In October 1688, and again in May 1689, Mary Cudmore claimed to have encountered a ‘spectre’ in her employers’ house in Cork city. The great interest the story aroused among the townspeople is indicated in letters from prominent inhabitants and an examination of Mary by the bishop of Cork and Ross. They allow us access into the homes and heads of the people of Cork at a point when significant challenges were being mounted to the Protestant authorities’ dominance of the city, as the War of the Two Kings loomed, and as memories of other conflicts stirred. As observers weighed questions of scruple and certainty, and balanced concerns about imposture and creditworthiness, we also glimpse shifts in supernatural belief and contemporary debates about the construction of proof and truth. That anything of Mary’s experiences has survived is remarkable, given the loss of most of the contents of the Dublin Public Record Office in 1922. In the context of ongoing deliberate and negligent destruction of archives, this article thus also argues for consideration of and consideration to partial and phantom histories.

According to some of the past half-century’s most influential critics of liberalism, John Locke is the pivotal subverter of the pre-modern ethical tradition. Locke’s view of nature and of human nature, the story goes, divorced ethics from natural teleology and so set off an inevitable spiral downward into moral dissolution. This story about Locke remains influential even though the last fifty years of Locke scholarship have brought a cascade of studies treating Locke as operating within the tradition of Reformed natural law. These studies, in part because they embrace a distorted view of Locke’s conception of the person, have failed to address satisfactorily the crux of the story told by the critics of liberalism. This article corrects that distortion and demonstrates how natural teleology operates within Locke’s ethics. I show how Locke sought to identify the teleological ordering of human beings to the supreme good by developing a relational conception of the person, analysing the human being as embedded in and defined by a web of relationships including neighbour and God. The result is a Locke far more in continuity with pre-modern ethical approaches than has hitherto been realized, one who sought to preserve natural teleology for the modern world.

This article explores how writers, predominantly adhering to a variety of different Christian denominations but also including Jewish writers, discussed religion and the body in letters throughout the long eighteenth century. It draws on a corpus of over 2,500 familiar letters written by men and women of different denominations between 1675 and 1820. That these letters were not chosen because of their religious content makes them a good ‘test’ of the role of faith in everyday understandings of the body. This article underscores the continued centrality of religious discourse and devotional practice in eighteenth-century everyday life. Our research finds that religion was a commonplace register deployed when discussing bodily matters throughout the long eighteenth century. Significantly, this was the case for individuals who otherwise made scant reference to their faith. Discussion of the physical body encouraged recourse to providence, a public discussion of doctrine, and the shared expression of devotion. The ongoing force of religion in people’s lives was thus intimately tied to their embodied experiences. Letters not only expressed but actively maintained this widely shared religious framework for understanding the body.

A significant paradigm shift in the examination of China’s engagement with the maritime world has taken place over the past decade. The conventional image of the Qing dynasty in the long eighteenth century as being merely land-orientated has now become obsolete. Historians are no longer satisfied with this stereotype and have put aside the conception that the Qing only realized the importance of strategic marine governance after the First Opium War. In view of this historiographical turn, I seek to deepen our understanding of the Great Qing in relation to the sea. By focusing on a series of sea charts, alongside some relevant palace papers, from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, I will argue that the Qing’s process of locating and charting those offshore islands was an essential, indicative, and demonstrative step for the central authority to project its imperial power onto the waters off the coast of China long before the arrival of Western gunboats in the age of global rivalry.

This article offers a spatial examination of entrepreneurial philanthropy at Cromford, Quarry Bank, and Saltaire mills during the industrial revolution. It argues that entrepreneurial philanthropy at these mills, with its new social relations, was influenced by both market competition and philanthropy, to the extent that active welfare provision was dependent on profitable enterprise and creation of wealth. It demonstrates that the extent and nature of philanthropy intended, implemented, and experienced at each of these entrepreneurial projects was determined by site-specific factors with unique effects in space and time. The article builds on existing research into the socially transformative impact of the industrial revolution by developing the concept of philanthropic space to enable a fresh assessment of the relationship between capital and welfare. It suggests that, within these communities, the development of philanthropic space addressed some of the causes and effects of discontent of the working classes associated with the ‘condition-of-England question’. In particular, the discipline of education became an increasingly important component of both enhanced philanthropic development by owners and the experience of workers, offering opportunities for self-improvement. At the same time, discipline and control were ostensibly paradoxical within, yet established and essential features of, philanthropic space.

