positioning girls as political subjects sheds new light on political change in modern Britain. Schoolgirl debates show how gendered political boundaries were shifting in this period. Within the unique space of the school debating chamber, girls were free to appropriate and subvert ‘masculine’ political subjects and ways of speaking. In mock parliaments, schoolgirls re-created the archetypal male political space of the House of Commons, demonstrating their familiarity with parliamentary politics. Schoolgirl debates therefore foreshadowed initiatives that promoted women's citizenship after partial suffrage was achieved in 1918, and they help to explain how the first women voters were assimilated easily into existing party and constitutional politics.

During the nineteenth century, the Muslim Mediterranean became a locus of competing imperial projects led by the Ottomans and European powers. This article examines how the migration of people and ideas across North Africa and Asia complicated processes of imperial consolidation and exposed the ways in which North Africa, Europe, and Asia were connected through trans-imperial influences that often undermined the jurisdictional sovereignty of imperial states. It demonstrates that cross-border migrations and cultural transfers both frustrated and abetted imperial projects while allowing for the imagining of new types of solidarities that transcended national and imperial categorizations. In analysing these factors, this article argues for a rethinking of the metropole–periphery relationship by highlighting the important role print and trans-imperial networks played in shaping the Mediterranean region.

This article uses Churchill's defeat in Dundee in 1922 to examine the challenges to liberal political economy in Britain posed by the First World War. In particular, the focus is on the impact of the war on reshaping the global division of labour and the difficulties in responding to the domestic consequences of this reshaping. Dundee provides an ideal basis for examining the links between local politics and global economic changes in this period because of the traumatic effects of the war on the city. Dundee depended to an extraordinary extent on one, extremely ‘globalized’, industry – jute – for its employment. All raw jute brought to Dundee came from Bengal, and the markets for its product were scattered all over the world. Moreover, the main competitive threat to the industry came from a much poorer economy (India), so that jute manufacturing was the first major British industry to be significantly affected by low-wage competition. Before 1914, the Liberals combined advocacy of free trade with a significant set of interventions in the labour market and in social welfare, including trade boards. The Dundee case allows us to examine in detail the responses to post-war challenges to these Liberal orthodoxies.

This article analyses the curious development and subsequent refinement of the Photo-FIT system for the identification of criminal suspects, used by police forces around the world from the 1970s. Situating Photo-FIT in a succession of other technologies of identification, it demonstrates that, far from representing the onward march of science and technology (and the way in which both were harnessed to the power of the state in the twentieth century), Photo-FIT was the brainchild of an idiosyncratic entrepreneur wedded to increasingly outmoded notions of physiognomy. Its adoption by the Home Office was primarily determined by the particular context of the later 1960s, and its continued use owed more to vested interest and energetic promotion than to scientific underpinnings or proven efficacy. It did, however, in the longer term, provide the impetus for the development of a new sub-field of psychology and pave the way for the development of increasingly sophisticated facial identification technologies still used today. Overall, the article demonstrates the long persistence of physiognomic thinking in twentieth-century Britain, the way in which new technology is socially constructed, and the persuasive power of ‘pseudo-science’.

How can we explain rising levels of pre-marital sex in post-war Britain? Focusing on the experiences of young women growing up in Britain between 1950 and 1980, this article argues that changes in sexual practice were brought about by shifts in the social value of sexual knowledge and experience. While the figure of the ‘nice girl’ was still central to understandings of respectable femininity, across this period social status and reputation became linked to demonstrations of attractiveness and sexual knowing. For girls of the post-war generation, discussions of sex were central to how they related to those around them, and the decisions that teenagers made about their own sexual practice were informed by their perceptions of what their friends and peers would think of them. The article argues that, by considering the history of sexuality at a ‘local’ scale between the macro-level of culture and the micro-level of individual sexual selfhood, we not only gain an important new perspective on the everyday sexual experience but also uncover new processes of socio-sexual change.

This historiographical review focuses on the complex interactions between Nazi Germany, local populations, and east European Jews during the Holocaust. Braving fierce historical revisionism in eastern Europe and the Baltic states, recent studies have shifted the spotlight from Germans to Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, Lithuanians, and other ethnicities. As a result, the analytic categories with which most historians still work – notably ‘perpetrator/victim/bystander’ and ‘collaboration/resistance’ – have outlived their usefulness. A more complex picture of the Nazi-occupied territories in eastern Europe has emerged and now awaits new theoretical frameworks. This article argues that past paradigms blinded scholars to a range of groups lost in the cracks and to behaviours remaining outside the political sphere. Through four criteria that shed light on the social history of the Holocaust in eastern Europe, it draws connections between central and east European, German, Jewish, and Soviet histories, in order to engage with other fields and disciplines that examine modern mass violence and genocide. As Holocaust studies stands at a crossroads, only a transnational history including all ethnicities and deeper continuities, both temporal and geographical, will enhance our knowledge of how social relations shaped the very evolution of the Holocaust.