This article offers a new interpretation of the Wallachian revolution of 1848. It places the revolution in its imperial and European contexts and suggests that the course of the revolution cannot be understood without reference to these spheres. The predominantly agrarian principality faced different but commensurate problems to other European states that experienced revolution in 1848. Revolutionary leaders attempted to create a popular political culture in which all citizens, both urban and rural, could participate. This revolutionary community formed the basis of the government's attempts to enter into relations with its Ottoman suzerain and its Russian protector. Far from attempting to subvert the geopolitical order, this article argues that the Wallachians positioned themselves as loyal subjects of the sultan and saw their revolution as a meeting point between the Ottoman Empire and European civilization. The revolution was not a staging post on the road to Romanian unification, but a brief moment when it seemed possible to realize internal regeneration on a European model within an Ottoman imperial framework. But the Europe of 1848 was too unstable for the revolutionaries to succeed. The passing of this moment would lead some to lose faith in both the Ottoman Empire and Europe.

This article explores the changing historical referents that Qing officials used in arguing for the extension of direct governance to the empire's frontier regions from the 1870s to the 1900s. In the 1870s, Shen Baozhen and Zuo Zongtang made the case for a change of governance on Taiwan and in Xinjiang respectively by reference to past Chinese frontier management. However, in the first decade of the twentieth century Cen Chunxuan and Yao Xiguang both referred to the European past, and specifically the history of European colonialism, to argue for reform of frontier policy in Mongolia. I argue that this shift was a result of both the empire's altered political circumstances and a growing belief in the inevitability of an evolutionary fate which awaited nomadic peoples, who were destined to be colonized. Yet this was not a case of Chinese thinkers simply adopting European ideas and perspectives wholesale. The adoption of European historical referents was entangled with Han Chinese perceptions of Mongolian populations which had been carefully cultivated by the Manchu Qing state.

Through a co-ordinated series of publications in the final years of the seventeenth century, a diverse set of commonwealth texts was entrenched into the canon of whig political thought. This article explores that canon through the lens of the history of the book. A key figure in the formation of this canon was the printer and bookseller John Darby. This article reconstructs Darby's role in the commonwealth opposition to the perceived failures of the Williamite revolution. Using bibliographical methods to establish his output, it shows that from the earliest days of the revolution Darby reprinted a broad range of historic whig texts, ranging from works of history and memoir to collections of poems. These texts provided a language, a rationale, and a model for opposition activity. He also manufactured pamphlets that adapted country principles to contemporary political circumstances. By shifting the focus from John Toland to his printer, the article suggests that the canonical whig texts were one part of a much broader and more ambitious programme to establish an historic canon of oppositional literature.

The launch of the East India Company in 1599 relied on the engagement of an investing public. Despite this, little is known about how and why ordinary individual investors chose to invest in the corporation or what institutional frameworks supported them. While the later ‘financial revolution’ would radically alter the relationship between the state, investors, and financial organizations, this process does not adequately explain the earlier development of an investing public. Using a newly developed dataset of members’ familial, neighbourhood, civic, and business connections, this article reconstructs the social networks of East India Company investors in 1599. This analysis reveals that the company was formulated within an intensely interconnected investment environment – linkages that were used to distribute information and provide access to seemingly illiquid markets. Social networks played a key role in how people decided about where, when, with whom, and how much to invest during the expansion of investment opportunities in early modern England.

The nineteenth century witnessed a major expansion in the construction of public works including canals, roads, and railways across the British empire. The question that colonial governments faced during the nineteenth century was on how to finance public works. Focusing specifically on irrigation works and the rivers of southern India, this article shows how different experiments were attempted, including raising capital and labour from local communities as well as corporate investment in irrigation works through London capital markets. The article argues that by the latter part of the nineteenth century, a definitive answer had emerged, i.e. irrigation projects on rivers would be financed through state debt. An enormous body of scholarship in Britain and India debated the relationship between public works and public debt. This article rethinks this scholarship as a technological and environmental history. The article argues that colonial modes of raising capital were dependent on speculating on Indian rivers. Historiography wise, in contrast to scholarship which takes for granted the role of the state in building large dams, it suggests that the emergence of the state as the builder of large dams was part of a more fundamental relationship between rivers, technology, and colonial capital that emerged in the nineteenth century.

This article argues for the understanding of ‘utopia’ as a cultural marker whose appearance in history is functional to the a posteriori chronologization (or typification) of historical time. I develop this argument via a comparative analysis of utopia between China and Europe. Utopia is a marker of modernity: the coinage of the word wutuobang (‘utopia’) in Chinese around 1895 is analogous and complementary to More's invention of Utopia in 1516, in that both represent attempts at the conceptualizations of displaced imaginaries, encounters with radical forms of otherness – the European ‘discovery’ of the ‘New World’ during the Renaissance on the one hand, and early modern China's own ‘Westphalian’ refashioning on the other. In fact, a steady stream of utopian conjecturing seems to mark the latter: from the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom borne out of the Opium wars, via the utopian tendencies of late Qing fiction in the works of literati such as Li Ruzhen, Biheguan Zhuren, Lu Shi'e, Wu Jianren, Xiaoran Yusheng, and Xu Zhiyan, to the reformer Kang Youwei's monumental treatise Datong shu. Altogether, these sketches of utopia provide an imaginary counterpoint to the co-produced regimes of historicity whose genealogies are being traced in this issue.

