The Crimean war has been the victim of much conceptualization. For modern historians, drawn to the phenomenon of a European conflict conveniently sited in the middle of a century of comparative peace, much can be made to hang on it. Whether it is an aberration, or the expression of suppressed feelings, or indeed the beginning of a current that is to grow stronger until 1914, diplomats, soldiers, politicians and economists have taken it as a dividing line. It is simultaneously the continuance of the Peninsular tradition in warfare and an array of technological novelties tempting the variously applied title, ‘the first modern war’. But while its impact on domestic politics and European diplomacy has been scrutinized, and while Captain Nolan has failed to convey his breathless order to the Light Brigade correctly on innumerable occasions, the bridge between the two, between – at its most banal – politics and tactics, has not been so closely examined.

From the 1920s through the 1940s, European and Anglo-American Protestants perceived a crisis of humanity. While trying to determine religion's role in a secular age, church leaders redefined the human being as a theological person in community with others and in partnership with God. This new anthropology contributed to a personalist conception of human rights that rivalled Catholic and secular conceptions. Alongside such innovations in post-liberal theology, ecumenical Protestants organized a series of meetings to unite the world churches. Their conference at Oxford in July 1937 led to the creation of the World Council of Churches. Thus, Protestants of the transwar era supplied the two main ingredients of any human rights regime: a universalist commitment to defending individual human beings regardless of race, nationality, or class and a global institutional framework for enacting that commitment. Through the story of Protestant thinkers and activists, this article recasts the history of human rights as part of a larger history of critical reappraisals of humanity. Understanding why human rights came into prominence at various twentieth-century moments may require abandoning ‘rights talk’ for human talk, or, a comparative history of radical anthropologies and their relationship to broader socio-economic, political, and cultural crises.

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.

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.

The seventy-five years from the Second Punic War to the legislation of Tiberius Gracchus were critical years in the history of Rome. Within this period Rome imposed her will on the Hellenistic world and brought the West under her sway. The foundations of the Empire were laid in these years. Yet the period closes with violence and blood-shed in Rome herself and the seeds of civil war in Italy. The strain of conquest and the immensity of success disturbed the stability which had made the victory possible. Imperial rule called for changes in administration; deep economic movements began to touch the life of the people; but the strength of tradition, political and social, and the dominance of the Senate limited their range of vision. The result was to provoke, whether or not it was justified, an attempt at revolutionary reform.

In 1546 the members of Lincoln's Inn beheld a most peculiar sight in their communal hall. The traditional midsummer light of St John had been replaced with the ridiculous head of a horse. Three young members were charged by the benchers. Two who refused to confess were expelled from the house and imprisoned in the Fleet by the lord chancellor, Thomas Wriothesley, and Sir Roger Cholmley, the chief baron of the Exchequer and a former bencher. The other culprit, who confessed and made humble suit to the bench, was merely excluded from commons. After the inevitable petitions, all were forgiven ‘their said lewd and nowghtie mysdemeanours’ and shortly remitted into the house.

Histories of the Second World War rarely describe the impact of that conflagration upon the Grand Duchy of Luxemburg. Such omission is not surprising, yet the German efforts to assimilate this allegedly Germanic borderland reveal interesting aspects of National Socialist totalitarian methods.

In 1854 Russia for the first time was confronted with that doubtful privilege of national greatness, a single-handed war with a coalition of major European powers. When Nicholas I, ignoring the prudent advice of Nesselrode, his Minister of Foreign Affairs, had ordered his troops to occupy once again the Danubian Principalities, Turkey had resisted, England and France after some hesitation had come to her assistance, and Austria had been converted from a close ally into an unfriendly neutral.

It was not an easy task in the early eighteenth century to write a complete history of England, and Laurence Echard courageously attempted to be the first to do so. For even if one could pick a way carefully through the Saxon/Norman period (on which most attention had centred up till this time), there still remained immense problems in the interpretation of the seventeenth century and its relationship back to the chosen version of this earlier time. In the first quarter of the eighteenth century Echard wrote or contributed to six volumes on the subject of English history, all of which contained at least some discussion of the English seventeenth century, but the results were confusing. In the very small amount of modern discussion on Echard's politics and historical works, this confusion is evident in a revealing contradiction.

