The struggle between Frederick II and the papacy is the most dramatic of all the medieval contests between Regnum and Sacerdotium and has naturally attracted many historians. Frederick's relations to the church of his Sicilian kingdom is a less obviously dramatic theme and has never been treated except incidentally as one of the contributory causes of friction between pope and emperor. It is, however, worthy of independent study, providing as it does a corrective to the idea of Frederick engaged in almost ceaseless warfare against the church, which one derives from excessive concentration on papal and imperial manifestoes. A study of Frederick's Sicilian constitutions, of his charters to churches and his letters to officials and ecclesiastics, reveals a ruler who is far from being the inveterate enemy of churchmen and of church privileges.

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.

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.

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.

Chaos reigns – at least in the historiography of the Raj. It was once the consensus among historians that British imperial authority in the Indian subcontinent was secure for at least the century-and-a-half before the Second World War. Recently, however, this narrative has drawn a range of challenges. Prominently, Mark Condos and Jon Wilson have held that British imperial authority was chronically insecure. In their view, the irrational anxiety of generations of British officials produced a chaotic administration with minimal social purchase or ideological coherence. Instead of a confident state capable of acting as it chose, these historians have limned a psychologically embattled one incapable of acting except in the abstract, small scale, or short term. Their bold revision succeeds in dispelling the aura of indomitability that has often surrounded the Raj, and in directing attention to its overlooked discontents and weaknesses. Yet their characterization of the British regime as constantly and pervasively anxious is more an article of faith than a conclusion warranted by evidence. Nor do they explain how, if the regime suffered from permanent ‘chaos’ or ‘insecurity’, it managed to survive for some two hundred years. At the heart of Condos's and Wilson's approach is an effort to bypass texts that results, instead, in misreading them. It is largely by re-emphasizing rigorous textual methods, therefore, that Durba Ghosh offers a compelling alternative approach to the history of state vulnerability and disorder.

For imperial Britain, it has often been stated, the introduction and maintenance of the rule of law was a cardinal responsibility and indeed the great achievement of empire. But this is a view that has also been strongly challenged. For example, it has been argued that often at times of crisis, maintaining the rule of law collided with the primary responsibility of the colonial state to secure social order, with the state then turning to emergency measures, forsaking the rule of law and legal process. In the early 1930s, the colonial state in Burma faced a major rebellion, and indeed emergency measures were introduced to try the large number of rebels captured. However, this article, drawing on a substantial collection of files created by the trials and the appeals that arose from them, argues that, within that emergency regime, long-established legal processes were retained to a striking degree. In fact, the article concludes, at a time of severe challenge to the colonial order, maintaining the rule of law and legal process became still more critical in the colonial mind, for were it to be forsaken, those charged with running the colonial state would be forced to question its – and their – very purpose.

Conservatism claims to be a philosophy of common sense and everyday experience, in which sensation takes priority over reason. This article asks how this was understood by both Conservative thinkers and grassroots members in mid-twentieth-century England, and how it sat alongside other ways of understanding the feelings and experiences of ordinary people, in a period in which these came to be regarded as a privileged form of political authority. The article shows that the Conservative everyday was rooted in individual sensory experiences, but always underpinned by the collective evocation of reverence, majesty, and awe. It traces understandings of the everyday and the awesome through political texts and grassroots publications, showing that the tension between them is what gives Conservatism its distinctive character. This is conceptualized in Burkean terms as the beautiful and the sublime. The latter guarantees order, hierarchy, and allegiance, while the former works to soften and socialize power – making it seem a matter of custom and common sense. The article suggests that this combination enabled Conservatism to adapt to the challenges of mass democracy but became ever harder to sustain in the emotional culture of post-war England, when feelings became a marker of personal authenticity, rather than cultural authority.

Why people trust is a question that has preoccupied scholars across many disciplines. Historical explorations of trust abound, but we know relatively little about the workings of trust in the history of investment. Despite becoming increasingly mediated and institutionalized in the nineteenth century, the market for stocks and shares remained local and embedded in personal relations to a significant extent. This created a complex trust environment in which old and new forms of trust co-existed. Investors sought information from the press, but they also relied upon friends to help them navigate the market. Rather than studying trust in the aggregate, this article argues that focusing on the particular allows us to appreciate trust as an emotional and ultimately imaginative process depending as much on affective stories as rational calculation. To this end, it takes the case of a Bath clergyman and workhouse schools inspector, James Clutterbuck, who solicited investments from a wide network of friends and colleagues in the 1880s and 1890s. By capturing the complex interplay of friendship, emotions, and narrative in the formation of trust, the article offers a window onto everyday financial life in late Victorian provincial England.

