Historical scholarship has long highlighted the extensive landscape interventions initiated by state agents, early capitalists and experts in the early modern period, and pointed to the fierce, often violent resistance they evoked from local and rural communities. Such an approach risks narrowly aligning expertise with intervention in the service of states or capitalist elites and positioning experts

Prize law was a legal regime that played a crucial role in maritime trade and warfare in the European imperial world before the twentieth century, governing both the capture and disposition of enemy property seized by belligerents at sea during wartime. Prize law outlined the rules by which captures were to take place and how captured property was to be handled, adjudicated, and (if “condemned” or

Between the second half of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Indian Ocean became a theatre of the global war waged by European imperial states. This article compares how three colonial powers, in French, Danish, and British colonial territories, dealt with interconnected political threats, in a region where the limits of imperial sovereignty and jurisdictions were often

Every empire in the Americas developed a law of slavery that connected the forced transoceanic migration of enslaved people with land-based economic production and social life. Competing conceptions of jurisdiction over land and sea emerged from legal processes regarding slavery in the transition from colonial Portuguese rule to early independence in Brazil. Both the Portuguese monarch and post-independence

During the wars of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries tens of thousands of English sailors had their wages deferred because the government could not come up with the cash to pay them. Instead, Navy sailors were discharged with undated government promissory notes, usually called ‘sailors’ tickets’, which they and their families sometimes had to wait months or years to have paid. This essay

This article analyzes the practices and politics of Caribbean prize courts at the turn of the nineteenth century, in order to better understand the dynamics of these peculiar legal institutions on the ground in one of the most volatile inter-imperial maritime spaces of the period. The focus is on the daily operation of the courts, the relationship between different regional courts (within and between

This article offers a new interpretation of mutiny, and of the ways in which this concept was defined and implemented in maritime law during the seventeenth century. It particularly focuses on British seafarers and the evidence surviving in the papers of the English High Court of Admiralty, placed in a comparative perspective with reference to other states’ legal provision. Scholars of maritime social

This article focuses on the consequences of a single major international affair — the shipwreck of a French ship carrying 165 Muslim pilgrims along the southern shores of Sicily in 1716 — to address two pivotal issues in the reordering of eighteenth-­century legal and political systems: the limits of domestic sovereignty in absolutist states and the status of non-Christian polities in the theory and

Historians have paid more attention to the inner life of households than to their legal and political significance in early European overseas empires. This article analyses the legal role of households in the seventeenth century Caribbean, with an emphasis on Jamaica and Suriname. It argues that households were key to organising maritime violence and composing regional order. Imperial agents in the

This essay focuses on the long history of archipelagic formations in the Bay of Bengal as sites of legal experimentation. This history is often narrated beginning with convict transportation and the permanent occupation of the Andaman Islands as a British penal settlement in 1857 and the violent erasure of indigenous cultures that followed it. This essay focuses instead on the hundred years preceding

The four generations of Hohenzollern rulers who transformed the electorate of Brandenburg into the kingdom of Prussia — a regional player into a great power — all employed Black men at their courts and in their armies. Through court performance, including processions and tournaments, as well as through artistic commissions, the Brandenburgian rulers adapted existing traditions of representing and displaying

Thousands of Jews moved from Qajar Iran and Ottoman Iraq to the Persian Gulf ports during the long nineteenth century. Attracted by colonial trade and British patronage, they formed communities on the Gulf littorals and expanded their social and economic networks across the sea. At the same time, modern transportation connected the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea, enabling collective long-distance

This article uses case studies from Byzantium to demonstrate a new trans framework for gendered historical analysis that recognizes identity as both fluid and painful. Instead of placing the emphasis on whether or not we can call an individual trans, it explores the forces that produced cisness, and the cis and trans lives people carved out amidst them. We find ableism and transmisogyny at the heart

By the thirteenth century, confederations of communes in western Europe were claiming important legal, political and military prerogatives for themselves in written charters of inter-urban alliance. Scholars have seen these alliances as a tool of the emerging economic elite or as forces of resistance to the sovereign territorial state taking shape in the late Middle Ages. To understand alternatives

Late medieval Coventry attracted so many in-migrating singlewomen that it might have seemed a city of women — for every ten women, only seven men. Some of these peasants-turned-townswomen supported themselves as labourers, domestic servants or prostitutes, but it was the demand for their industrial labour as spinners of cloth-yarn and cap-yarn that drew most women to the city. Coventry’s merchants

