The American publisher Charles Francis Hall had no previous experience with the Arctic before he travelled there in 1860. Yet, Hall transformed himself into an Arctic authority, and was given command of a United States governmental funded expedition in 1870. Hall was only able to undertake his work in the Arctic because of his relationship with Tookoolito and Ipiirvik, a married Inuit couple from Cumberland Sound, and this article examines the structural processes that enabled Hall to rescript their expertise as his own. Tookoolito and Ipiirvik travelled with Hall for over a decade, a relationship where the unequal power-dynamic was continuously transformed and renegotiated in the United States and the Arctic. Drawing on recent historiographical insights on the construction of exploration knowledge in the imperial context, this article interrogates the epistemic and physical violence involved in Hall's erasure of Tookoolito and Ipiirvik's expertise and personhood. In doing so, I highlight the structural function of the erasure of Indigenous knowledge and labour in the production of nineteenth-century European and Euro-American Arctic science, and its enduring influence on the historiography.

Scholars have often considered twentieth-century sovereignty in colonial contexts as increasingly connected to the modern, territorially bounded state, stimulated by the influence of European rule. Yet there remained more malleable and amorphous sovereign configurations well into the twentieth century. Focusing on the case of Indore, a ‘minor’ state in late colonial central India, this article reveals the ongoing dynamism of ḍakait (‘bandits’) within such configurations. By approaching the state as a disaggregated entity, it captures how such communities held complex reciprocal relationships with local state representatives. These interactions challenge older histories, both in South Asia and beyond, that understand banditry primarily as evidence of state evasion or resistance, rather than reflecting an interlocking web of relational and gradated jurisdictions. By exploring connections between ḍakait and the state at the ‘everyday’ level, this article also takes issue with existing emphases on the wider institutional frameworks that classified such communities as ‘criminal tribes’. Such connections could engender local responses that undercut their ethnographic categorization and complicate postcolonial critiques of the essentialization of caste and ‘tribe’ in South Asia. Reconceptualizing sovereignty ultimately provides us with a compelling analytic tool to reconsider wider scholarly axioms relating to colonial knowledge, marginality, and state–society relations.

Was Kim Il-sung's desire to have nuclear weapons the sole reason for North Korea's quest for nuclear power? The answer, I argue, is highly unlikely given that extensive economic considerations played the most fundamental role in North Korea's pursuit of atomic energy from 1945 to 1965. With original, creative research on previously unexamined North Korean publications and Soviet archival materials, I demonstrate how the ‘peaceful’ impetus steered North Korea's early nuclear enterprises in the Cold War period. While previous studies draw only upon circumstantial evidence to argue that North Korea's going nuclear was predestined due to its security concerns, this article revises this teleological assumption by reconstructing historical contexts wherein the two driving factors that formed early North Korea's nuclear programme were mostly emulating how the Soviets harnessed nuclear power for economic gain, and aversion to the Americans’ use of nuclear power for atomic weapons to a lesser degree. That is, North Korea, like other countries in what later would be termed the Global South, sought to master nuclear technology for industrial ends in the first place, which turned out to be economically burdensome to continue, long before September 1965 when its first research reactor went online.

Traditionally, anti-standing army ideology in the 1690s and 1700s has been viewed primarily through an English prism. As a result of the unique contribution of Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, the place of Scotland has also been examined in this regard, particularly in relation to the ‘paper war’ of 1697–9. However, Ireland also loomed larger than has previously been acknowledged within the associated debates. This was evident both in the arguments advanced and in the writers who advanced them. Several individuals with close connections to Ireland – both Anglo-Irish and English Protestants – figured prominently among the anti-standing army writers, including Robert Molesworth, John Trenchard, Sir Francis Brewster, and Henry Maxwell. That they did so requires explanation, given that the army in Ireland offered the minority Protestant ruling elite the greatest security against a Catholic Jacobite rebellion. The involvement of these men in anti-standing army debates also highlights their engagement in an Irish Protestant context with the idea of a Gothic constitution and the extent to which their writings contributed to the post-Glorious Revolution whig canon. Yet the debates also highlight the limitations of such ideology when faced with the question of Irish identity and confessional allegiance, the constitutional relationship with England, and the presence of a standing army in Ireland. One proposed solution to such limitations was political Union.

