This address examines the ‘Old Corruption’ of Georgian Britain from the perspective of diplomacy and material culture in Delhi in the era of the East India Company. Its focus is the scandal that surrounded the sacking of Sir Edward Colebrooke, the Delhi Resident, during the reign of the penultimate Mughal emperor, Akbar II. Exploring the gendered, highly sexualised material politics of Company diplomacy in north India reveals narratives of agency, negotiation and commensurability that interpretations focused on liberal, Anglicist ideologies obscure. Dynastic politics were integral to both British and Indian elites in the nineteenth century. The Colebrooke scandal illuminates both the tenacity and the dynamic evolution of the family as a base of power in the context of nineteenth-century British imperialism.

We are still working out how to do global history, especially for pre-modern periods. How do we achieve the necessary shift in scale without falling back on standard definitions of categories like states, ethnicity, religion, urbanisation, when these are increasingly challenged at the specialist level? This article sets out an approach that could help pre-modern historians ‘going global’ to challenge claims that ‘there is no alternative’ to modern frameworks such as neoliberal economics, and especially the nation-state. Useful alternative techniques include thinking in layers rather than blocks, not seeking narrative arcs, and not using words like ‘China’. These methods are illustrated with analysis of three Liao dynasty (907–1125) cities and three comparators from neighbouring states to the north, south and east of the Liao. The intention is to disrupt the re-emergence in the new venue of global history of essentially national narratives, using the opportunities presented by pre-modern worlds before nation-states to free us from teleological concepts. This article argues that there is indeed an alternative to the putative precursors of modern nation-states, and offers a framework for doing without them.

We might flatter ourselves that the idea of a spin doctor is rather a modern one, but I wonder. Obviously enough, powerful rulers have always had their coterie of close advisers. But in the medieval Muslim world there is one outstanding example of something rather more than this: the team of three counsellors that Saladin assembled who watched over his interests and, crucially, his reputation, with unflagging devotion for decades. Two of them were, by any standard, intellectual stars who could have turned their multifarious talents in many directions but who chose rather to dedicate them to a man whom they not only admired but also loved. One of them, the poet ‘Imad al-Din al-Isfahani, was a Persian with a truly awesome command of Arabic, a gift which he delighted to exhibit in and out of season. His pyrotechnic performances, solid with metaphor, saturated with puns, wordplay, alliteration, assonance and verbal acrobatics, are such a nightmare to understand that generations of Western Orientalists – and indeed Arab scholars too, for that matter – have recoiled from the task of editing certain of his works. Sometimes in his writings manner eclipses matter, but he is also capable of reaching heights of solemn eloquence, as in his paean of triumph at the recapture of Jerusalem, or his threnody on the death of Saladin. The other, the Qadi al-Fadil – his title means ‘The Excellent Judge’ – though only a somewhat pedestrian poet, was an acknowledged master of the epistolary prose that was de rigueur in Islamic chanceries, and for centuries his letters were regarded as models of their genre. His appearance, hunchbacked and skeletal, made him the butt of the court's satirical poets, but his political skills were beyond reproach, and indeed in his master's absence he governed Egypt for a time. It has been said that biography adds an extra terror to death, but in that respect Saladin need not have worried. For Ibn Shaddad, the third member of this distinguished triumvirate, who joined the team after the fall of Jerusalem but thereafter never left Saladin's side and therefore saw him in good times and bad, was a plain man with a plain style. But he rose to the occasion and crafted a biography of his hero Saladin that lets the facts speak for themselves. He has no time for stale panegyric; instead, his admiration for Saladin shines through his account at every turn, and it is he who laid the foundations for his master's posthumous celebrity. The lecture will explore the impact of these three men on the Saladin legend, which transformed a minor Kurdish warlord into an emblem of chivalry, piety and military glory which captured the hearts and the imaginations of Muslims for centuries to come – and still does.