This article analyses over 19,000 articles from newspapers and parliamentary commission reports to reveal endemic electoral violence in England and Wales between 1832 and 1914. It offers a new understanding of the phenomenon in three main ways. First, the extent of election violence, which regularly featured major riots requiring police and military intervention, disturbances of the peace, and deaths

This article places the origins of Italian settler colonialism and its defeat in the battle of Adwa (1896) in the global perspective of the environmental history of European imperialism. It argues that the Italian project to turn the highlands of the Horn of Africa into a settler colony was an “imperial mirage”: the perception that the momentarily depopulated landscape of Ethiopia, produced by “natural”

The nature of the relationships among the Mexican state, organized crime and violence is much debated. Many accounts of state formation suggest that states increase their extractive and coercive capabilities in tandem: they monopolize the provision of ‘protection’ in Charles Tilly’s famous analogy. However, when unconsolidated states confront lucrative, illicit markets, state-building takes an unexpected

This article challenges the ‘from-lordship-to-government’ model of the grand narrative of European state formation through a reconceptualization of the late medieval German feud and lordship (1300–1500). It demonstrates how the predatory lordship of the feudal revolution persisted in late medieval imperial lands by centring on how modalities of extractive violence linked the lordly feud and lordship

This Viewpoint contribution considers the recent turn to emotion and affect in the humanities and the social sciences. We present here a conversation between four scholars of gender, Ute Frevert, Chitra Joshi, Lynn M. Thomas and Valerie Walkerdine, reflecting on their personal intellectual trajectories. In their discussion, they examine how, when and why they began to explore the analytical potential

In the nineteenth century Straits of Malacca, one of the globe’s most significant trading crossroads, merchants were integral to imperial stability and growth. Indeed, historians of the British empire have long sought to understand how colonial governments turned to merchants, both British and Asian, to extend commercial networks, establish local hierarchies and extend processes of state-building.

A striking yet underexamined system of labour management circulated between land and sea in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world: the use of liquor rations to stimulate worker productivity. Turning to the British naval warship and the American slave plantation, this article depicts how labour supervisors in both settings relied on carefully regulated quantities of alcohol to extract more labour from

The relationship between towns and lords was fundamental both to the making of towns and to the making of polities in the late Middle Ages. The European literature on state growth has led historians to focus on the role of towns in historicizing narratives of state formation and national exceptionalism. These different narratives have depended on urban typologies that emphasize the importance of the

In the late nineteenth century, the Chosŏn state, which ruled the Korean peninsula from 1392 to 1910, moved settlers, animals and crops to the isolated oceanic island (do) of Ullŭng, displacing or killing the indigenous people, animals and possibly plant species living there. Having first sent observers to investigate Japanese settler colonialism in Hokkaido, the Chosŏn court accurately replicated

At the end of the First World War, defeated European empires ceded a wealth of imperial patronage, including palaces, government buildings and offices, to newly forming states in central Europe. While we know a great deal about these property transfers, the fate of ceded property in mandates and other newly emerging sovereign spaces, such as international zones, is less well known. This article traces

Industrial capitalism arrived in Europe as great urban fires were already retreating. The United States, however, was generously timbered and far more reliant on wooden construction. As a result, its infernos continued, and even increased, well into its age of capital. They especially struck places of intense commodification: hastily built settler towns, slave cities, financial centres and sites of

In the eighteenth century, ‘ship tracks’, lines recording vessels’ movements on charts, facilitated wayfinding, hydrographical surveys and territorial claims. During the long nineteenth century, however, their main function shifted from surveying of the marine environment to surveillance of officers’ movements and actions. Using textual and cartographical sources produced by British naval officers

In October 1958, seven Japanese writers attended the first great cultural event of the Bandung era, the week-long Afro-Asian Writers Conference held in Tashkent, the capital of Soviet Uzbekistan. The ‘literary Bandung’ resulted in the creation of the Afro-Asian Writers Association (AAWA), a source of growing interest among historians of anti-colonialism for the institutions it founded to support a

In Late Antiquity, as today, women’s veiling was a contentious topic. Early Christian churchmen wrote about it at length, exhorting women to cover and criticizing those they considered were not veiling appropriately. According to these writers, veils were an essential garment tied to Christian modesty and religious ideas about female submission to male authority. Modern scholarship has tended to side

In the three decades after 1945 the British property development sector exploded in size and began operating on a worldwide scale. The largest property companies in the world were British in this era and they built office blocks, shopping centres and hotels in cities all over the world. These overseas property developments overlapped firmly with the pre-existing political and economic geographies of

