Review of Untied Kingdom: A Global History of the End of Britain, by Stuart Ward (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022)

In their focus on queer sexuality, letters 77 and 78 in Augustine's letter collection are unusual. Same-sex acts and sexual violence are mostly tightly controlled and deliberately erased in antiquity. This article looks again at the case of sexual abuse preserved in letters 77 and 78 between the monk Spes and the presbyter Bonifatius, applying modern critical understandings of gendered violence, victimisation and harm to reach beyond previous critical approaches that have seen the exceptionalism of the case as a reason not to engage with it. This research takes a new critical approach, re-situating the incident within the wider context of gendered violence in Augustine's letters. It engages with the case of sexual abuse solely between men intrinsically, and as a uniquely available point of comparison with sexual violence perpetrated by men against women. It examines how sexual violence is gendered, in Augustine's response, in the adjudication of the case and in the behaviours and expectations of both victim and perpetrator. Whilst working outwards from absence and silence is a central historiographical approach to gender and violence in the past, this article reaches new understandings by turning towards evidence that is usually siloed and working it back into a framework of sexual violence in Augustine's letters.

This article argues for an essentially political definition of empire with sovereignty at its core, which recognises that British assertions of sovereignty were multiple, mutually contradictory and thus, taken together, incoherent. Tracing the history of conflict between different archetypes of sovereign authority, we argue that imperial crises occurred when empire's different ideas were forced to speak to one another, during world war, for example. The emphasis here on sovereignty and incoherence contrasts with conceptions of the history of the British empire which assert to the contrary that empire was a coherent entity. Such coherence can, we argue, only be maintained by treating empire as a metaphor for broader conceptions of power and thus collapsing the history of empire into other totalising meta-concepts such as global capitalism or Western cultural dominance. Recognition of the incoherence of imperial sovereignty offers new, more nuanced, readings of central concerns in the literature such as imperial violence and the economics of empire.

Debates on the proportionality of political representation surfaced repeatedly, and in similar forms, from the English to the American and French Revolutions. They contributed to shaping those revolutions’ outcomes and, through them, to the emergence of modern democracy – especially so as they were linked up with voting rights: demands to make seats in assemblies more numerically proportionate to electorates – in other words, to weigh all votes equally – implied the equal weight of individual votes and thus also entailed calls for more equal standards regarding the right to vote. This did not yet signify voting rights for all: only specific categories of individuals – as a rule, male and propertied – were considered, even by the most ‘enlightened’ writers, to be politically entitled. Nevertheless, it was only one step from here to envisage voting rights for all individuals – or at least, for the time being, for all male individuals – as can also be seen in all three revolutions. If claims for more proportional and equal representation showed their full impact only on the American and French Revolutions, finally, this was due to the intervening emergence of statistics (or ‘political arithmetic’) as a tool of reflection and debate that gave numbers and calculations increasing persuasive power.

How did work shape people's identity before industrial capitalism? It is a question that early modernists have never really got to grips with. Thanks to decades of research by social and cultural historians, we now have a much better understanding of how people in the past saw themselves and labelled those around them. But until recently scholars of early modern England have had surprisingly little to say about how a person's working life – their occupation, trade, vocation or livelihood – influenced their social identity. This essay is therefore an attempt to synthesise recent research on the subject into a more explicit historiographical intervention. Early modernists need to broaden their research to consider ‘working identities’ as a whole, rather than merely the narrower concept of ‘occupational identities’. By exploring how work influenced a person's self-image and social role, we can reshape our understanding of broader social relations in this period and challenge some of the ‘grand narratives’ of early modern social and economic change.

This article explores popular British ideas about Asia from the mid-seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century, using largely neglected sources: geography books. Thanks to their popularity and focus on conventional knowledge, this genre of texts – geographical reference works, gazetteers, encyclopaedias and schoolbooks – allows us to glimpse the commonplace mentalities of the period, and consequently to understand how Asia was perceived by ordinary literate Britons and not just by prominent intellectuals. Geography books typically regard Asia as a ‘place of origin’ for the cultural and societal achievements of Europe. They also assume that Asia possesses plentiful natural resources and is thus ripe for economic exploitation. At the same time, however, Asia is understood to be degenerate and corrupt, usually due to a combination of climactic decay, religious failings and government mismanagement. Asia is thus alien and entirely distinct from Europe, and, simultaneously, it is intimately connected to Europe's rise and future imperial progress. British geography books can tell us a great deal about how ordinary literate people understood Asian peoples and places in the formative age of British empire-building.

