Early modern war was a complex phenomenon that marked not only the lives of soldiers and civilians directly involved in conflicts, but also the technology, the economy and the culture of the epoch. Current intellectual approaches to war nevertheless tend to ignore that war was also experienced as a particular series of sounds, from drums to cannons and cries. In fact, aural perception constituted in

With the disintegration of the Russian Empire, Romania annexed Bessarabia, a region on its eastern border, in 1918. The integration of the new region was implemented through a centralized process in which the security forces played a significant role. This article examines the beginnings of the Romanian police in Bessarabia, the main security force in its urban areas, focusing on the development of

When the First Carlist War (1833–1840) broke out in Spain between the queen regent María Cristina, supported by the liberals, and the absolutist pretender Don Carlos, French legitimists portrayed it as a clash of civilizations between absolutism and liberalism. As supporters of the eldest branch of the Bourbon dynasty who had governed France from 1589 to 1792 and then again from 1814–1815 to 1830,

Baron Wolfgang Jacobus Forstner von Breitenfels was envoy to Duke Leopold I of Lorraine (1697–1729) at the court of Queen Anne of Britain and Ireland (1665–1714) between 1710 and 1713. Using Forstner's unexamined papers, this article explores Lorrain perceptions of Britain during the twilight of Anne's reign. As a monarch's political decisions were influenced by the correspondence of their representatives

This article studies the failure of the Spanish-German treaty signed in 1893. The examination of the process that led to its derailment in the Spanish senate contributes to the historiography in the following ways. First, the composition of the executive that promoted the agreement illustrates the fragility of the protectionist agro-industrial coalition, as shown for Germany, in late-nineteenth century

In early modern Europe, spontaneous festive activities such as gambling and other street entertainments were a prominent part of everyday urban life. This article analyses their impact on some of Venice's informal political spaces. Ludic gatherings disrupted the rhythms of everyday life and often provoked violent reactions from residents who complained of being denied access to these public spaces

This article will consider the polycentric topography of politics in the centres of southern Italy between the late Middle Ages and the Early Modern period. The institutional fluidity which characterized the universitates of the Kingdom of Naples determined the use of different types of ‘informal’ spaces by the municipal bodies which administered the cities via groups of local elites and royal officials

Among the most striking phenomena in the history of the Reformation in the Low Countries are the Protestant open-air sermons of the summer of 1566. These sermons, held in fields, woods, marshlands or other open spaces beyond the city limits, were attended by hundreds or even thousands of men and women from all social groups, eager for reform. This essay discusses the geographical proliferation, organization

This paper will focus on sixteenth-century weaver and wedding singer Jonas Losch of Augsburg as a focal point for examining craftsmen in Germany who moonlighted as singers, offering both formal and informal entertainment in the streets, pubs, and other informal spaces of early modern German towns. Because songs were one of the few ways that artisans of lower status were able to make their voices heard

Using a recently discovered private merchant archive (the Archivio Adami-Lami in Florence, Italy), this article reconstructs the Acre Consul Controversy, a diplomatic dispute over the appointment of a Tuscan merchant, Francesco Adami, as the first English vice-consul of the Ottoman port of Acre. Through a micro-spatial case study, documenting the emerging rivalry between European ‘nations’ and their

Beyond the spheres of opinion built around the circles of power, political communication in the early modern age went through other channels accessible to a wider and more diverse public, which also included subaltern groups in that society. This article adopts a spatial and material approach to explore the role of squares and streets as channels for political discourse. While examining the significance

During the Spanish Civil War, War Routes with tourist itineraries were organized in the area controlled by General Francisco Franco. They began to operate on 1 July 1938 and ran throughout the whole of the following year. The objective was, on the one hand, to create a new tourism product essentially aimed at the European market in order to attract tourists and obtain foreign currency. On the other

In this article we argue that the reports of conductresses accompanying female migrants shed new light on the nature of interwar labour migration. As they mitigated the anxiety and insecurity that women faced during the process of migration, they fulfilled a crucial role in the highly restrictive post-1918 international migration regime. The Polish government introduced conductresses in 1925 to respond

The territorial expansion of the USA in the 1840s represented an important phase on its way to becoming a world power. Historians have paid considerable attention to US foreign policy during this period but have largely neglected the significant impact of US expansion on Europe. Whereas they have written a great deal about European reflections on American democracy or slavery, they have largely overlooked

Between 1848 and 1867, at a time that is often considered to be central to Italian, German, and Slavic nation building, the Habsburg port city of Trieste witnessed a significant immigration from throughout Europe and the eastern Mediterranean. While the historiography of the city has focused on the Triestine entrepreneurial class, understandably described as cosmopolitan, little research has been conducted

While a rich body of work on nations and national borderlands has demonstrated how the ideal of the nation state resulted in ever greater (and often violent) demands for geographic fixity, this article shows how territorial visions of regional communities permitted a tremendous level of flexibility and were able to hold highly divergent geographic imaginings in suspension. The article seeks to demonstrate

The opening of Spain's first railway in 1848 inaugurated a short-lived period of railway euphoria that consumed the imaginations of Spaniards and resulted in the rapid development of nearly 5000 km of track. While most historians of Spain's nineteenth century concede that the effort failed to trigger the industrialization many had hoped for, it did stimulate the minds of those primed to fantasize about

Between 1942 and 1945, Jewish inmates of a forced labour camp and later Auschwitz subcamp at Blechhammer (Blachownia Slaska, Upper Silesia) worked alongside British prisoners of war on the construction site of a giant synthetic fuel facility, the Oberschlesische Hydrierwerke. This paper examines the multifaceted forms of interaction between these two groups, who were situated at the opposite ends of

This article contributes to recent scholarly efforts to reassess the history of Third-Worldism in Europe during the Cold War. Focusing on left-wing activists who mobilized through and beyond the long 1960s in the Spanish city of Santa Coloma de Gramenet, the article demonstrates how local communities drew meaning from and projected meaning onto the Third World to help them understand domestic conditions

Spanish prisoners deported to the Mauthausen Nazi concentration camp were treated and classified in an anomalous and problematic fashion that did not correspond to the real reasons for their detention. Thus, despite being prosecuted as Rotspaniers – ‘red Spaniards’ – a category initially employed to designate those Germans who had fought in the Spanish Civil War in support of the republican government

This article focuses on the itinerant print trade that actively involved the Alpine Tesini pedlars for more than three centuries (between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries) and that profoundly influenced the cultural, social, and economic history of their home valley. The case study of the pedlars from the Tesino valley, in what is now the Trentino region of Northern Italy, offers a privileged

Recent imagological scholarship about the Balkans has revised the Balkanism thesis by examining the sympathetic lens through which British liberals viewed the peninsula's Christian and Slavic nationalities following the 1903 establishment of the Balkan Committee. Revisionist historiography has, however, overlooked how non-Christian and non-Slavic communities were represented in Britain beyond overgeneralized