This article proposes a transition in Western European thinking on slavery by examining the legality of slave jettison and its indemnification in the seventeenth-century Christian Mediterranean and comparing this with the late eighteenth-century Atlantic. Under the law of general average (GA), a shipmaster may legally sacrifice cargo or parts of a vessel to save a maritime venture from peril. GA then mandates that the costs of this sacrifice be shared proportionally between all interested parties. However, the status of human cargo with respect to pre-modern GA remains unclear, beyond the well-known example of the eighteenth-century British slave ship, the Zong. A jettison, a moment of crisis, forces the slave's dual conception as person and property to be definitively resolved. This article uses historical GA records and early modern jurisprudence on human jettison to shed light on the legal conceptualization of the slave in the two contexts. It finds that seventeenth-century jurisprudence generally ruled against slave jettison and that such a jettison could not be indemnified. In some Mediterranean operational contexts, slaves were excluded from GA altogether. To a certain extent, this finding justifies the conceptual divide historians have placed between Atlantic bondage and earlier forms of slavery.

This article examines four Marian histories written by Bohuslav Balbín (1621–88), a Bohemian Jesuit, scholar, and noble, in the second half of the seventeenth century. Assessing the content and form of these works, it argues that Balbín reinterpreted and intellectualized the genre of Marian hagiotopography, expanding the historical sections of his works and conceiving of hagiotopography as historical scholarship. Balbín's unique approach to this genre and his focus on Bohemian, Moravian, and Silesian history allowed him to present his particular vision of the Bohemian composite monarchy, which was influenced by his status as a Jesuit and by his patriotism. Balbín's representation of the inherent unity of the territories which made up the composite state criticized Habsburg policy during and following the Thirty Years’ War. In this way, the article sheds light on the interplay between Catholicism, patriotism, and scholarship in early modern Europe.

This article investigates the complex entanglement of neutrality and displacement in Hong Kong and Macau with a focus on the impact of and responses to an unprecedented influx of refugees during the Second World War. Displaced persons were of central importance in shaping the ambiguous experience of neutrality before Hong Kong's occupation by Japan in late 1941 and until the end of the war in Macau. Building on Elizabeth Sinn's conceptualization of Hong Kong as an ‘in-between place’, this article considers these two foreign-ruled territories as ‘in-between places’ where multi-layered transborder flows developed in an ‘in-between time’ of neutrality. Highlighting similarities and connections between Hong Kong and Macau, it argues that neutrality was shaped by the movement of refugees and that refugees often experienced neutrality differently depending on perceptions of race, class, and nationality. The presence of diverse communities of refugees shaped multiple dimensions of urban life, with colonial concerns for spatial order and social control co-existing with humanitarian co-operation. The discourses and practices around refugees are an important precedent to understanding post-war refugeedom in these territories.

Through focusing on the lives of women, this article examines silences and obfuscations in Samuel Pepys's diary and in the histories we tell about this most famous of Restoration sources. It begins by considering how the ways we read the diary today remain influenced by Pepys's decisions when preserving his papers. While his diary has increasingly been studied for what it reveals about early modern sex and/or women's lives, historians have faced difficulties in assessing and representing this content, partly because of measures devised by Pepys. Knowledge of his methods, together with close reading, can help us attend to what this source omits and elides. Historiography has often followed Pepys's lead when discussing his diary's sexual content, and it has also followed his lead in researching his kin. His father's family has been tracked over generations; meanwhile, basic facts about his mother and her family have remained unknown. The article traces Pepys's maternal kin, comparing new evidence with the diary's representation of social status and kinship networks. Pepys's diary is a vital source on the seventeenth century, but fully exploiting that source requires factoring in Pepys's methods of writing and preservation, and attending to what has gone unwritten.

This article explores the significance to the Irish land question of a controversial issue in late nineteenth-century international political economy – bimetallism. Bimetallists advocated a monetary system that used gold and silver to define currency value rather than gold alone. Archbishop William Walsh's support for bimetallism is analysed to highlight how Ireland provided a case-study that framed this debate. Walsh believed the gold standard deepened an agrarian crisis that drove the Irish land question. He argued that careful and internationally orchestrated reform of the monetary system offered the means for its resolution. Walsh's bimetallist views marked him out as an original thinker within Irish nationalism, and his views were debated and adopted by monetary reformers across Britain, Europe, and the United States where they featured during the 1896 Presidential Election. Walsh's engagement in monetary politics must also be understood within a tradition of Catholic social teaching in which he positioned himself as a critic of financial capitalism. This article contextualizes the Irish land question within wider debates on the role of silver in the global economy and argues that Walsh's monetary thought reveals him to be a more significant international intellectual than his involvement in Irish politics tends to allow.

Civilization discourse hierarchically ordered nation-states and people of different traits, including race and gender, in the Western modern concept of progress. This civilizational ideology of modern nation-states has underpinned narratives of many historical works, including transnational historical studies. This article showcases the ideas and practices of transnationalism that challenged such civilization discourse and pursued a more egalitarian and mutually interdependent vision of the world at the non-state level. This article does so by focusing on the Brotherhood of the New Life, a mixed-race religious agricultural community in late nineteenth-century rural America, and one of its Japanese members, Arai Ōsui, who joined the community after his defeat in Japan's Boshin Civil War. I argue that this non-state transnational perspective illuminates the Brotherhood members’ endeavour to free gender and race – the key conceptual underpinnings of the ideology of civilization – from this very discourse. This article further reveals, through Ōsui, that the community's egalitarian ethos developed to instigate new, anti-imperialist, and anti-hierarchical thoughts and actions in early twentieth-century Japan, in opposition to the state's imperialist endeavour to progress.