In the past decade, scholars of the here-and-now have (re)discovered the concept of enclosure, applying it with considerable zeal and in a bewildering variety of situations: from the securitisation of the Internet, and patenting genes, to attempts to privatise urban ‘public’ spaces, the English ‘enclosure story’ is presented as a given, a narrative that is set in stone. One critical aspect of this account is that enclosure was exported to Britain's overseas colonies in a one-way process. This paper shows, however, that from the early sixteenth century – and insistently so from the late eighteenth century – arguments for the enclosure of English commons and wastes were framed using techniques and discourses deployed overseas: the languages and practices of colonialism. Commons and wastes, so the paper argues, were not just increasingly seen as empty spaces, but the peoples that inhabited them were written as if they were uncivilised and unable to manage the land. Further, arguments for the enclosure of wastes were made as an alternative to Britain's overseas imperialism. The paper traces a variety of debates and proposals that collectively constitute a coherent body of ‘internal colonial’ thought.

The oral performance of history has been common to many societies from Herodotus and the histories of Beowulf, to the griots of West Africa. The lecture in Western history emerged from these histories of orality, with its name showing the close connection in its origins to reading, and to the lecturer's expertise in that domain. From this starting point, lectures grew to be associated with frameworks of academic authority, as well as markers of community and shared academic, religious and civic identity. From the late eighteenth century onwards, the role of the historical lecture widened to involve public education, and was also later incorporated into political contestations by anticolonial orators such as Maya Angelou, Amílcar Cabral and Fidel Castro. In the twenty-first century, the rise of transnational technology has seen the increasing atomisation of the lecture into a space of performative and disembodied information. As technologies change, in the future the knowledge and thematic being explored in historical lectures may change. What is embraced may prove to be demonstration of mastery of the commercial technology involved in a lecture's delivery, as much as the exposition related to the lecture or reading from which knowledge and academic communities historically have built.

This article explores one of the main arenas in which change came over the role of the monarchy as part of Europe's transition to a modern political system: diplomacy. Traditionally, there had been a dual aspect to monarchy that merged dynastic and state interests. The creation of modern constitutional political systems in the nineteenth century forced European crowns to modify their prerogatives and effective power, sharing this with elected politicians. This included foreign policy, which thenceforward pursued national interests that did not always agree with dynastic ones. Focusing on the Spanish branch of the house of Bourbon, I examine this involved and controversial process. Firstly, I trace the breaking of the Bourbon alliance which had been dominant in the eighteenth century and its unsettled reconfiguration into the worldwide system created by the Congress of Vienna. I then discuss the complex imposition of the nation-state interest over the dynastic one in a time of deep ideological division – between constitutional and absolutist systems – and traumatic revolutions that overthrew Bourbon monarchs. From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, the liberal and nationalist wave forced transnational family ties to succumb to national interest.

Although most accounts of Christian encounters with Muslims in the period between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries pay particular attention to conflict and violence, a body of hagiographical texts emanating from monastic circles points to a different kind of approach. In this article I foreground three examples of Italo-Greek saints’ lives from the tenth and early eleventh centuries in which the saints in question treat Muslims whom they encounter as potential converts, and explain to them the tenets of Christian theology. These texts are examined as precursors of the Cluniac ‘dossier’ compiled about Abbot Maiolus's encounter with Muslims in the 990s. Two of the three saints’ lives were translated from Greek into Latin, one in the late eleventh, the other in the late twelfth century. The motives for and circumstances of these translations are discussed in light of growing hostility towards the Islamic world during the period of the crusades.

This article explores how popular historical knowledge and understanding can be deepened by collaboration between historians, creative artists, and editors, publishers and those who support and develop the creative arts. Historical research into enslaved people who escaped in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century London reveals much about their enslavers but very little about the enslaved people themselves. However, archival gaps and silences can be imaginatively filled, and those who engage with the historically inspired creative work can explore the nexus of historical research and artistic creativity. In this article the authors (a historian and two members of the creative industry) detail how their ‘Runaways London’ collaboration developed, and how the work of poets and artists, premised on extensive historical research, deepens our understanding of race and slavery in British history, achieving something that is beyond the reach of historical research and writing alone.

