Tolls were not only fundamental to the operation of early modern English markets, but also had the capacity to generate tensions that belied their seemingly unremarkable role in contemporary economic affairs. Yet, tolls and toll disputes have received little attention in studies of market regulation and have also been neglected in studies of the politics of grain supply and marketing. This article revives tolls as an object of enquiry and suggests that they occupied an ambiguous position within early modern English economic culture. Tolls raised complex questions about how self-interest operated in a society that conceptualized bargaining primarily in communal terms and emphasized the social and moral obligations that should underpin it. While this was arguably true of tolls on all goods, it was especially true of tolls on grain – a commodity that occupied a singular place in contemporary socio-economic relations. By examining how competing parties in toll disputes articulated and sought to defend their interests, and how their respective tactics changed over time, this article sheds new light on the dynamics involved in England’s transition from one way of thinking about economic activity to another.

In December 1654 a large naval force departed from Portsmouth and sailed across the Atlantic. Its goal was to expand the English Commonwealth in the Caribbean at the expense of Spanish colonies. The Gloucester, a third-rate frigate recently constructed as part of Oliver Cromwell's ambitious shipbuilding programme, was one of the largest and most heavily armed warships of the expedition. Combining analysis of courts martial accounts, inventories, journals, letters, sailing instructions, and wills, this article argues for the Gloucester's importance as a case study and microcosm for understanding the economic, political, religious, and social problems that the navy and wider Protectorate faced. It revises traditional historiography about the topic that has underestimated the significance of the naval context to the Western Design. Crucial to this new history is that the extreme hardships and religious divisions created tensions that targeted the leadership of Admiral William Goodsonn. Of particular importance in this narrative is Benjamin Blake, captain of the Gloucester, who clashed with Goodsonn over key policies. By focusing on the Gloucester and exploring its crew's experiences, this article shows that the English navy was a restricted and internally conflicted force when operating at the peripheries of the state network.

From the Second Anglo-Dutch War to the fall of the United Provinces (c. 1670–1795), dozens of English writers published accounts of their travels across the North Sea. The English and the Dutch were bound by centuries of intellectual, political, and cultural interaction. Factors like a shared confession and similar economic structures meant that Anglo-Dutch relations were uniquely intimate, and this close relationship allowed a nuanced and complex exploration of political ideas. This article recreates one of those ideas that was repeated so often in English travel writing: that the Dutch Republic was free. This freedom was presented as a Faustian pact. In practice, the Dutch state guaranteed many freedoms that the English lauded, such as the right to property, to government accountability, and to efficient justice. However, English writers disdained the theories that underpinned these freedoms, which were viewed as egalitarian and republican. It was argued that these suspect doctrines led the United Provinces down the path to licentiousness, luxury, and decline. Paradoxically, therefore, the nature of Dutch freedom determined both the country’s rise and its fall.

This article examines the life of Lady Elizabeth Anson (1725–60), daughter of Philip Yorke, 1st earl of Hardwicke, and the wife of Admiral George Lord Anson, first lord of the admiralty. Using a sample of her letters, this article argues that Lady Anson engaged with letter-writing as an inherently political activity. Previous studies of Lady Anson’s correspondence have emphasized her role in the Yorkes’ political network, but this article foregrounds her marriage to Lord Anson and her life at the admiralty. In a marriage shaped by the strains of naval service, Lady Anson used her talents as a letter-writer to establish a role for herself as her husband’s political partner. Building on the work of Elaine Chalus, Judith Lewis, and Sarah Richardson, this article explores the ways in which Lady Anson used letters to disseminate intelligence and negotiate patronage. It examines her friendship with the powerful admiralty secretary, John Cleveland, and considers the ways in which her physical proximity to the admiralty office gave her privileged access to the inner workings of the Royal Navy. Consequently, her writing provides important insights into the ways in which elite women could use letters to establish their own political authority.

This article traces the immediate reception of Paine’s Rights of man (Part One) in Germany. It especially focuses on the publication history of the complete translation published in Berlin in 1792, featuring the translator Meta Forkel, her collaborator Georg Forster, and the publisher Christian Friedrich Voß. This reconstruction affords insight into the process of translation as a collaborative enterprise and clearly demonstrates the translator’s agency. When the publisher proved reluctant, publication was dependent on Forkel’s initiative, which highlights the factor of contingency and the willingness to take risks. By detailing the modifications a book might undergo even in the case of a very faithful translation, this article also exemplifies strategies employed in the dissemination of radical works and the adaptation to new cultural and political contexts. Finally, the evidence presented here shows that Paine’s work was considered central by German contemporaries and should be placed alongside the reception of Burke’s in future scholarship on the Revolution debate in Germany.

This article focuses on the shift toward post-revolutionary politics supported by reform-minded aristocratic clans and their bourgeois allies. Using the example of the Balbo family – one of the leading aristocratic families in Sardinia-Piedmont – I will argue that the quest for stability and pragmatism is crucial to understanding the political, cultural, and ideological reorientations within the noble-bourgeois elites in the first age of global revolutions. Family history is a lens through which it is possible to look afresh at this vital period of social transformations, state expansion, and political modernization. The article explores the Balbos’ family history across generations and genders, not only in the revolutionary and Napoleonic period, but also in the decades after the Congress of Vienna. In doing so, it sheds new light on the course of state-building processes, constitutional reforms, and the formation of a new, composite elite, which would largely dominate European politics until the end of the nineteenth century.

