‘Theory’ is taken for granted as an object of historical study, especially in relation to the history of political thought, and most historiography proceeds as if little were lost by construing authors such as Aristotle, Machiavelli, and Smith as ‘theorists’. This article argues that the costs are likely to be high, and that in consequence ‘theory’ ought not to be considered a generic category capable of neutrally describing a given piece of thinking from the past. On the one hand, ascribing theoretical argument can obscure the nature of rival idioms for making claims regarding political life, such as biblical criticism, the common law, and ‘office talk’. On the other hand, the evidence suggests that the ‘political theorist’, as an avowed identity, only emerged in Britain late in the eighteenth century, tentatively and under the force of peculiar pressures. It follows that it will rarely be appropriate to use the term before c. 1800, and considerable caution will still be necessary when using the label in the post-1800 period. Abiding by this discipline is likely to lead to new discoveries in what has been a flat terrain of ‘political theory’.

This article uses hundreds of letters written by the families of patients committed to Victorian Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum to provide the first sustained examination of the effects of asylum committal on patients’ individual family members. It shows that, despite what historians have previously suggested, the effect on families was not solely, or even necessarily primarily, economic; it had significant emotional effects, and affected family members’ sense of self and relationships outside the asylum. It also shows that family ties and affective relationships mattered a great deal to working-class Victorians. Some found new ways to give meaning to their relationship with, and the life of, their incarcerated relative, despite the costs this entailed. By taking a new approach – engaging with the history of the family, shifting focus from patients to their individual family members, and considering factors including age, class, gender, change over time, and life stage – this article demonstrates the breadth and depth of the effects of asylum committal, and in doing so provides new and significant insights into the history of the Victorian asylum. It also enriches the history of the family by providing an insight into working-class quotidian lives, bonds, and emotions.

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.

This article examines radical and socialist responses to Malthus's Essay on population, beginning with the response of William Godwin, Malthus's main object of attack, but focusing particularly upon the position adopted by his most important admirer, Robert Owen. The anti-Malthus position was promoted and sustained both by Owen and the subsequent Owenite movement. Owenites stressed both the extent of uncultivated land and the capacity of science to raise the productivity of the soil. The Owenite case, preached weekly in Owenite Halls of Science, and argued by its leading lecturer, John Watts, made a strong impact upon the young Frederick Engels working in Manchester in 1843–4. His denunciation of political economy in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, heavily dependent upon the Owenite position, was what first encouraged Marx to engage with political economy. Marx initially reiterated the position of Engels and the Owenites in maintaining that population increase pressured means of employment rather than means of subsistence, and that competition rather than overpopulation caused economic crises. But in his later work, his main criticism of the Malthusian theory was its false conflation of history and nature.

Based on long-term oral historical research in the Mandara Mountains, this article traces the ways in which memories of slavery have been preserved in songs which are usually not part of the more formal oral historical narratives. It historicizes this process by focusing on the selective memories of different generations as well as on the influence of colonial and post-colonial politics, particularly post-1990 democratic politics in Cameroon. The major change over time is the shift from the shameful memory of slavery to be repressed – or treated only obliquely – to its public claim as a political resource after the democratic transition of the 1990s. In retelling the history of being sold as slaves, the residents of the Mandara Mountains reversed the negative meaning of slavery to use it to celebrate their resistance to Islam and to voice political claims. This new narrative congeals around being kirdi, a new regional and trans-religious identity claimed by Christians and pagans in the mountains.

The Berlin ecclesiastical historian, August Neander (1789–1850), developed a religiously driven conception of history which excited contemporaries across the Protestant world. This article reconstructs the impetus which Neander gave to the creation of a religiously cosmopolitan historical imagination in Germany, Britain, and the United States. At a time when Hegelian and ‘scientific’ models of historical progress foretold a post-Christian future for civilization, Neander's alternative idea of world history, centred on the leavening spread of the invisible church through contrasting forms of Christianity and culture, exercised a powerful sway over Protestant historians everywhere. His universalizing historical philosophy offered an appealing mode of self-understanding to the networks which translated his ideas into new settings. Appearing to afford a mode of securing Protestantism from the twin dangers of sectarianism and unbelief, Neander's ‘unpartisan’ philosophy simultaneously became an important instrument of Protestant nation-building in the hands of the historians drawn towards it. By considering the interaction between universal and national aspirations in the development and dissemination of Neander's historical philosophy, the article examines the practical implications of historical thought, and connections between national and transnational scales of analysis, in modern religious and intellectual history.

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.