This article offers a new approach to early modern global history, dubbed (dis)entangled history as a way to combine the conventional focus on the history of connections with a necessary appreciation of the elements of disconnection and disintegration. To exemplify this approach, it offers a case study related to the history of cannibalism as both a disputed anthropophagic practice and a cultural reference point across the early modern world. Through a rich multilingual and multimedia source base, we trace how the idea of Indigenous Tapuya endo-cannibalism in Brazil travelled across the Atlantic through Europe and Africa to East Asia. The idea of Tapuya cannibalism crossed some linguistic borders, stopped at others and interacted unevenly with long-standing Ottoman, Polish, West African, Islamic and Chinese ideas about ‘cannibal countries’, of which it was just one more example. This trajectory challenges the historiographical consensus that early modern ideas about cannibalism were centred on the Atlantic world. By tracing how one particular discourse did and did not travel around the globe, this article offers not just a theoretical statement, but a ‘fleshed out’ and concrete approach to writing about intermittent connectedness during the period 1500–1800.

Portraits and biographies play a central role in engaging non-specialists with the past, and hence invite careful scrutiny. Major enterprises, such as the National Portrait Gallery in London and the Dictionary of National Biography, in both its original and Oxford versions, provide rich examples for reflecting on public history and on the relationships between types of writing about past times. These issues relate to literature as well as to history, given the prominence of biographies of literary figures, and the role of literary scholars as authors of biographies. Using materials concerning the artist John Collier (1850–1934), the publisher George Smith (1824–1901) and the surgeon James Paget (1814–1899), this article examines the relationships between portraits and biographies and the types of insight they afford. Colin Matthew's innovation of including portraits in the Oxford Dictionary, together with his own scholarship on William Gladstone (1809–1898), including his portraits, provide the basis for suggestions about the role of work when representing lives, including those of historians. Public history can only benefit from research practices being discussed in an accessible manner, as attempted here.

In the mid-sixteenth century, there were many parallels between the political cultures of Poland-Lithuania and the kingdoms of the British Isles, as thinkers inspired by the ideals of Renaissance civic humanism challenged traditional currents of thought. Across the British Isles and Poland-Lithuania there were strong native traditions asserting the liberties of communities of the realm and the need to check unbridled royal authority through parliamentary assemblies. As the Reformation swept across the British Isles and Poland-Lithuania, traditional claims concerning the right to resist tyrannical authority were bolstered. Finally, in 1603, Scotland and England formed a loose political union as Poland and Lithuania had formed a loose political union in 1386, although it was not until 1707 that England and Scotland followed the example of the 1569 Lublin Union, when Poland and Lithuania established the first parliamentary union in European history. Despite these parallels, the fates of these composite polities were very different, and their political cultures diverged substantially. This article considers the idea of the Renaissance republic in Poland-Lithuania and the British Isles. It suggests why their roads diverged, and asks what made all the difference.

What effect did British imperialism in Myanmar have on frogs? And, given that the lives of these small amphibian creatures were rarely ever recorded or preserved in archival collections, how might we find out? Sceptical readers may also wish to take a step back and ask, why should historians even care about their lives? These are unusual questions for a historian to confront, but they are occasioned by the deepening conversation between ecology and history. This paper delves into the ecological impact of colonial rule in Myanmar through the lives of Burmese elephants and the creatures that they lived alongside. In it I argue that the concepts of ‘accumulation’ and ‘cascade’ are useful for enabling historians to apprehend the full extent of the impact of imperialism on the lives of animals.

The ‘right of public meeting’ has historically been a key demand of extra-parliamentary political movements in England. This paper examines how public assembly came to be perceived as a legally protected right, and how national and local authorities debated and policed political meetings. Whereas previous histories have suggested that a ‘liberal governance’ dominated urban government during the nineteenth century, this paper offers an alternative framework for understanding the relationship between people and the state. It points to rights paradoxes, whereby the right of free passage and to ‘air and recreation’ often conflicted with the demand for the right of political meeting in challenges to use of public spaces. Local authorities sought to defend the rights of property against political movements by using the common law offences of obstruction and ‘nuisance’. By the first half of the twentieth century, new threats of militant tactics and racial harassment by political groups necessitated specific public order legislation. Though twentieth-century legislation sought to protect certain types of assembly and protest marches, the implementation and policing of public order was spatially discriminatory, and the right of public meeting was left unresolved.