This article looks at four families living in and around the small town of Gatchina, not far from St Petersburg, Russia, in the long nineteenth century. Their family histories are recreated from archival files based in tsarist Russia's system of social estates (soslovie), supplemented by city directories, newspapers, and many other sources. Taken together, the four family histories expand our understanding of tsarist Russia's middle classes in two ways. First, they highlight the role that women played in families as economic actors and as agents of their own destiny. Second, they demonstrate the role that social mobility did and did not play in maintaining families across the long nineteenth century. In addition, they demonstrate some of the ways in which the Russian empire's experience of the nineteenth century differed from a standard Eurocentric narrative, in particular in the way that ‘archaic’ and ‘modern’ worlds existed simultaneously.

This article explores a key trope in the history of French colonial Algeria: the idea of the colony as a failure. The focus is on the resettlement of Alsatians and Lorrainers in Algeria in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War. What started as a wave of nationalist elan that sought to rebuild the lost provinces in France’s largest colony soon became the object of criticism and controversy, depicted by contemporaries from early on as failure. While this perceived failure was itself a colonial category – the failure to recruit settlers, expulse Algerians, and seize land – it tells us a great deal about the political culture of the colony. How was this resettlement project conceived? What visions of colonization and colonial settlement were projected upon it? And what mechanisms of coercion, dispossession, and violence did different colonial players seek to deploy? Through these questions, this article seeks to demonstrate that the verdict of ‘failure’ by settlers and lobbyists did not emerge in hindsight but was rather the product of the inherent tension between the sheer force that was necessary to seize the land and the metropolitan attempt to establish in the colony a form of unequal yet standardized civilian governance.

William Munro Tapp, the largest post-foundation benefactor to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, was a prominent lawyer who directed multiple businesses interested in water utilities, motor car manufacturing, and brewing. That much is acknowledged at Caius today. Yet Tapp was also a director of the sugar refiners Manbré & Garton Limited, and he helped establish a sugar plantation in Kenya. Alongside his involvement in an African estate, he held investments in other plantations and colonial enterprises. He was part of a class of gentlemanly capitalists who participated in imperial expansion and then donated their wealth to British cultural institutions, including colleges and universities. While much public attention has been paid to Cecil Rhodes, this article argues that both Tapp and Rhodes were members of a larger group of men and women who provided their wealth to educational institutions, thereby entrenching the financial legacies of colonialism in universities. By focusing on more minor figures in the British empire, like Tapp, historians can better address the continuities of universities’ financial connections to coerced labour and colonialism across time and understand that private connections and affective attachments between individuals and institutions were as significant as governmental policies in directing the spoils of empire.

In recent years, most research on the long ’68 has underlined the importance of connections between the First World and the Third World. This article takes one of these intertwined histories into account: the one that ties ETA to the Algerian FLN. More specifically, it focuses on the strategy of political defence used in some of the trials against ETA members and their inspiration in previous FLN processes. The research pays particular attention to the Burgos Trial of December 1970, which was one of the most notable events in Europe’s long ’68. In Spain, the protests against this court martial marked a turning point in the pathway of the Franco regime. At the same time, the trial inspired an exceptional expression of international solidarity. The article stresses the key role played during the Burgos Trial – and before – by several left-wing lawyers from Spain and France. Their collective experiences and personal trajectories show the relevance of transnational interconnections and illustrate the different genealogies of the idea of political defence, based mainly on communist and anticolonial struggles. Despite pointing out the importance of these exchanges, the research also emphasizes some of their limits and contradictions, something that previous studies have insufficiently addressed.

The marginalization of astrology – the protracted process by which a rich scholarly field and a highly skilled trade migrated into the margins of European culture – is coming to be recognized as one of the most fundamental transformations in the transition from the pre-modern to the modern world. Long assumed to be a casualty of the ‘scientific revolution’ and ‘Enlightenment’, since the 1970s historians have questioned the power of intellectual developments to carry the weight of this major shift, and have constructed alternative social, political, and cultural narratives. However, in the last fifteen years, the field has been making a (re-)turn to intellectual history, albeit in innovative ways. This critical historiographical review accumulates and digests this large body of new work, showing how these historiographical about-turns leave us with broader questions about the role of ideas in cultural transformations, as well as – on a smaller scale – the processes by which individuals change their minds. I close the review by contending that after decades of neglect, it is an opportune time to bring intellectual history back into our studies of the ‘disenchantment of the world’.

In 1973, a conference was held in Toronto to mark the bicentenary of James Mill's birth and the centenary of John Stuart Mill's death. By that time, Toronto had emerged as the centre of Mill studies. Between 1963 and 1973, the University of Toronto Press had published, in a scholarly edition, eleven volumes of Mill's Collected works. A further twenty-two volumes would appear in the eighteen years that followed. Only two of the nine presenters at the 1973 conference were members of a Philosophy Department. Philosophers had a modest part in the production of Mill's Collected works. Yet, philosophers came to dominate Mill studies in the decades after the Mill edition wrapped up in 1991. Philosophers contributed ten of the fourteen essays featured in The Cambridge companion to Mill (1998), edited by John Skorupski. Philosophers constituted twenty-six of the thirty-seven contributors to A companion to Mill (2017), published by Wiley Blackwell and edited by Christopher Macleod and Dale E. Miller. This communication explains the relative unimportance of philosophers in the creation of the Collected works, and comments on the forces shaping the subsequent pre-eminence of philosophers in Mill studies.