The idea of the school museum as an active resource for object-based learning played an important but now neglected part in programmes of educational reform during the closing decades of the nineteenth century and the opening decades of the twentieth. In this article we focus on the role of the Kew Museum of Economic Botany in supplying schools with botanical specimens and artefacts for their own museums during this period, to support a broad variety of curricular agendas, from nature study to geography and beyond. The evidence suggests that this scheme was remarkably popular, with demand among teachers for museum objects outstripping supply, and increasingly being met in other ways. Seen from the perspective of Kew, the distribution of specimens, artefacts, and visual materials to schools was a way of extending the ethos of economic botany into the classroom. For the teachers who requested specimens in large numbers, and the pupils who studied and handled them, however, such objects may have had other meanings and uses. More broadly, we propose new avenues for study that can help us to better appreciate the ways in which museum objects, expertise, and practices moved across professional, institutional, and increasingly global boundaries in this period.

In the early nineteenth century, political economists, politicians, and geologists debated the size and duration of the British coal supply. For mineral Malthusians, the argument about a dwindling supply sharpened anxieties about population pressure, fuel demand, and limited resources. They introduced a new sense of geological limits and long-term obligations into the theology of atonement. But for cornucopian liberals, the shift to a mineral energy regime supplied a powerful refutation to the Malthusian forecast. Inexhaustible coal promised growth without end.

In early modern England, spectral figures were regular visitors to the world of the living and a vibrant variety of beliefs and expectations clustered around these questionable shapes. Yet whilst historians have established the importance of ghosts as cultural resources that were used to articulate a range of contemporary concerns about worldly life, we know less about the social and personal dynamics that underpinned the telling, recording, and circulation of ghost stories at the time. This article therefore focuses on a unique set of manuscript sources relating to apparitions in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England to uncover a different vantage point. Drawing on the life-writing and correspondence of the antiquarian who collected the narratives, it lays bare concerns about familial relations and gender that ghost stories were bound up with. Tracing the way that belief in ghosts functioned at an individual level also allows the recovery of the personal religious sensibilities and spiritual imperatives that sustained and nourished continuing belief in ghosts. This subjective angle demonstrates that ghost stories were closely intertwined with processes of grieving and remembering the dead, and they continued to be associated with theological understandings of the afterlife and the fate of the soul.

This article contends that understandings of race and practices of racial differentiation underwent a significant epistemological shift around the first decades of the twentieth century. It reaches this conclusion via consideration of a dog breeding programme conducted by the statistician and hereditarian theorist Karl Pearson. In 1913, Pearson proclaimed that he, along with his collaborators Edward Nettleship and Charles Usher, had created a ‘new race’ of dog. Notable for its complete absence of hair pigmentation, this race appeared to demonstrate the potential that experimental animal breeding had for imperial policy-making. In differentiating his dogs from the Pekingese spaniels from which they had been produced, Pearson sought to show that ‘foreign’ animals could be made to approximate British racial standards. In Pearson's wake, animal breeding became an increasingly persuasive means by which scientists sought to legitimate racial contentions. By the 1920s, established anthropocentric approaches to human differentiation had begun to be replaced by new, animal-centred techniques and practices. Whereas nineteenth-century conceptions of race had primarily been articulated in relation to the study of human bodies, in the new race of the twentieth century, differentiation would involve study of and experimentation with bodies of all kinds – animal and human.

Among all the paper ephemera surviving from eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain, the humble Methodist ticket has attracted little attention from scholars and collectors. Issued quarterly to members as a testimonial to religious conduct, many still exist, reflecting the sheer quantity produced by 1850, and the significance of keeping practices, where Methodist habits were distinctive. This article explores first the origin and spread of tickets primarily within British Methodism, but also noting its trans-oceanic contexts. Apparently inconsequential objects, they shaped experience and knowledge, illuminating eighteenth-century religious life, female participation, and plebeian agency. Discussion then turns to patterns of saving and memorialization that from the 1740s preserved Methodists’ tickets. Such practices extended the lifecycle of the individual ticket and created the accidents of its survival, giving it new uses as an institutional resource. In recovering the dead, it acquired nostalgic value, but other capacities were lost and forgotten. The ticket's origins, uses, and preservation intersect with major historical and historiographical currents to complicate established narratives of print, urban association, and commerce, and to present alternative understandings of collecting.