In the summer of 1780, anti-Catholic riots led by Lord George Gordon in London left hundreds dead and stretches of the city burnt and destroyed. Eighteen months later, during a tense period in the city's history, London was invaded by brown-tail moth caterpillars. The metropolis and surrounding countryside disappeared behind the tents and nests of the insects, prompting widespread fear of famine and plague. With the memory of the riots still fresh, philanthropists such as Jonas Hanway and entomologists like William Curtis sought to assuage the public's fear, insisting that the brown-tail moth outbreak was part of the normal operations of nature, that the infestation bore no danger to the public, and that efforts to alarm the public or describe them as dangerous were contemptuous. At the same time, the conjurer and philosopher Gustavus Katterfelto, performing in the city, sought to profit from the public agitation, developing spectacles and performances that promised the insects would soon deliver famine, plague, and ruin on the city. This article examines the intersection of scientific authority, public fear, and performance, showing that the outbreak placed tremendous stress on the relationship between scientific authority and security in the metropolis.

Revolution can lead to the complete political and social reconfiguration of a society. Such readjustment is often especially significant amongst the society's elites, as when ancient aristocrats had to converge with a newly emerging bourgeoisie. This article argues that over the course of the nineteenth century there was a steady process of negotiation that saw the evolution of a new form of elite, one defined by a new characteristic: respectability. This change saw successful businessmen, particularly magnates or tycoons, climbing to the top of the social ladder, as the culmination of a process that began in the eighteenth century. To illustrate this thesis, I discuss the case of Spain. I draw upon the lives of a large and diverse range of great Spanish bankers, industrialists, and businessmen. Traditionally, historiography has studied such men individually and from an economic history perspective. Here, a global, cultural approach is adopted. The chronology of the events described is not straightforward. Although the men studied are not all from a single birth cohort or even the same generation, I consider that they lived through the same social processes. The years between 1840 and 1880 were a period of intense industrial and business development in Spain during which modern economic practices were introduced. For the purposes of this article, I first situate the concept of respectability within the Spanish historiographical context, before analysing the discursive strategies that Spanish business magnates used to turn themselves into legitimate members of the county's new social elite. Finally, I study the three main symbolic tools that they employed to demonstrate their respectability and prove their status.

This article examines a niche space: youth clubs created by small voluntary organizations for ‘gifted children’ in 1970s and 1980s Britain. It asks how individualism shaped everyday life and demonstrates how youth culture was much broader than just the permissiveness that dominates the literature. Gifted children are currently missing from accounts of modern Britain, which focus on mainstream educational categories. Yet, including them in our analysis provides new insights into the diversity of youth cultures that existed in these decades. Drawing on new uncatalogued archives, and centrally poetry, letters, and stories from young people themselves, the article shows that conservative and radical visions co-existed. Young people shaped their own culture, subverting and challenging ideas of themselves as distinctive future leaders.

This article explores the engagements of people and various civic organizations, even from the margins of society, with the making of India's constitution during the early stages of its drafting. Using hitherto unstudied archival materials, it examines constitutional visions, demands, conceptions of inclusion, and constitutional proposals, as these were expressed at the time by people outside of the Constituent Assembly. The conventional understanding has been that the constitution was a product of elite consensual decision-making, and that India's nationalist leaders endowed it from above. This article shifts the historical inquiry away from the Constituent Assembly onto the ways the constitution-making process was experienced, related to, and understood from below by ‘We the People’ – those on behalf of whom the constitution would ultimately be enacted. Hence, it constructs a new perspective on the making of India's constitution. In doing so, the article throws light on the significance of people's interactions with the constitution-making process on the nature of India's decolonization, on its successful democratic transition, and on the rooting and endurance of its constitution against many odds.

The publicity of journalism has long been central to anti-corruption politics in the United States. This article explores relations between journalism and corruption in early twentieth-century Chicago and shows how newspapers could be used by corrupt politicians to consolidate and even constitute their power. By examining the three-term mayoralty of William Hale ‘Big Bill’ Thompson, the article considers a range of media strategies, from press-baiting to propaganda and boosterism, that fuelled public controversies about press hypocrisy and limited journalism's anti-corruption potential. Thompson's Chicago sheds light on broader debates about the politics of journalism in capitalist societies with commercial media environments; it also helps illuminate wider histories of corruption in America.