Fifty years ago, the infamous bank robbery and ensuing hostage crisis that took place in a Stockholm bank gave rise to the so-called ‘Stockholm syndrome’. Though never recognized as a valid medical diagnosis, the (allegedly) pathological relationship between kidnapper and hostage has become an omnipresent media phenomenon that inspires movies and television series to this day. However, this forced bond was not always seen as problematic. The years between 1860 and 1910 witnessed the rise of kidnappings in the Mediterranean world (Southern Italy, Greece, the Ottoman Balkan region, and Morocco) involving English, American, and European hostages. Today, we know about these incidents from autobiographical narratives by the former captives. They painted a surprisingly favourable picture of their captors – and found enthusiastic audiences for their stories. Looking at the interplay of feelings, coercion, and empowerment, the article opens up a new perspective on the history of emotions that brings both victims and perpetrators into the picture.

The intricacies of modern compensation procedures that value human life, injury, and property are often overlooked, despite growing demands for reparations and justice following state violence. This article historicizes the legal structures of modern compensation, arguing that the advent of imperial rule was characterized not only by the extraction of material resources and labour, but also by the discriminatory construction and implementation of imperial law, which sought to protect European life, wealth, and property. By focusing on one of the most notorious episodes of violence in British imperial and modern South Asian history – the atrocities committed by British officials in Punjab (1919), including the Jallianwalla Bagh massacre – this article underscores how British officials penalized protests and freedom struggles by legalizing indemnities, taxes, and fines to compensate European families. In contrast, colonial officials grossly undervalued the claims and payments of Indian subjects killed or maimed during state violence, if they did at all. Furthermore, this article reveals how imperial state compensation, managed in relative privacy and buried in legal proceduralism, was rooted in legal structures of intersectional racialized inequality, and political concerns that valued the longevity of imperialism, rather than a meaningful gesture of justice and redress.

Over the past two decades, historians have become increasingly fascinated by the question of what enabled the emergence of a stable model of democracy in post-war Western Europe, characterized by the persistence of pre-war elites and top-down forms of decision-making. This article reveals the importance of the British occupations during and after the Second World War in fostering this model of democracy. It does so by comparing and weaving together British occupation strategies in Germany and Italy between 1943 and 1949. Based on a novel examination of archival sources, it demonstrates that British ruling strategies influenced the form of democracy that emerged in these two states. As such, the article reveals the centrality of ‘indirect rule’ practices and their multifaceted impact. Building on imperial precedents, the occupations were primarily run through pre-existing local elites who commanded authority and influence amongst the population. The article argues that this choice explains why the British produced, first, functioning occupation regimes and, subsequently, contributed to the emergence of remarkably stable democracies. At the same time, however, this ruling strategy aided the creation of political regimes that were elite-led and that strongly limited popular participation, leaving many democratic aspirations unfulfilled.

Between 1958 and 1973, hijackings between Cuba and the US surged, prompting Cuban officials in the early 1960s to propose an extradition agreement for hijackers. However, the US, leveraging its superpower status, dismissed these initiatives, viewing hijackers as political asylum seekers rather than criminals. By the late 1960s, as hijackings escalated from the US to Cuba, the American approach shifted, seeking a bilateral agreement to address air piracy, only to be rebuffed by Cuba, which refused to accept the US’s categorization of specific hijackers as political asylum seekers while classifying others as criminals. Meanwhile, the US pressed its extradition stance through international bodies like the International Civil Aviation Organization. These diplomatic efforts underscored broader challenges in US–Cuban relations, with negotiations repeatedly missing opportunities for enhanced co-operation. A pivotal shift occurred after a significant incident threatened both nations, leading to a more balanced perspective between the US and Cuba. This change culminated in the 1973 signing of a ‘Memorandum of understanding’, marking a turning point that significantly curbed hijacking incidents and hinted at potential future improvements in bilateral relations.

This review identifies three major traditions in British landscape historiography: material/environmental, cultural, and phenomenological. The continuing vitality, methodological rigour, and popular reach of the material tradition is emphasized, notwithstanding persistent questions about the adequacy of its theoretical foundations. Its close cousin historical ecology has meanwhile developed into a broader environmental history, increasingly sensitive to ideological and institutional influences. The development of the cultural tradition, originating in art historical analysis of the ‘landscape idea’ as a culturally specific ‘way of seeing’, is traced through a rich proliferation of studies connecting landscape with memory, national identity, and governance, and through feminist, postcolonial, and history-from-below perspectives. The pervasive influence of the spatial, mobilities, and material turns is highlighted but phenomenology’s focus on experience perhaps challenges the cultural tradition’s premises more fundamentally. Although historians were slower than anthropologists and archaeologists to adopt phenomenology, medievalists and early modernists have applied it rewardingly to topics such as the settings of elite buildings, peasant landscape perceptions, and collective landscape memories. Few modernists have yet embraced phenomenology but it has great potential here given the abundant life-writing sources available. While scope remains for further convergence between research traditions, British landscape history is therefore in an exciting phase of methodological renewal.