While there have been growing calls for historians to listen to the past, there are also significant barriers to integrating music in particular into broader historical practice. This article reflects on both the gains and difficulties of this integration, moving from an interrogation of the category of music to three case studies. These concern musical terms, compositional practices and cultures from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, revisiting some key debates in musicology: first, the highly charged language of sweetness deployed in the fifteenth century; second, connections discerned in nineteenth-century music history between medieval polyphony and contemporary attitudes towards time and authority; and, third, debate over the anti-Jewish implications of Handel's music, which we approach through his Dixit Dominus and a history of psalm interpretation stretching back to late antiquity. Through these case studies, we suggest the contribution of music to necessarily interdisciplinary fields including the study of temporality and emotions, but also explore how a historical hermeneutic with a long pedigree – ‘diversity of times’ (diversitas temporum) – might help to reframe arguments about musical interpretation. The article concludes by arguing that the very difficulty and slipperiness of music as a source can encourage properly reflective historical practice.

This article uses a combination of court and Kirk (Church of Scotland) session records, and several sets of letters written by the mothers of illegitimate children to explore how such children were loved and cared for in eighteenth-century Scotland. It argues that legitimacy, as well as class and gender, mattered in the love and care that children received. Illegitimacy also had an impact on who mothered, fracturing the bond between the biological mother and child, for a mothering given by other mothers, including wet-nurses, grandparents and, later, employers. Its conclusion is that how a child was mothered, the love and care they received, were products of a child's positioning – gender, class, legitimacy, parentage – in the world. Love was a social product, framed and shaped by and through the social, economic and legal networks in which the child was positioned. Whilst the legitimate child, both in law and social practice, might have expected its care to be framed primarily through the nuclear family, the bastard child belonged, as the law suggested, to the community, requiring its mothering to be dispersed.

In 1779, Thomas Jefferson proposed the use of nose-cutting to punish women convicted of specific offences, and the use of retaliation (lex talionis) for anyone who deliberately disfigured another person. These punishments were intended to replace the death penalty for these crimes, and as such formed part of Jefferson's attempt to rationalise the Virginian law code in line with eighteenth-century reform principles. Jefferson drew on British laws from the Anglo-Saxon period to the Coventry Act for his bill, but his proposals contrast strikingly with British movements away from corporal marking as punishment used against their own citizens. This article examines the origins and fates of equivalent crimes and punishments in the law codes Jefferson examined, and compares the legal and wider connotations of facial appearance and disfigurement that made these proposals coherent in Virginia when they had long ceased elsewhere. Tracing examples and discussion of these intersecting cases will greatly increase our understanding of Jefferson's proposals, and the relationships between facial difference, stigma and disability in eighteenth-century America.

‘I was a few years back a slave on your property of Houton Tower, and as a Brown woman was fancied by a Mr Tumming unto who Mr Thomas James sold me.’ Thus begins Mary Williamson's letter, which for decades sat unexamined in an attic in Scotland until a history student became interested in her family's papers, and showed it to Diana Paton. In this article, Paton uses the letter to reflect on the history and historiography of ‘Brown’ women like Mary Williamson in Jamaica and other Atlantic slave societies. Mary Williamson's letter offers a rare perspective on the sexual encounters between white men and brown women that were pervasive in Atlantic slave societies. Yet its primary focus is on the greater importance of ties of place and family – particularly of relations between sisters – in a context in which the ‘severity’ of slavery was increasing. Mary Williamson's letter is a single and thus-far not formally archived trace in a broader archive of Atlantic slavery dominated by material left by slaveholders and government officials. Paton asks what the possibilities and limits of such a document may be for generating knowledge about the lives and experiences of those who were born into slavery.

In India the 1918–19 influenza pandemic cost at least twelve million lives, more than in any other country; it caused widespread suffering and disrupted the economy and infrastructure. Yet, despite this, and in contrast to the growing literature on recovering the ‘forgotten’ pandemic in other countries, remarkably little was recorded about the epidemic in India at the time or has appeared in the subsequent historiography. An absence of visual evidence is indicative of a more general paucity of contemporary material and first-hand testimony. In seeking to explain this absence, it is argued that, while India was exposed to influenza as a global event and to the effects of its involvement in the Great War, the influenza episode needs to be more fully understood in terms of local conditions. The impact of the disease was overshadowed by the prior encounter with bubonic plague, by military recruitment and the war, and by food shortages and price rises that pushed India to the brink of famine. Subsumed within a dominant narrative of political unrest and economic discontent, the epidemic found scant expression in official documentation, public debate and/or even private correspondence.