The Comité de l'Afrique française, founded in 1890, is often regarded as the epitome of colonial nationalism. On closer examination, however, the Comité and its signature policy, the Chad plan, can be shown to have acted as instruments of choice for financial and commercial lobbies with particular interests in the Congo. The Chad plan and its successor and complement, the Upper Nile policy, were primarily intended to advance the interests of King Leopold and his French sympathizers. The unavoidable clash with British strategic and commercial interests in the region that ensued helped to unleash the forces of nationalism and led, ineluctably, to the Fashoda crisis and the conquest of Chad.

The Congress system that arose in Europe after the Napoleonic Wars facilitated European imperial expansionism throughout the nineteenth century. Yet, the ties between that system and expansionism have rarely been unwound and studied in detail. Taking the French invasion of Algiers in 1830 as a case in point, this article shows how the Congress system's shared discourses of security and threat perceptions as well as its common practices of concerted diplomacy fostered European imperialism in North Africa. The article emphasizes obscured continuities and understudied multilateral diplomatic efforts. It uncovers the ways in which the post-1815 system decisively shaped the aims, justifications, and execution of the French war against Algiers. European, North African, and Ottoman actors each furthered or contested the idea that the invasion was part of an international legacy dating back to the Congress of Vienna, related to the concerted repression of North African ‘Barbary piracy’. In bringing these connections to light, it becomes apparent that the post-1815 international system cannot be understood in isolation from nineteenth-century imperialism.

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.

Since Bodin, scholars have been debating whether sovereignty is indivisible or rather decentred, multiple, and shared. This article adds to practice-oriented conceptualizations of sovereignty, which acknowledge the existence of jurisdictional pluralism in nineteenth-century state-building. Borrowing from imperial history, it contrasts the nominal supremacy of the Prussian crown – as embodied by the monarchical principle – with the residual sovereign rights of potentates that had lost their lands in Germany's successive wars of unification. The possession of ‘bare sovereignty’ allowed such mediatized princes and exiled rulers to maintain a presence in the lives of their former subjects. They did so by exercising privileges and functions of royalty which left vague in whose name was being governed. The Hohenzollerns for their part struggled (and to a certain extent proved unwilling) to assert exclusive dominion because right of conquest-based justifications had no firm standing in international law, alienated segments of domestic public opinion, and did not necessarily serve the interests of the state. The article argues, ultimately, that the resulting negotiation and contestation of monarchical sovereignty in Prussia speaks to global themes of state-building through state destruction in the Age of Empire.

This article explores how the Japanese translator-historian Murakami Naojirō created an understanding of the Japanese past that established seventeenth-century Japanese actors as equivalents to western European and overseas Chinese merchants. Creating a historical geography of the Southern Seas and the Pacific, Murakami celebrated Japan's expansionism, not only by stressing the seventeenth-century Japanese presence in South-east Asia, but also, more subtly, by identifying the existence of a progressive spirit in the Japanese individuals involved in it. His narrative strategy included implicit comparisons with the European age of expansion, whose protagonists in South-east Asia relied on the networks and services of both Japanese wakō (‘pirates’) and more complex actors such as the red seal merchant Yamada Nagamasa. The article is a case study for Japan's intellectual imperialism of the 1910s–1940s, which closely intertwined popular discourse and academic history.

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.

Across monsoon Asia, salt is of such vital necessity that controlling its production or supply has historically been connected to the establishment and expression of political authority. On the one hand, rulers maintained the allegiance of their subjects by ensuring their access to salt of suitable price and sufficient quantity. On the other hand, denying rebels their salt was a strategy of conquest and pacification, while the necessity of salt meant it could reliably be taxed to raise state finances. This article first sets out this connection of salt and sovereignty, then examining it in the context of colonial Burma, a province of British India from its annexation until its ‘divorce’ in 1935 (effected in 1937), and thus subject to the Government of India's salt monopoly. Focusing on salt brings into view two aspects of the state (while also permitting analysis of ‘Upper Burma’, which remains rather marginal in the scholarly literature). First, the everyday state and quotidian practices constitutive of its sovereignty, which was negotiated and contested where indigenes were able to exploit the chinks in the state's administrative capacity and its knowledge deficits. Second, in turn, the lumpy topography of state power. The state not only failed to restrict salt production to the extent it desired (with the intention that indigenes would rely on imported salt, whose supply was easier to control and thus tax), but conceded to a highly complex fiscal administration, the variegations in which reflected the uneven distribution in state power – thicker in the delta and thinnest in the uplands.

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.

