In the autumn of 1913, Japanese radical journalist Ishikawa Sanshirō (1876–1956) fled Japan for Europe on a self-imposed exile that would last more than seven years. While there, he mingled with English social philosopher Edward Carpenter (1844–1929) and his circle of friends, and resided for several years with the family of French anarchist Paul Reclus (1858–1941), nephew and professional heir of famed nineteenth-century geographer Elisée Reclus (1830–1905). Ishikawa’s travels contributed to the development of an intricate web of non-state, non-institutional links, fuelling an exchange of knowledge that spanned four decades. His personal trajectory highlights the significance of individual-based activism to the early twentieth-century global spread of anarchism. The experience of exile is also a valuable opportunity to explore how chance encounters, emotional ties, and subjective politics shape ideas of social change in tension with ideological consistency.

Labour history has been revitalized by the global turn. It has encouraged historians to look beyond national frameworks to explore issues relating to mobility and inter-territorial connection. This article, while accepting the benefits of a global approach, argues that historians should not lose sight of the factors that constrain mobility or lead to the collapse of cross-border exchanges. Singapore's dockworkers were at the forefront of the island's anti-colonial campaigns of the 1940s and 1950s. Inspired by anti-colonial movements elsewhere in the world, dockworkers drew on international discourses relating to self-determination to place their local struggles in a global context. This activism, however, coincided with the emergence of countervailing forces, including the universalization of the nation-state and the rise of state-led developmentalism. In this context, dockworkers’ internationalism came to be regarded as a threat to state sovereignty and development. As a result, once Singapore achieved independence the ruling People's Action Party encouraged dockworkers to abandon their globalized outlook in the name of modernization and nation building. Global history, then, should be as much about the rise of the national as the transnational, and the loss of connection as the forging of inter-territorial networks.

The recent bicentennial commemorations of the Napoleonic empire have witnessed a proliferation of new studies. Scholars now possess much more sophisticated conceptual tools than in past decades with which to gauge the problems faced by French imperial administrators throughout Europe. Well-trodden concepts, like centre/periphery or collaboration/resistance, have been reinvigorated by more sophisticated understandings of how rulers and ruled interacted in the early nineteenth century. This article argues that, while much progress has been made in understanding problems of ‘resistance’, there is more to be said about the other side of the same coin, namely: ‘collaboration’. Using the micro/local history of a scandal in Napoleonic Bologna, this article wishes to reaffirm that collaboration was an active agent that shaped, and often shook, the French imperial project. The biggest problem remained that, despite ‘good intentions’, collaborators sometimes simply did not collaborate with each other. After all, imperial clients were determined to benefit from the experience of empire. The centre was often submerged by local petty squabbles. This article will use a specific micro-history in Bologna to highlight the extent to which Napoleonic empire builders had to thread a fine line between the impracticalities of direct control and the dangers of ‘going native’.

Street vending was a common feature in many towns in early modern Europe. However, peddlers and hawkers often operated outside the official framework, lacking permission from governments and guilds. The impact of their informal status has hitherto not featured very extensively in historical studies. This article assesses the impact of policing of street vendors by looking at familiar source materials in a new way. Rather than solely focusing on those people who were ultimately punished, this article investigates the full process of policing and prosecution of street traders in eighteenth-century Dutch towns. It exposes that apart from those receiving a formal punishment, many more traders could suffer from policing activities, and that particular groups of street vendors were more vulnerable than others due to the specific dynamics of local power relations. As such, this article provides new insights into policing and social control, while also offering wider lessons for our understanding of the relationship between the formal and informal economy in pre-industrial Europe.

This article addresses the social, cultural, and political history of backstreet abortion in post-war Britain, focusing on the murders of Beryl Evans and her daughter Geraldine, at Ten Rillington Place in 1949. It shows how the commonplace connection of John Christie to abortion and Beryl Evan's death was not a given in the wider public, legal, political, and forensic imagination of the time, reflecting the multi-layered and shifting meanings of abortion from the date of the original trials in the late 1940s and 1950s, through the subsequent judicial and literary reinvestigations of the case in the 1960s, to its cinematic interpretation in the 1970s. Exploring the language of abortion used in these different contexts, the article reveals changes in the gendering of abortionists, the increasing power and presence of abortion activists and other social reformers, the changing representation of working-class women and men, and the increasing critique of the practice of backstreet abortion. The case is also made for a kind of societal blind spot on abortion at the time of both the Evans and Christie trials; in particular, a reluctance to come to terms with the concept of the male abortionist, which distorted the criminal investigations and the trials themselves. Only when public acceptance for legalizing abortion grew in the more liberal climate of the 1960s and beyond did a revisionist understanding of the murder of Beryl Evans, in which abortion came to be positioned as a central element, gain a sustained hearing.

This article examines the role played by patient organizations in the making of the patient as consumer during Margaret Thatcher's term as prime minster. It details a crucial moment in the reconstitution of the relationship between state and citizen, as universal entitlements to welfare gave way to individualistic rights to, and choice of, services. Though patients had been regarded as consumers prior to this period, it was during the 1980s that the patient-consumer moved from the margins to centre-stage. By examining the activities of patient groups around three key themes – the provision of information, the development of patients' rights, and the notion of patient choice – this article shows that ideas about what it meant to be a patient-consumer came initially from patient groups. Through their work in these areas, patient groups built up a kind of patient consumerism that was concerned with the needs of the wider population, as well as representing demands made by individual patient-consumers. By the end of the 1980s, however, the patient-consumer was reconfigured by the Conservative government, and emphasis moved from the collective needs of patient-consumers to the rights of individuals within increasingly marketized services. This development thus raises questions not only about who speaks for the consumer, but also about the relationship between citizenship and consumption in contemporary Britain.