Driven by the quality of sources rather than their representativeness, the history of English agriculture has been written primarily from the perspective of well-documented large farms to the neglect of smallholders and cottagers who for centuries cultivated the greater part of the nation’s farmland but left scant records. The superb series recording the mediocre and low crop yields of the expansive

Banging together pots and pans has become established as a common protest technique in Spain and across the world. Pot-banging can be linked to charivari: a centuries-old, Europe-wide, nuptial practice that subjected a marrying couple to mocking moral critique, which was also adapted for political ends. This article, however, distinguishes between nuptial charivari (the cencerrada) and recent political

This article examines the long-term response of the Indian Muslim salariat to the lifting of usury laws in British India in 1855. The salariat were a group of urban professionals and landed gentry in north India who emerged after the uprising of 1857. They espoused a self-conscious brand of Islamic modernism, a central feature of which was a reinterpretation of Islamic traditions pertaining to ‘rent

We might expect chiromancy in the modern period to be analysed best within the well-known late nineteenth-century occult revival. The specific practice of palmistry, as it happens, is minimally examined in that historiographical context. Yet the purpose here is not to reinstate palmistry into our already extensive understanding of an Anglo-American modern occult, but to show how other readers of hands

The year 2021 marked the fiftieth anniversary of Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), a book that set the agenda for decades of scholarship on the history of popular religion and supernatural beliefs. The book brought to life a lost world of early modern English magic, its success ultimately confirming popular beliefs and practices as respectable objects of historical study. This

In 1672 John Evelyn, Restoration courtier, diarist and polymath, formed a platonic soul union with Margaret Blagge (later Godolphin), a young maid of honour in Queen Catherine’s household. Both were devout Anglicans whose religious practices were shaped by their love of ‘recesse’. For four years they enacted a spiritual solitude à deux in an emotionally charged relationship lived out through private

This article uses the records of the National Negro Business League (NNBL) to examine the economic life and experiences of African American entrepreneurs between 1900 and 1920. Often referred to as the ‘golden age’ of Black business, this era saw the proliferation of African American owned businesses, despite the increase in discrimination and racial persecution that had characterized the United States

The framing of India’s constitution was a critical event in the global history of both constitution-making and democracy. Conventionally it has been analysed as a founding moment. Its success against multiple odds has been explained as resulting from a vision and consensus among the elite over what would become a pedagogical text for an ‘ignorant’ and undemocratic public. This focus among academics

This article examines a set of public universities that opened after 1848 across California, Australasia, South Africa and Canada. It argues that these institutions, termed the ‘goldfield foundations’, owed the speed of their formation, if not their existence, to the period’s global gold and mineral rushes. During the first capital-intensive years of university development, new mineral wealth added

This article analyses the petition and response process in late medieval Castile, focusing on petitions of grievance submitted to the Royal Council during the reign of Isabel I and Fernando II (r.1474–1504). Studies published in recent decades have revised our understanding of petitionary practices and their significance to systems of governance in medieval and early modern Europe. One persistent gap

European states gradually established colonial rule in Africa between the mid nineteenth century and the beginning of the First World War. Historians have assessed the infrastructure introduced during this period through the lens of colonial state-building and resource extraction. This article offers another perspective by reconstructing the early history of electrification in Lagos Colony, one of

In the inaugural issue of Past and Present, Eric Hobsbawm cautioned historians against the assumption that a capitalist economy has an inherent tendency to cost-saving and technological innovation, emphasizing that ‘It has a bias only towards profit’. Inspired by Hobsbawm, this article shows how a history of profit can elucidate the economic and social history of machines. Beginning with miners’ protests

The ability to foresee the outbreak of epidemic disease, and to predict its course, is a highly coveted skill. Most often associated with statistical techniques, such efforts to improve the health of communities are thought to be exclusively modern. Public health more generally is often said to be categorically distinct from pre-modern medicine, which was interested above all in individual patients

This article offers a new approach to the study of the persecution of the early Christians. Past scholarship on this topic has offered explanations built around inter-religious animosity, which are here exposed as the inevitable result of unquestioned assumptions about those responsible. It offers instead a hypothesis that the driving agency for the violence Christians suffered came from their immediate

This chapter analyzes a series of interconnected Italian cases in its enquiry into how disinformation was created, and how it impacted on society. It argues that disinformation is an inherent element of information itself. Disinformation is understood here as an intentional construction of fictional and often conflicting narratives, helpful in times of crisis and also in routine governance in the pursuit

