The significance of the state’s fiscal system for military capacity, colonization, trade, and economic development is a long-studied topic. Much scholarship has focused on Britain and the emergence of its fiscal-military state. This article shows that fiscal capacity was not created only by government bureaucracies: the ‘company-state at home’ model presented here complements the narrative of the ‘fiscal-military

In colonial Bengal, the average police constable was largely unlettered. Nevertheless, constables were at the frontline in the enforcement of colonial law. This paradox of an unlettered constabulary enforcing the letter of law defies the familiar logic in the historical scholarship on British India that associates the written word with histories of state power and orality with histories of subaltern

This article analyses the elimination of hand-spinning in Britain during the Industrial Revolution and shows that it produced large-scale technological unemployment. First, it uses new empirical evidence and sources to estimate spinning employment before the innovations of the 1760s and 1770s. The estimates show that spinning employed 8 per cent of the population by about 1770. Next, the article systematically

Historians of premodern economies, in contrast to modern ones, have only infrequently contemplated the economic contribution of slavery. Here, I suggest that quantitative and statistical tools allow us to evaluate the place of slavery in an early economy, using Roman Pompeii as a case study. At the time of its destruction in 79 ce, Pompeii appears prosperous, having benefitted from the economic development

On 11 December 1967, a large earthquake devastated the village of Koynanagar in Maharashtra, western India. Many blamed the new Koyna hydroelectric dam nearby. Prompting international inquests, Koyna became perhaps the world’s most famous case of reservoir-induced seismicity, a novel type of earthquake triggered by human activities. We use the dam’s history to explore the emergent consciousness of

Bede and other authors describe a destructive wave of plague sweeping across Britain and Ireland in the period 664–87. In the decades around and after this time, the English kingdoms saw rapid economic changes as urban settlements grew, monasteries were founded, and a large silver currency appeared. Here, it is proposed that these developments were influenced by the effects of the plague. Exact levels

Starting in the fifteenth century, European city governments began to respond to the threat of plague by introducing quarantine measures, which presumed that risk arrived in the bodies and goods of travellers. The adoption of quarantine was long considered a milestone on the road to modern, rational public health and was linked to increased centralization and the rise of state power in the early modern

Taking its cue from the weather wars that unfolded around the Alps in the eighteenth century — conflicts between neighbouring towns and polities attempting to divert storms by firing cannons at clouds — this article studies the representation of an environment rarely seen in spatial history: earth’s atmosphere. A survey of maps in different historiographical traditions, climate history foremost, reveals

This article explains how the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a group of radical queer nuns, created gay ‘religious relics’ in San Francisco and Sydney, Australia, in the 1980s. The Sisters’ relics are a neglected part of twentieth-century queer history and reflect the role of urban spaces and sexual cultures in the formation of contemporary queer identities. They also represent an early effort to

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

When Giuseppe Garibaldi set sail for Sicily on the campaign that led to the unification of Italy in 1860, he gave a group of exiled political radicals living in the port city of Genoa the task of procuring weapons, equipment and reinforcements for his expedition. These exiled veterans of the 1848 revolutions quickly developed a fluid yet highly integrated fundraising and procurement organization that

The Russian Empire collapsed because it failed to assimilate non-Russian minorities, and did not provide a coherent national narrative to unite the Russian population. Its religious policies were key contributors to these failures, and this article examines their impact in order to shine a new light on the religious background to the empire’s demise. The Orthodox Church was supposed to provide the

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

In 1911, numerous women’s organizations, of varying political interests, mounted a campaign against the National Insurance Bill. Such opposition emerged despite feminist support for increased welfare provision in general and especially for the maternity benefit that the Bill proposed to introduce. Feminists criticized National Insurance for discriminating against women, especially its failure to recognize

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”

Towards the mid-1920s, a growing number of colonial firms began to transfer their headquarters from the metropole to French colonies to evade taxation on investment capital income. These transfers threatened to transform French colonies into tax havens. Why was this averted? This article explores the politics of corporate tax planning in the French colonial empire and shows that French colonial tax

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

A new survey of ‘Liberated Africans’ exposes how global calculations of involuntary African indentured labour after 1800 have been significantly underestimated. This analysis of the suppression of the slave trade draws upon a publicly accessible database and digital archive at LiberatedAfricans.org. A quantitative, spatial and chronological visualization of abolition in action, the website memorializes

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

: This article revisits the debate over presentism in historical writing touched off by American Historical Association President James Sweet in an August 2022 column for the Association’s newsletter. Sweet’s statement, expressing concern that historians motivated by today’s political concerns sometimes distort historical evidence, sparked a flurry of responses, mostly from detractors in public and

The recent debate between Chris Wickham and Shami Ghosh exposes different interpretations of the political economy of Europe, with Wickham arguing for the persistence of the feudal economy up to about 1700, and Ghosh imagining a distinct phase in which economic development was not yet capitalist but was no longer decisively shaped by the demands of lords. This article contributes to the discussion

This article argues that the microhistorical analysis of one specific industrial enterprise offers a useful perspective from which to study local participation in global industrialization and to unite business and environmental history. Using the example of the Daira Sanieh, a giant sugar holding in late Ottoman Egypt (the so-called ‘khedivate’), I map the economic logic of this non-sovereign polity

The colonial state in Kenya offered its African subjects a novel tool for imagining a future life. The Post Office Savings Bank (POSB) was meant to encourage ‘thrift’ — the postponement of consumption — and to play its part in a wider colonial project of turning disparate forms of value into money that could be gathered and used by the state. In practice, Kenya’s POSB was inaccessible and/or unappealing

In colonial Uruguay black slaves could supervise the work of white creoles and even hold the power to have their wages docked. To most historians this might seem puzzling and almost fictional in the context of the colonial Americas. This article makes sense of the puzzle by examining interactions between the economy and the environment on the Río de la Plata frontier. It argues that the natural world

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

Drawing on work in the social sciences on the handshake, this article examines the role of the handshake as a form of gestural communication and traces the changes in its relative importance in the ‘access rituals’ of early modern England. We lack a history of the handshake for early modern England. Such work as there is, is chronologically discontinuous and largely blind to the sociology of its performance

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

The state of Durango has long been a centre of Mexican heroin production and an important node in transnational drug trafficking networks. As early as 1944, it was the site of one of the biggest drug busts in Mexican history, when an opium poppy plantation the size of 325 football pitches, irrigated by a purpose-built aqueduct, was discovered in the state’s northern mountains. By the mid 1970s, a combination

This article reconsiders what is often seen as a defining feature of the mid-twentieth-century welfare state in the United States: its exclusion of agricultural workers and tenant farmers. It shows that in the cotton-producing regions of the Mississippi Valley, agricultural workers and tenants were not excluded from the welfare state but unequally incorporated into and disciplined by it. In the absence

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

Across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Atlantic African leaders confronted new challenges as the European demand for captive African labour transformed the political economy of the region and the experience of living within it. Among a range of new and remodelled strategies designed to protect their polities, West African leaders used alcohol diplomacy to facilitate political alliance, cross-cultural

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