This article examines how rulers of early modern small states attempted to survive and increase their status in the ever-shifting political world of early eighteenth-century Europe. To do so it takes the example of Duke Leopold of Lorraine and his connections with the exiled James Francis Edward Stuart and his court. Like many other small state princes, Leopold was politically dependent upon the decisions of his larger neighbours and his policies were designed to ensure his continued survival and to increase his own prestige. Historians have long acknowledged the relationship between Leopold and James in 1713–15 but they have done little to explore their interactions between 1716 and 1729. In drawing attention to this neglected sequence of encounters, the article highlights their connection to broader and more well-known political affairs in the 1710s and 1720s. It demonstrates how Leopold utilized his connection with the Stuarts as he reacted to a changing political situation in Europe in the years following the Peace of Utrecht. In return, the Stuarts, seeking to achieve their political goals, could rely upon ducal advice and aid. This dynamic suggests that these small but well-connected princes and their diplomatic activities require further consideration when examining international relations.

The article traces a hitherto-neglected form of political obligation, one that resulted from national debt and relied on creditors’ self-interest. Eighteenth-century commentators argued that William III had introduced public borrowing to gain support from the people and to maintain the Revolution Settlement. This claim was first made by tories and became a staple argument of opposition authors. Around the middle of the eighteenth century, this connection between national debt and political allegiance was reassessed. Robert Wallace presented the debt as a price worth paying for the excellent British constitution, David Hume considered it as Britain's last hope to maintain the established order. In the discussions of American independence, the association of national debt with political obligation was used for divergent purposes. While Adam Smith and Richard Price utilized it to argue for a reform of empire, Thomas Paine urged the American provinces to unite under an American national debt. Drawing on authors from various political allegiances in eighteenth-century Britain, the article shows how the same idea about national debt and political obligation could be used for different purposes.

The structuring of time in the early modern period has traditionally been associated with a broad, European-led shift towards ‘accuracy’, and with it connotations of ‘modernity’. Yet, a fuller examination of the temporal world of early modern merchants challenges such a teleology. Taking as its focus the English East India Company (EIC), this article situates concerns for accuracy in the management of time (and with it profit) within a broader spectrum of temporal influences, including seasonal, indigenous, and embodied time. It draws upon the experiences of the merchant Isaac Lawrence (1639–79), whose trade began around the Mediterranean Sea but ended in the service of the EIC in Persia. Like many of his contemporaries in the Company, Lawrence died relatively young and in obscure circumstances; however, the survival of his personal papers through his brother William Lawrence affords vital insights into how time was observed, measured, and felt within mobile early modern lives. Read alongside Company records, Lawrence's experience makes clear the necessity of reading subjective temporalities into historical understandings of time within global frameworks.

In Britain between 1838 and 1858, the Chartist movement demanded the implementation of the ‘Six Points’, a parcel of parliamentary reforms centred on universal male suffrage. Despite the movement's recognized importance, little study has been made into Chartism's attitude towards slavery and abolitionism. This article will provide the first comprehensive study of this topic, from Chartism's origins in the 1830s until its decline in the decade after 1848. It will illustrate that Chartism was influenced by the radical labour component of the ‘Democratic’ coalition that supported President Andrew Jackson. This helped reinforce amongst early Chartists theories that wage labour was more exploitative than chattel slavery, alongside a racist reaction to West Indian emancipation more extreme than has previously been acknowledged. By 1842, however, various changes within the movement helped bring to the fore more consistently anti-slavery and even anti-racist sentiment with Chartist culture, as did growing exposure to American abolitionism, especially that of William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass. The development of the anti-slavery ‘Free Soil’ ideology amongst American labour radicals profoundly influenced the late Chartist position on slavery by inserting abolition into Chartist aspirations for land reform. Consequently, a core component of late Chartism was its own anti-slavery ‘Free Soil’ ideology, which greatly informed pro-Union working-class agitation during the American Civil War.

The nineteenth century represents a formative period for the development of historical consciousness in Britain, with texts and, increasingly, images shaping perceptions of the past. This article examines how Stuart history was interpreted and experienced, through a series of historical genre paintings of King Charles I and his family. It explores how Anthony van Dyck's depiction of politicized domesticity in royal portraiture was revised and reworked in these later images. Reimagining Stuart family life, they extended processes of remembering, enlisting audiences in an active, participatory engagement with the past. Probing temporal, visual, and verbal alignments and connections, the article contributes further dimensions to the understanding of historical representation. It argues that these paintings stirred the viewer's intellectual, emotional, and associative responses to encourage a sense of proximity. Establishing an episodic narrative, they initiated processes of recollection and recognition, they reflected sympathetic historiographies, and they encouraged a shared community with their pictorial protagonists. By so doing, nineteenth-century artists diminished historical distance and fashioned a familiarized past.