By the early modern period, libelling a private individual had been legally redefined and was being tried at the court of Star Chamber, alongside cases relating to the monarch or government. This brought the ruination of individual reputations by spreading false rumours into the same realm as the circulation of nationally significant false news. Private libels typically took the form of verses, impersonations

Our modern concept of political free speech as an individual political right was first elaborated in detail three hundred years ago by two London journalists, Thomas Gordon and John Trenchard, in their best-selling, endlessly reprinted, anonymous newspaper column, known as ‘Cato’s Letters’ (1720–23). As is well known, Cato’s novel ideas about speech and press freedom proved hugely influential, especially

This chapter explores the intersection between two different kinds of nouvelle: on the one hand, a piece of news; and on the other, a literary genre, the novella. Both senses were current in the early sixteenth century when Marguerite de Navarre, the sister of the French king François I, wrote the collection of novellas now known as the Heptameron. Developing its model, Boccaccio’s Decameron, the Heptameron

Since its publication in 1642, Giovanni Baglione’s Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects from the Pontificate of Gregory XIII of 1572 until the times of Pope Urban VIII in 1642, has been classified as either largely factual or obviously biased, a reflection of the culture of slander in early modern Rome. Definitions of what constituted textual ‘truth’ have changed dramatically since Baglione

This chapter introduces the reader to the world of fiction and disinformation in early modern Europe. It starts by placing fiction and disinformation in the context of wider trends and developments, while also drawing a parallel between present practices and concerns and those of the early modern period (Section I). The chapter then surveys existing scholarship on these themes, highlighting the novelty

This chapter examines the conceptualization of Catholic liturgical practices within the Protestant anti-Catholic polemics of early modern England. I argue that, insofar as Protestants typically glossed such practices as ‘idolatry’, and thus, as the worship of a false god, Protestants explicitly accused Catholics of falling victim to the deceptive tendencies of their imaginations. Hence, for English

This chapter sheds light on the narrative strategies and techniques involving reported speech in Machiavelli’s diplomatic records and historical writings. The focus is on the diplomatic correspondence of his 1502 mission to Cesare Borgia and on his Discourses on Livy. Analysis of the rhetorical devices that Machiavelli uses to report his own words and those of others shows that his letters and the

Abstract This article investigates the archiving practices of a little-known group of Catholics in the Ottoman Empire, the Diyarbakır Chaldeans, in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It argues for a flexible definition of archives, based not on traditional characteristics such as links to a defined institutional repository, but on their purpose of community formation. The loose institutional

Abstract The aim of this article is to establish a new basis for exploring the network of ancient Greek city-states during the Classical and Hellenistic periods by applying Social Network Analysis to the record of inscriptions recording grants of proxeny. Proxeny was a generalized institution for facilitating interactions between Greek political communities. Because it left a rich and idiosyncratic

Abstract This article responds to Philip Slavin’s ‘Out of the West: Formation of a Permanent Plague Reservoir in South-Central Germany (1349–1356) and Its Implications’. Genetics has transformed the study of plague, one of the most lethal diseases in human history. But this technically demanding science raises questions of what constitutes valid evidence and supportable argument when examining historical

AbstractBetween the 1870s and 1914, tens of thousands of peasants left Austria-Hungary’s easternmost provinces of Galicia and Bukovina, heading for the Americas. This article places this episode in the context of contemporary global labour migrations while also emphasizing the distinctive characteristics of this mass exodus. Unlike most migrants around the world, Galicians and Bukovinans emigrated

In the originally published version of this manuscript (https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtab025), the author's name was erroneously given in the HTML as ‘M Rachel'.

AbstractIn the 1830s, plague, which had been all but forgotten by most Europeans, was on everyone’s lips again. Shortly after the Ottoman and Egyptian governments instituted their first permanent quarantines, the disease broke out in the Levant and the Nile delta, and the global medical community watched anxiously to see whether these new western Mediterranean-style quarantines would be able to contain

When Switzerland was created in 1848, one of its founding fathers went by the name of ‘Borneo Louis’. Before becoming a Swiss state builder, he had served as a mercenary in the Dutch East Indies. There he had founded a family with his native ‘housekeeper’, Silla. In Switzerland, he continued to benefit from Silla’s exploited labour. Stories such as these seem unusual today, not for historical but for

Almost exactly a hundred years after the Permanent Settlement of 1793 revolutionized property relations in Bengal, a far less studied legislation would subtly extend the rule of property to include the province’s waters. Bengal’s Private Fisheries Protection Act 1889, which is usually regarded as having been motivated by conservationist or economic concerns, was in fact an attempt to resolve intractable