The political significance of Spanish reason-of-state literature has been studied almost exclusively from the perspective of imperial institutions, in particular the monarchy. This article argues that there was a distinctive political perspective in the crown of Aragon, based on its constitutional traditions, which inspired a particular kind of ‘reason of state’. Focusing on the works of a Catalan nobleman, Don Francisco Gilabert, the argument goes on to show that this constitutional thought was able to articulate a project of reform alternative to that of the minister of Philip IV, the count-duke of Olivares, and that therefore it cannot be merely analysed (as it often has been) as an anachronistic form of aristocratic self-seeking. On the contrary, by denying the king the power of absolute sovereignty, and by insisting on the idea of a mixed constitution, Gilabert's approach was able to articulate republican ideals, even though at the cost of some fundamental ambiguities concerning the idea of empire. It is suggested that the recognition of this distinctive intellectual tradition has important implications for the overall interpretation of the course of Spanish history in the seventeenth century, before and after the Catalan revolt of 1640.

On Saturday, 4 December 1154, eight hundred years ago, Nicholas Breakspear was elected pope. On the following day he was enthroned and crowned at St Peter's, Rome. Adrian IV was the only ‘pontifex natione Anglicus’ who has assumed the tiara.

The aftermath of Hosni Mubarak's forced abdication as president of Egypt in 2011 brought the culmination of a long-running debate over whether Western governments should engage with the Muslim Brotherhood. At the heart of that debate was the question of how to judge the Brothers: as ‘moderates’ with whom the US might do business, or as part of a movement ultimately hostile to American interests. As this article demonstrates, the idea of engaging in some form of dialogue with the Brotherhood is itself nothing new to United States diplomats. An examination of the Wikileaks cache of documents confirms that contacts of varying kinds have existed since the first half of the 1980s (with dialogue only abandoned for a brief period during the early years of the ‘war on terror’). Such contacts were a product of the normal, low-level political intelligence-gathering conducted by all American embassies; at no stage were they allowed to jeopardize America's key strategic alliance with the Mubarak regime. Nevertheless, the cables pertaining to the Muslim Brotherhood do reveal the limits of such diplomacy, with officials often struggling either to understand the character of the Brotherhood, or read the runes of its internal contours. In particular, the question of whether the Muslim Brothers should indeed be seen as ‘moderates ‘– and as suitable partners for the US – is shown to be one of enduring, but unresolved, concern. The history of this relationship thus serves as a crucial backdrop to contemporary debates and developments.

Henrion de Pansey (1742–1829) is an important but neglected constitutional historian whose views on the French past served as a commentary on the unwritten and written constitutions of his own age. A feudal lawyer before the revolution and an appeal judge under Napoleon and the restored Bourbons, he published a variety of works combining liberal sentiment with judicial traditionalism. His career illustrates the shift of moderate conservative opinion across the revolutionary divide. The alteration in his political thought is best understood through its conjunction with the three historical modes prevalent in his time: a discontinuous approach, accepting the past as a series of different regimes interrupted by revolutions; a developmental view, charting the progressive growth of institutions from seeds planted in antiquity; and a fundamentalist habit of thought that saw change as decline from pristine perfection. The jurists of sixteenth-century France remained Henrion's most admired models, and he used his roseate vision of the early modern French monarchy as a sometimes critical commentary on the constitutions designed in his own day. In prerevolutionary days he recast the ideas of the sixteenth-century rationalizer of feudalism, Charles Dumoulin, into Enlightenment terms. After the revolution, De l'Autoritéjudiciaire (1810) depicted the moderating role of the judiciary as defenders of past constitutions, and formed an oblique commentary on Napoleon's civil code. Des Pairs et de l'ancienne constitution (1816) appraised the charter of 1814. It accepted a measure of popular participation in government, but held judicial expertise essential in legislation. Des Assemblées nationales (1826) shifted the emphasis from judicial oversight to the separation of powers and representative government, although Henrion, like Guizot and the doctrinaires, remained critical of popular democracy.

The Vatican in the twentieth century has played a far less considerable role on the world's stage than in previous centuries. Stripped of its temporal possessions, the Vatican no longer exercises that military and political power which Napoleon estimated to be worth an army corps of 20,000 men, but which his latter day successor, Stalin, could sardonically dismiss with the (apocryphal) question: ‘How many divisions has the Pope?’ Nevertheless, the papacy remains an influential factor in world affairs; and there is still strong appeal in die ideal of the papacy pursuing aims which, in contrast to those of other powers, are solely peace and reconciliation.