The text of John Heywood's wedding ballad for Mary I and Philip of Spain, A Balade specifienge partly the maner, has been underestimated for many years. It is criticised for the poor quality of its poetry and lambasted for its tortured imagery. Instead, this article re-evaluates the ballad as a highly effective popular song intended to spread propaganda defending the queen's Spanish match. It argues that the song performed an excellent job of addressing complex constitutional issues through a quintessentially popular genre, while at the same time successfully overcoming the problem of fitting new words to a pre-existing tune. Furthermore, it is proposed that the song was deliberately set to the melody from Henry VIII's ballad ‘Pastyme with good companye’ and, by drawing on the latest research into cultures of creativity and examining what resonances the tune would have had for its listeners, it suggests that the potential multivalency of the melody was crucially important for understanding the song and its reception.

This paper returns to one of the germinal texts of nineteenth-century Arab political thought, Butrus al-Bustani's Nafir Suriyya (‘The Clarion of Syria’). A series of broadsides published between September 1860 and April 1861, these reflected on the confessional violence that had rent apart Mount Lebanon and Damascus in mid-1860. As scholars have suggested, Bustani – now regarded as one of the pre-eminent thinkers of the nineteenth-century Arab nahda, or ‘awakening’ – here offered a new vision of Syrian patriotism, which formed part of a longer reflection on political subjectivity, faith, and civilisation. But, this paper argues, these texts can also be read as reflections on the changing workings of empire: on the imperial ruler's duties and attributes and his subjects’ obligations and rights; on the relationship between state and population and capital and province; on imperial administrative reform; and on the dangers foreign intervention posed to Ottoman sovereignty. Drawing on the languages of Ottoman reform and ethical statecraft, as well as on imperial comparisons, Bustani argued against the autonomy some counselled for Mount Lebanon and for wholesale integration with the Ottoman state. These texts offer grounds for methodological reflection and for writing Ottoman Arab thought into broader histories of imperial political thought.

The principle that church buildings constitute sacred spaces, set apart from the secular world and its laws, is one of the most enduring legacies of medieval Christianity in the present day. When and how church buildings came to be defined as sacred has consequently received a good deal of attention from modern scholars. What happened when that status was compromised, and ecclesiastical spaces were polluted by acts of violence, like the murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral? This paper investigates the history of rites for the reconciliation of holy places violated by the shedding of blood, homicide or other public acts of ‘filthiness’ which followed instances such as Becket's murder. I first identify the late tenth and early eleventh centuries in England as crucial to the development of this rite, before asking why English bishops began to pay attention to rites of reconciliation in the years around 1000 ce. This paper thus offers a fresh perspective on current understandings of ecclesiastical responses to violence in these years, the history of which has long been dominated by monastic evidence from west Frankia and Flanders. At the same time, it reveals the potential of liturgical rites to offer new insights into medieval society.

This paper considers the Royal Historical Society (RHS)'s ‘Race, Ethnicity & Equality in UK History’ report published in 2018. The report contained the findings of a survey sent to staff and students working or studying in History higher education in the United Kingdom. In this paper, I reflect on the various findings of the report related to staff and student numbers, the attainment gap between white and Black and Ethnic Minority students, the curriculum, and racial harassment in History within universities. The RHS report emerged out of the work done by a number of organisations championing race and equality in the sector over decades. By connecting the work of RHS to these earlier initiatives it is possible to map a broader societal change in the historical sector to address historic inequalities, racialised disadvantage and structural exclusion. The RHS and institutions such as Runnymede Trust, the Institute of Historical Research, and Leading Routes are championing greater racial and ethnic equality which reflects broader political, economic and cultural transformations taking place in Britain. In this paper, I show how the RHS is part of an important conversation in foregrounding racial and ethnic equality in the historical profession to the inevitable benefit of History higher education.