The end of the nineteenth century saw the emergence of nationalism as the primary ideological underpinning of Australian identity, defining the broader Australian people as a culturally British, Protestant community. Such developments drew strength from key events of the early twentieth century, such as Australian federation and the Great War. Although historians have conceded that Irish Australians could adhere to the cultural tenets of Anglo-Australia, they have overlooked the extent to which Irish-Australian Catholics, especially those from the middle class, adopted Britishness as an integral part of their ethno-religious identity. Middle-class Catholic individuals, families and groups negotiated the extent of their Irishness to suit their needs within economic, social and cultural spaces dominated by Australia’s Protestant majority. This article argues that the expression of Britishness was an intrinsic part of Catholics’ middle-class ambitions, as they sought to rectify their implicit ‘otherness’ in an Australia committed to a myth of national unity on non-Irish, and non-Catholic, terms.

This article revisits and expands on my previous research on the entanglement of state power, nationalist ideology, lingering coloniality, and heritage production in Arab music in postcolonial Cairo since the late 1960s.1 It takes into consideration the intersection of politics and elite class positionality with Arab music heritage, an “absent presence” in my previous research and in much of the literature on heritage.2 I argue that the heritagization of Arab music transformed, re-signified and (re)positioned a largely mass-mediated musical practice that was embedded in urban popular culture into a highbrow expressive domain, a discourse of privilege that conferred cultural and social capital to music, musicians, and audiences.3

This article offers a critical rereading of the historiography on the role of women in the Italian Resistance. It starts with the postwar period, marked by a general silence and the prevailing image of women as mothers and staffette. In the 1970s, the first historical elaboration of women’s experiences began in all northern regions, leading to the now iconic concept of the ‘silent Resistance’. In the 1990s, a dialogue developed with other historiographical categories, such as the concept of ‘civil resistance’ developed by Jacques Sémelin and the ‘war on civilians’, but this approach ran the risk of reducing women’s contribution to ‘powerless’ acts. Although today women’s history is fully integrated into the narrative canon of the Resistance, it faces new challenges, such as the confrontation with ‘other’ (mainly non-European) resistances and new public uses of history. The article suggests that women’s history has been, if not the only, then certainly the most important means by which new dimensions of the partisan movement and the Second World War have been brought to the fore, shedding light on the specificities of the conflict experienced by women, but also shaping the very notion of resistance by overcoming a purely militarist vision.

The analytical framework, “policy innovation through bureaucratic reorganization,” elucidates how the policy implementation process can be restructured to affect its outputs. Three steps from the framework are applied to the case of Republican officeholders between 1906 and 1913, who centralized their control over immigration, by adding naturalization and enforcement in the new Bureau of Immigration & Naturalization. The Roosevelt and Taft administrations used budgeting, staffing, and infrastructure to regulate immigration and naturalization laws, pivoting between easing and tightening them (resource adjustment). The shifts responded to coalitions for and against immigration (coalition management). Until the Bureau became obsolete and was reconfigured (system redesign). Although immigration was open in the Progressive Era, this study reveals how Republicans managed inflows with mixed results, leading to the structural foundation for the restrictive laws that followed. This furthers the immigration history and political control literatures as they emphasize policymaking through legislative and procedural, not structural, means.

This article reviews the evolution of the representation of Italy’s ‘Catholic partisan’. In essence, this involved adaptation of the model of the Catholic soldier, who was able to kill out of love and ‘without hatred’, to the context of a civil war. With particular reference to the case of the central Veneto, this examination looks back to earlier Italian experiences during wartime to help explain how Catholic activists and the partisan groups linked to the Catholic world addressed the key issues of the legitimation of Resistance violence and the control of its use. It emphasises the disparity between the rhetoric directed at containing the violence and the realities of guerrilla warfare. The article goes on to analyse the different models of the ‘Catholic partisan’ put forward in the immediate postwar period (1945–1950): the ‘Catholic soldier’, with his military bearing; the ‘pure martyr’, who never initiated violence; and the ‘devout partisan’, who managed to restrict his use of violence, assessing its costs and benefits, and was characterised by his inclination to forgive and, especially, to kill as little as possible. The conclusions consider how a particular rhetoric helped to shape the narrative of the active involvement of Catholics in the Italian Resistance.

The ubiquitous presence of motorbike taxi drivers on the streets of Kampala, Uganda, has long been the subject of academic inquiry. This article interrogates the visible political symbols displayed on the motorbikes and the clothing of drivers, arguing that the aesthetic choices of drivers offer new ways of imagining Ugandan state pasts and futures. While the 2021 Ugandan presidential election has often been framed as a binary choice between President Museveni and Robert Ssentamu (popularly known by his stage name Bobi Wine), I propose that drivers’ conscious decision to display divergent political symbols must be understood through the history of cosmopolitanism in Kampala. Taking seriously the diversity of political visions suggested by the aesthetic markers of drivers enables us to appreciate the multifaceted challenges and possibilities for Uganda’s political future.

Historians continue to debate what form colonial rule took in early modern Ireland. This article explores how the reception and resistance to anglicisation, located in the everyday body language of submission and subordination encoded in gesture, might be understood in the experience of colonial rule. Exploring the gestural code operating in early modern Ireland, this article examines the role of body politics in the reception of and reaction to English rule. English ‘manners and apparel’ were central to the project of anglicisation. The body played a central role in representing and articulating social hierarchies in the early modern world. Body language offered a troubling everyday reminder of the inequalities signalled in the — non-reciprocal or non-reciprocated — gestures expected of ‘subordinates’ towards ‘superiors’. If the enforcement of the gestural order was important to the establishment of English rule, this also made gesture a focus for resistance and opposition. A body politics that exploited a shared understanding of the meaning of particular gestures could be drawn on in both everyday politics and collective protests to subvert, resist and retaliate against the political agenda of anglicisation. Looking forward to the eighteenth century and beyond state action, the article calls for more work on gesture.