This article examines the pioneering yet largely forgotten magazine Hitavadi, the first Telugu Christian monthly magazine and the earliest Telugu monthly journal. Founded in 1862 by Rev. John Edmund Sharkey, Hitavadi played a crucial role in shaping the intellectual, religious and social discourse in the Telugu-speaking regions of colonial India. Despite its significance, the history of the magazine has remained elusive due to the disappearance of most issues from public libraries and archives. The scarcity of issues reflects the fragility of nineteenth-century print preservation, making this article the first detailed attempt to reconstruct the legacy of Hitavadi. Through its vernacular focus, Hitavadi blended Christian teachings with secular knowledge, addressing gender reform, education and social transformation. It was not merely a missionary tool but a platform for intellectual engagement, connecting local concerns with global ideas. This study explores the role of the magazine in constructing a Telugu public sphere and contributing to the broader Protestant mission of literacy and moral reform. In doing so, it sheds light on the dynamics of colonial print culture, vernacular journalism, and the challenges of recovering lost archival material.

Many historians continue to regard the killing of prisoners and potential prisoners on the battlefield as having been an absolute exception during the Great War, something that was ‘episodic’ and happened only ‘in isolated cases’. One reason for this assessment might be the fact that the subject has rarely been examined empirically. This article is the first study directly to compare the actions of the British and the Canadians, the Empire’s two largest armies on the western front. Drawing on a wide range of primary source material, including, for the first time, unit war diaries and after-action reports, this article reveals that documentary evidence exists for scores of separate instances of prisoner killing by British and Canadian troops deployed against German forces between August 1914 and November 1918, with the number of dead ranging from individual enemy soldiers to several hundred victims at once. Examples are recorded of prisoner killing by enlisted men, NCOs and officers, acting either in groups or alone, and furthermore of officers at platoon, battalion, regimental and even corps level either encouraging prisoner killing or issuing explicit ‘take no prisoners’ orders. The level of acceptance that commanders showed for these practices, the openness with which soldiers discussed them in their letters home to mothers, sisters and wives, and the almost complete absence of any disciplinary action against the perpetrators indicate that – on some level – they were regarded as legitimate.

This article explores the hitherto understudied development of long-distance telephony in early 20th century China. It first explores the development of long-distance telephony before 1927 when it first appeared in China and was developed by foreign actors, the Qing government and various warlord regimes. The article then turns to the Nanjing Decade (1927-1937) and compares the efforts of the Nationalist government in building long-distance telephone infrastructure with those of the Guangdong provincial government and other regional regimes. The article uses the case of long-distance telephony to make two larger arguments about state-building in Republican China (1912-1949). First, it brings in telecommunications development as a major element of state-building of both central and regional regimes. Second, building on recent work by scholars of Chinese Republican-era state-building, it emphasizes the importance of studying state-building from the vantage point of both central and regional regimes in Republican China. Additionally, the article demonstrates the value of an infrastructural approach to the study of political competition and formation in China during the Republican era.

Lightning-related accidents were relatively frequent among age-of-sail seafarers, due to tall ships’ exposure and prominence above the sea. Yet lightning remains largely neglected in the historiography on sailors’ experiences. Examining a range of contemporary medical and philosophical literature, shipboard surgeons’ journals, operational correspondence and seamen’s memoirs, this article argues that lightning strikes created unique moments of epistemological and social crisis aboard naval ships. With its awesome multi-sensorial manifestations, divine symbolism and catastrophic and erratic effects on human bodies, lightning loomed large in many seafarers’ consciousness, as a powerful source of panic and trauma. At the same time, despite contemporary developments in natural philosophical understandings of electricity, surgeons’ training on how to treat these injuries remained limited. As a result, lightning could substantially affect naval shipboard relations between officers and ‘common’ seamen, creating challenges to the former’s authority and mobilising a range of competing emotions and knowledges. Considering lightning illustrates the fruitfulness of looking at uncommon but devastating types of injury, for historians interested in medical authority and in the doctor–patient relationship. It also helps us to start sketching accounts of seafaring bodies, health and maritime medical and religious cultures that give the sky its due place alongside the water.

British left-wing politics does not know what to think about mothers. In left-wing women’s movements, motherhood has been recognised as essential and difficult; necessary for future revolutions, not least in raising future revolutionaries. In less radical circles, it has been understood as a crucial contribution to the functioning of society, often forming the basis of women’s claims to citizenship and maternalist forms of politics. On the other hand, motherhood has been seen as a ‘natural’ function of women and a private responsibility, rather than a public good or a collective act which needs comprehensive state support. The family, in this reading, is a rather conservative force, better left to social reactionaries. Mothering has added additional hurdles to the gendered obstacles women already face in pursuing politics as activists or elected representatives. Perhaps because of this, many mothers in politics have sought to downplay or distance themselves from their roles as mothers, emphasising instead their contributions as workers and activists who can be fully committed to the left cause. Feminist historians have often followed their lead and have tended to write around political mothers’ maternal roles in their scholarship. This roundtable develops themes first explored in our November 2023 workshop, generously supported by the Royal Historical Society.

This Comment derives from a group discussion, generously funded by the Transactions Workshop Grant in 2023, to reflect retrospectively on the nature and degree of interaction among six trailblazing women members of Pakistan’s constituent assembly of 1972–3 (‘women constitution-makers’) within and without the assembly against the backdrop of their life histories. I refer to this group discussion as a ‘collective reflection’ to describe its open-ended structure of snowballing conversations among a small cohort of oral history narrators on the women constitution-makers as well as archivists whose work engages with material on or related to Pakistan’s enduring Constitution of 1973. The objective of the collective reflection was twofold: to provide an interactive mnemonic context for storytelling on the women constitution-makers and their personal and political associations; and to explore the extent to which these six women acted in concert in their constitution-making role on the question of women’s political representation. In relation to the former, the collective reflection yielded valuable observations. With respect to the latter, however, it presented a mixed picture and struck a note of caution in reading strong inferences into documentary archives – in this case, the constituent assembly debates.

This article explores the oral narratives about Samuel Ezekiel Divekar (1730–97), an officer in the British army and a member of the Bene Israel Indian Jewish community, who was released from the prison of Tipu Sultan (1751–99) by the Muslim ruler’s mother, Begum Fatima Fakhr-un-Nisa. These foundational narratives are compared with non-native colonial and other sources, including manuscripts, books, letters and reports located in libraries and archives, in order to see whether there is any synchronicity between the different versions. Of particular interest is the gender dimension in which Divekar’s release from prison was facilitated by a Muslim woman, reminiscent of the biblical story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife in Egypt. Although prominent in the Bene Israel communal narrative, the Begum’s role is reflected neither in colonial records nor in other accounts (notably, in Cochin Jewish letters). Finally, the question of whether Divekar brought a Torah scroll to the Gate of Mercy synagogue (so named to commemorate the compassion of the Begum) established in 1796 in Bombay is discussed. The article demonstrates that the analysis of subaltern oral narratives can enrich our understanding of history by giving a voice to marginalised groups, and focusing on suppressed narratives about gender.