In the history of post-war womanhood in Britain, women's self-help organisations are credited with little significance save for ‘helping mothers to do their work more happily’. This paper suggests that the do-it-yourself impetus of the 1960s and 1970s should be regarded as integral to understanding how millions of women negotiated a route towards personal growth and autonomy. Organisations like the National Housewives’ Register, the National Childbirth Trust and the Pre-School Playgroups Association emerged from the grass roots in response to the conundrum faced by women who experienced dissatisfaction and frustration in their domestic role. I argue that these organisations offered thousands of women the opportunity for self-development, self-confidence and independence and that far from being insufficiently critical of dominant models of care, women's self-help operating at the level of the everyday was to be one of the foundations of what would become, by the 1970s, the widespread feminist transformation of women's lives.

The communist regimes of Eastern Europe carried a particular set of assumptions about the way past, present and future related to one another. In the case of the German Democratic Republic (the GDR), these assumptions manifested themselves in official language and propaganda as a defence of the regime's dynamic and forward-looking historicity against the ‘ahistorical’ and ‘nostalgic’ modes of understanding that supposedly typified the historical consciousness of its West German adversary. By this view, the German Federal Republic – and the capitalist West more generally – lacked both a meaningful past and a meaningful future. This article investigates how the East German regime articulated its historicity as a direct expression of its state identity. In particular, it examines how it sought to rationalise newly emerging historical and cultural practices in the GDR within the framework of a modern and progressive socialist historicity, and how it deployed these as an argument against the ‘nostalgic’ practices of the Federal Republic.

This paper is concerned with East Africans’ perceptions of the intersection between their own, highly charged and contested, local histories, and the global past, as well as their place in it. The two case studies on which the paper is based – Eritrea and Uganda – have much in common in terms of recent history, not least in their experience of prolonged violence, and thus taken together they elucidate distinctive characteristics. Yet they also illustrate broader phenomena. On one level, particular interpretations of local history – both the deeper, precolonial past and the more recent, twentieth-century past – are utilised to critique the flow of global history, as well as the impositions of globalisation, and to emphasise the bitter experience of marginality and lack of agency. At the same time, the global past – conceptualised as the evolution of an intrusive, imperialist, hypocritical global order imposed by foreigners, usually Western in provenance – is seen as omnipresent and pervasive, and thus the arguments made around marginality serve to remind us, paradoxically, how central these communities are (or should be) to the framing of global history.

The Chernobyl disaster of 1986 had international repercussions, as nuclear fallout, and accompanying fear, traversed well beyond the borders of the Soviet Union. In Britain, raised radioactivity levels caused some upland regions, such as north-west Wales, to become subject to restrictions on the sale of livestock, which created upheaval for the agricultural community, leading to an uncharacteristic outburst of protest from farmers who were unhappy with the government's response to the crisis. Concurrently, nuclear sceptics in Wales attempted to politicise the tragedy in the Ukraine to underline the dangers of nuclear power, dovetailing the accident with the looming perils of Wales's domestic nuclear industry. In exploring these issues, this paper contributes to a growing body of work on ‘British nuclear cultures’, moving away from its generally urban focus by examining a Welsh rural case study. This approach also circumvents the well-trodden historiographical narrative surrounding the politics of nuclear warfare by highlighting debates arising from civil nuclear power. Crucially, the work demonstrates how looking at the modern Welsh past through the prism of a transnational nuclear event such as the Chernobyl catastrophe shows that the history of twentieth-century Wales is enriched by moving beyond the stereotypically ‘Welsh’ industrial shibboleths of the south Wales coalfield and the slate mines of north Wales.

This article explores some of the ways in which historians can, and should, engage with current debates about the environment. What we often think of as ‘natural’ habitats in Britain – heaths, ancient woodland, meadows and the like – are largely anthropogenic in character, and much of our most familiar wildlife, from rabbits to poppies, are alien introductions. The environments we cherish are neither natural nor timeless, but are enmeshed in human histories: even the kinds of tree most commonly found in the countryside are the consequence of human choice. The ways in which the environment was shaped by past management systems – to produce fuel, as much as food – are briefly explored; and the rise of ‘rewilding’ as a fashionable approach to nature conservation is examined, including its practical and philosophical limitations and its potential impacts on the conservation of cultural landscapes.