The traceless disappearance of the Holy Roman Empire from the map and the minds of nineteenth-century Germany was until recently a pervasive historiographical trope. Revisionist scholarship has since uncovered the empire's modern afterlife as a model for federative political order and archetype of the greater German (großdeutsche) nation. This article identifies a different kind of legacy, by examining the empire's role in shaping the constitutional configuration of an individual successor state – Prussia. In a debate over Prussia's unwritten historical constitution unfolding in the 1840s, narratives of the empire's constitutional history became the basis on which the juridical structure of the kingdom's sovereignty was negotiated by jurists and political actors. These included, among others, King Frederick William IV and his brother William, the leaders of the German historical school of jurisprudence Savigny and Eichhorn, and the Prussian statesman Kamptz. The article contrasts two rival interpretations of the imperial legacy: a teleological narrative focusing on the evolution of state sovereignty within the imperial constitution and a genealogical narrative highlighting the origins of sovereignty as a hereditary fiefdom. In doing so, it questions the rigid distinction that historians have drawn between the empire and the statehood that replaced it in 1806.

One of the most famous public figures in later nineteenth-century Australia was Giuseppe Garibaldi. The man known as the ‘hero of two worlds’ – Europe and South America – was in fact also the hero of a third. The nature of Garibaldi's iconic status in the Australian colonies was complex, multi-faceted, and fractured and it occurred at a moment when the notion of celebrity was being transformed amid what was effectively a fundamental democratization of the public sphere in the Anglophone world. As such, it provides an important opportunity to ponder the implications of what has been called ‘intimacy at a distance’.

This article examines conflict between farmers and elephants in the Addo region in 1910s–1930s South Africa to explore the porosity of the concepts ‘wild’, ‘tame’, and ‘domestic’, and their relationship to race, degeneration, nature conservation, and colonialism. In the 1910s, settler farmers indicted the ‘Addo Elephants’, as ‘vicious’ thieves who raided crops and ‘hunted’ farmers. This view conflicted with a widespread perception of elephants as docile, sagacious, and worthy of protection. Seeking to reconcile these views, bureaucrats were divided between exterminating the animals, creating a game reserve, and drawing upon the expertise of Indian mahouts to domesticate them. Ultimately, all three options were attempted: the population was decimated by hunter Phillip Jacobus Pretorius, an elephant reserve was created, the animals were tamed to ‘lose their fear of man’ and fed oranges. Despite the presence of tame elephants and artificial feeding, the reserve was publicized as a natural habitat, and a window onto the prehistoric. This was not paradoxical but provokes a need to rethink the relationship between wildness, tameness, and domesticity. These concepts were not implicitly opposed but existed on a spectrum paralleling imperialist hierarchies of civilization, race, and evolution, upon which tame elephants could still be considered wild.

In the last twenty years, the involvement of women's organizations in the campaign for Irish independence has featured prominently in publications and public discourse. But this article asks, did women serve the cause for independence in other ways? This article focuses on the careers of Irish women who worked for the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs in the period 1919–22, pressing Ireland's case for autonomy from British rule. The work of these early women abroad has been largely ignored by historians who have concentrated on the diplomatic activities of men in this period. This article first argues that these women who worked towards achieving independence for Ireland through the use of diplomacy and propaganda merit attention, but secondly they can be considered providing further insights into how women's work for the cause of Irish freedom did not warrant them a place in the diplomatic service in the new Irish Free State.

European empires experienced widespread anti-colonial rebellions during the First World War. These rebellions occurred for many different reasons, reflecting the diversity of context and history across colonial societies in Africa and Asia. Religion naturally played a strong role in most of the anti-colonial rebellions during the First World War, most prominently Islam. This article looks at the role Islam played in two key anti-colonial rebellions in North and West Africa: the rebellions in Batna, Algeria, and the Kaocen War in Niger, respectively. The article examines how Islam was instrumentalized by rebels, imperial collaborators, and French officers and administrators to further their own ends. Rebels called upon Islam to help inspire anti-colonial movements, to bind together diverse populations, and to contextualize their actions in wider socio-political conflicts. Imperial collaborators likewise called on religious authority to assist with European imperial recruitment efforts. French officers and administrators used Islam both as a justification and a target for collective punishment and repression after the rebellions were put down from 1917. This repression is still under-studied in a period usually portrayed as evidencing broad imperial harmony, rather than violent extraction and oppression.

Many scholars claim that the world has had many ‘renaissances’ in its long history: they advocate what we could call the ‘multiple renaissances’ thesis. In this article, I will focus on the history of this idea. Where and when did the ‘multiple renaissances’ thesis emerge? What intellectual exchanges and historical conditions made it possible? To answer these questions, I will first draw up a short genealogy of the idea that the European/Italian Renaissance is a ‘culture’ or a ‘social type’; then, I will show that such typological use of the renaissance made it possible to apply this concept to different historical and social configurations, not only within, but also outside Europe; finally, through an analysis of the relation between Arnold Toynbee and Hu Shi, I will show that the uses of the renaissance category in the non-European world, especially in East Asia, contributed to shaping the ‘multiple renaissances’ thesis and, through it, to redefining the perception of the renaissance in Europe proper.