Through an examination of the women's suffrage movement, this article reassesses the place of petitioning within late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British political culture. While critical of their Victorian predecessors’ reliance on petitions, the Edwardian women's suffrage movement did not abandon petitioning, but reinvented it. Rather than presenting a polarized view of relations between suffragettes and suffragists, the article shows how both operated on a spectrum of direct action politics through petitioning. Militants and constitutionalists pioneered new, although different, modes of petitioning that underpinned broader repertoires of popular politics, adapting this venerable practice to a nascent mass democracy. The article then situates suffrage campaigners’ reinvention of petitioning within a broader political context. The apparent decline of petitioning, long noted by scholars, is reframed as the waning of the classic model of mass petitioning parliament associated with Victorian pressure groups. The early twentieth century was a crucial period for the reshaping of petitioning as a tool for political participation and expression through myriad subscriptional forms, rather than primarily through the medium of parliamentary petitions.

Beginning in 1689, England was struck by not one but three economic shocks. First, the war against France – Europe's greatest military power – attracted swarms of hostile warships and privateers that heavily damaged English maritime trade, while military expenses also led to a doubling of the tax burden. Second, wartime conditions and government mismanagement sparked a currency crisis in 1695–7 that halted much domestic commerce and caused a run on the recently founded Bank of England. Third, William III's reign brought rapid inflation in the cost of the necessities of life, especially food and fuel, which resulted in prolonged widespread hunger from 1693 onwards. Yet, these hardships have rarely received more than a passing mention in political histories of the Glorious Revolution and do not fit easily into the narratives of economic expansion in the later Stuart period. Close analysis of these ‘hard times’ demonstrates the limits of histories that emphasize long-term developments over short-term crises. Using evidence from a wide range of local and national archives, this article shows the impact of these shocks on the lives of ordinary people.

This article explores the relationships between ritual, material culture, and political authority in early modern Japan by focusing on the Japanese tea ceremony, a highly formalized socio-cultural activity elaborated from the customs related to the consumption of powdered green tea. The article analyses one of the Tokugawa Shogunate's annual processions, the so-called, ‘Travelling of the Shogun's Tea Jar’ – a ritual developed around the Shogunate's acquisition of its annual stocks of tea – which was formalized as one of the official annual events in the early seventeenth century. It argues that the tea ceremony became a part of routine business in the Tokugawa Shogunate and continued to perform its customary functions in supporting military elite's political life. In turn, the tea ceremony was authorized by shoguns and domain lords through public rituals and regular consumption. Consequently, the tea ceremonial practice was institutionalized in the shogunal administrations, creating a class of tea professionals and generating networks of tea providers. Moreover, the practice of tea was embedded in the everyday life of the warrior elite, both at the national and regional levels, until the final fall of the Tokugawa Shogunate in 1868.

Despite the well-established historiography examining the South African war's impact upon British society, little attention has been paid to the plight of British soldiers’ families or to the charitable efforts mobilized to maintain them in the absence of adequate state support. This article, focusing on the key charity in the field, the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Families Association (SSFA), examines the SSFA's wartime policies and considers how the Association's actions influenced subsequent state policy-making. It explores the motivations and attitudes of its middle-class, mostly female, volunteers, on whose sustained commitment the work of the SSFA depended. In analysing the sources of the SSFA's funding, it considers how class and regionality shaped public giving to patriotic philanthropy. Finally, it investigates how perceptions of soldiers’ wives and mechanisms for their support in the First World War were affected by the South African war experience. Overall, the article aims both to demonstrate the importance of philanthropic aid to soldiers’ families in understanding the domestic impact of this imperial war, and to trace the longer-term effects on the development of policies towards servicemen's dependants.

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.

In this historiographical review, I analyse recent works on the history of economic growth and provide a starting point for thinking about how this literature fits together as a discrete field of research. The questions being asked in these texts are relatively new, and as of yet no attempt has been made to identify the major themes that are driving this research. In putting these works into dialogue with each other, across the disciplinary boundaries of history, ecology, anthropology, economics, and political science, we can see that a new subfield of academic inquiry is emerging. Driven by concerns over climate change and rising economic inequality, this new research aims to understand the obsession with economic growth that has shaped so much of our contemporary world.

White Jamaicans developed a drinking culture that drew on British precedents, but which mutated in the tropics into a form of sociability different from how sociability operated in mid-eighteenth Enlightenment Europe, where civility was a much-aspired-to norm. In this article, I use works by eighteenth-century social commentators on Jamaica – Edward Long and especially J. B. Moreton – to explore how white Jamaicans developed a form of sociability which in Long was praised as showing Jamaicans as a generous and hospitable people but which in Moreton was described, more accurately, as a distinctive and unattractive form of debauchery, oriented around excessive drinking and sexual exploitation of enslaved women and free women of colour. The overwhelming importance of slavery in Jamaica accentuated the trends towards a debauched version of hospitality that stressed white male pleasure over everything else as a central animating value in society.