This article tracks the shifting contours of John Maynard Keynes's invocation of certain ideas associated with Thomas Robert Malthus, between 1914 and 1937 especially. These ‘Malthusian moments’ in Keynes's work form a triptych. In pre-war thinking about global population dynamics as a Malthusian ‘devil’ threatening national political and economic stability, Keynes found optimism in the thought that modern political economy could be repurposed to avoid the horns of such a dilemma. In the 1920s, he moved to consider the international, and particularly European, responses to both population and to the developing Malthusian ‘devil’ of unemployment. Finally, in the 1930s, Keynes's view became increasingly domestic, focusing on ways that these devilish twin problems could be managed by nation-states organized for prosperity and self-sufficiency. Across these moments, Keynes sought to assert the power of past political and economic ideas to aid in the formulation of present policy, by continuously (if rather loosely) invoking the Malthusian trope of ‘effective demand’.

The French expedition to Mexico from 1862 to 1867 rarely features in accounts of the origins of the Franco-Prussian War or of the liberalization of the French Second Empire in its final years. By contrast, this article uses a range of archival and published sources to argue that the failure of the Mexican expedition was an important factor in the crisis that convulsed French politics in the late 1860s. The legitimacy of the fiscal-military system was undermined, partly because of the burdens that the expedition imposed on the French people. There resulted difficulties over finance and the army, which hindered the Second Empire's ability to confront the Prussian threat and accelerated the emergence of the ‘Liberal Empire’ with the constitutional reforms of 1867–70. Liberalization, though, could not rescue the imperial regime, and the legitimacy crisis of the Second Empire was only resolved by a transition to a parliamentary democracy under the Third Republic.

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.

Republicanism has been one of the most influential political ideologies in modern Irish history; however, it remains conspicuously undertheorized by historians of the revolutionary period. While recent historiography has challenged representations of anti-Treaty Sinn Féin as a mindlessly destructive, anti-democratic force, the extent of ideological and rhetorical continuity linking the Provisional Government formed to assume control of the Free State on 7 January 1922 with the pre-Treaty republican tradition has not been understood. This article rejects the historiographical thesis that the Provisional Government abandoned republican ideas. Drawing from the Cambridge School's contextualist account of republicanism as a polysemic and contingent political language, it highlights the vigorously contested nature of republican thought in the intellectual firmament of revolutionary Sinn Féin and argues that the Free State leadership articulated its vision of politics and society through classical republican concepts of ‘civic virtue’ and the ‘common good’. It is suggested additionally that the colonial dynamics of the Anglo-Irish relationship helped to shape the vision of republican citizenship promoted by an administration possessed of a deep-seated determination to refute historical perceptions of the Irish people as congenitally ‘unfit’ for sovereignty.

The British wrote and read a large quantity of fictional depictions of future wars and invasions in the period between 1871 and 1914, imagining the various ways in which a great war might look before the real conflict broke out. This article outlines the ways in which this form of literature described a British world united across time and space. The stories have traditionally been read as indicative of a societal fear of invasion, of imperial decline, or of the dangers of revolutionary upheaval. The article argues that the stories’ popularity can instead be traced to the way they included their readers in the experience of invasion and conflict, and how they were well suited to the era of modern mass newspapers. The article therefore concludes that earlier interpretations of how readers engaged with such fiction has underestimated how a varied readership could view the stories as entertaining spectacles where they were invited to participate. As such, the article offers a new interpretation of an important literary genre as well as of British pre-war political culture.

Decolonizing history and anthropology is often presented as a theoretical enterprise, through which a more rigorous and inclusive framing of historical precepts will deliver a clearer and less Eurocentric understanding of the past. Yet it is arguably necessary to decouple decolonization from the broader practices of anti-Eurocentric historiography. Via an empirical assessment of the legacy of Hermann Klaatsch, a German anthropologist working on the colonial frontier, this article examines the possibilities and limitations of a decolonizing approach to settler colonial history. The article reflects upon its own study of colonial anthropology and the historical complexity of the repatriation of Indigenous human remains, and suggests that not all anti-Eurocentric interrogations of the colonial past are synonymous with decolonization.

References to Malthus are increasingly evident in narratives of agricultural trends in development discourse at the end of the twentieth century. This article addresses the long roots of Malthusian thinking in formulating public policy, that can be traced across from Malthus's own ideas and to subsequent construction of neo-Malthusianisms in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It deploys the distinction between two approaches to statistical data collection that emerge in Malthus's own time: an ‘open’ system that collects data to identify trends, and a ‘closed’ system that uses data to prove an existing model. The article uses these distinctions in order to demonstrate opposing tendencies in policy-making in both England and India, with particular reference to Indian agriculture. It shows how radical thinking about data collection as an inductive line of enquiry lost out to a deductive approach that regarded data on Indian agriculture as doomed, because of its ‘unimproved’ condition, and highlights three moments where opposing tendencies were important. The article concludes that this turn in thinking about food, land, and people continues to persist in agricultural policy-making in international development circles into the present.