When Thomas Ellwood repeatedly flouted his father’s command in 1659 to stay away from the Quakers, his behaviour provoked bitter family quarrels and a beating, until his father eventually found a surprising solution: he confiscated all his son’s hats. Thomas became in effect a prisoner in the house, accepting that it would be unthinkable to go outside without a hat. However strange to us today, this made perfect sense to contemporaries, and such episodes remind us that the multifaceted conventions surrounding dress played an important role in early modern culture. When, where, and how hats were worn, and the gestures in which they featured, conveyed signals about identity and status, could sustain, display, or defy social hierarchies and relationships, and asserted political or religious loyalties.

This article analyses the political economy of consumption in Poland during the crisis of 1980–1 through economic-policy debates among Communist Party and Solidarity experts. It asks how conflicts over everyday economic needs shaped political confrontation and the decision to impose martial law. The central argument is that the crisis resulted not from a simple failure of socialist production but from the erosion of a paternalistic system of allocating goods. This weakness was exposed both by Solidarity’s challenge to the state’s monopoly over defining scarcity and by the party’s own long-term consumer policies based on austerity as a recurrent instrument of governance whose implementation became politically blocked. The article outlines the systemic logic of socialist consumption, emphasizing accumulation, subsidized prices, and chronic allocation tensions, and examines late 1970s debates on needs and rational consumption. It then analyses the 1980–1 confrontation, showing how Solidarity legitimized consumer grievances yet resisted responsibility for stabilization, producing policy paralysis. Finally, it demonstrates how martial law enabled comprehensive austerity and price reform aimed at restoring financial stability and external creditworthiness. Based on Communist Party and Solidarity documentation, the article shows how struggles over consumption revealed structural limits of paternalistic governance under late socialism.

Migration history is a growing field – yet the legal status of migrants in early modern England has not yet been investigated in detail. Reconstructing the legal system that governed migrants in early modern England does not just add significant depth and nuance to histories of migration and migrants, but also provides fresh insight into the status of English subjects. Furthermore, it enables historians to trace longer histories of the exclusion of migrants from rights in England and Britain. This article reconstructs the common law governance of migrants between c. 1540 and c. 1640, showing how common law principles and practices excluded migrants from the rights-bearing status of English subjects. Rather than being governed by the law, migrants were substantively governed under prerogative, a form of governance repeatedly resisted by English subjects. Although some migrants could access (unstable) liberties granted under prerogative, for the most part migrants were also subject to discriminatory local byelaws and licences and commissions granted by the crown for their exploitation. The repeated ‘molestation’ of migrants by informers for working contrary to statute, and petitions against this harassment from migrants suggest this early modern system of immigration control was relatively well understood by both subjects and migrants.

Samuel Pepys had significant professional and social connections to transatlantic slavery in the years covered by his diary and afterwards, mediated by his involvement with two English slave-trading companies – the Royal African Company and the Company of Royal Adventurers trading to Africa. He also owned and sold at least two enslaved people in London in the 1670s and 1680s. This article uses previously neglected manuscript evidence to reassess Pepys’s involvement in enslavement and his status as an enslaver. It emphasizes three themes: the relationship between Pepys’s official connections to the African companies and his private ownership of enslaved people; the development of his involvement in slavery within his extensive social and professional networks; and Pepys’s own agency in curating his official and personal archives to shape and limit our knowledge of his slave ownership. In doing so, it considers how the consciously expressed professional and ethical priorities of administrators and slave-owners like Pepys shaped the complex archival traces of slavery in England and erased the experiences and voices of enslaved people.

Newspaper reporters routinely occupied the galleries of the adversarial and inquisitorial courts at the beginning of the twentieth century but whether their shorthand progressed to publication and into the public domain was sensitive to many factors. Newsworthy cases were self-selecting; headlines could be quickly constituted from verdicts and riders, and the verbatim replication of proceedings provided editors with ready content safe from libel. Scholars of Ireland rely heavily on digitized newspapers as surrogate sources for legal records destroyed in 1922, but the extent to which they can be used in that respect merits further and detailed research. This article takes a case study approach to show the methodological challenges faced by historians dealing with partial archival pasts and why digitized newspapers should be used with great caution. Using a sample of cases from Irish coronial court registers, it traces newspaper coverage over the course of a census year to ascertain discernible patterns. With a particular focus on suicide, it exposes the problems associated with using digitized newspapers in historical research, the limitations of search engine capacities, as well as the necessity for more critical analysis of the embedded gender and class biases that influenced editorial decisions.

This article overturns the assumption that early modern ballads include too much godly, moralizing content to be considered part of news culture. It uses a wide range of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English ballads in print and manuscript to demonstrate that one of the news ballad’s most significant features was the inclusion of providence – the ongoing supernatural workings of God in the material world. Placing these songs in the context of other cheap print genres and drawing on research into the role of religion in everyday life, the article shows that rather than undermining the ballad’s role in news culture, providence defined it. Moreover, the early modern distinction between God’s overall plan and specific examples of his intervention in earthly affairs helps to subdivide the genre into those where providence forms an editorial line and those where providence itself provides the story. This second type has traditionally been seen as godly rather than ‘newsy’. Understanding providence shows that those ballads which have been dismissed as more moralistic than topical in fact shared the most important news people could hear.

First published in 1614, John Selden’s Titles of honor has long been ignored by historians of political thought. A large and compendious description of the various titles of Europe and the Near East; by its structure and tone, it resembles nothing more than a work of dusty antiquarianism. It attracted none of the controversy that would plague Selden’s Historie of tithes (1618); and it did not state its polemical purpose in such explicit terms as his Mare clausum (1635). If historians of political thought have remembered it at all, they have done so because Thomas Hobbes recommended the work in chapter 10 of Leviathan (1651). This article will treat Titles of honor as a work of political intention. Following Selden’s engagement with Roman Civil Law, it will argue that he composed the treatise to criticize sixteenth-century theories of resistance, and the medieval theories of divided sovereignty upon which they were founded. In short, this article will seek to reframe Titles of honor as a defence of state sovereignty against theories of noble resistance – and so explain Hobbes’s affection for the work.

Up to 1616, when the Copernican theory of heliocentrism was prohibited, Galileo had never asserted its truth. But the pope and cardinals of the Roman Inquisition assumed that he had, and he was required to repudiate it. In contrast, Copernicus’s book was only lightly corrected and allowed to be read. Galileo continued his practice of not asserting the reality of heliocentrism in his Dialogue on the two world systems, but he was put on trial nevertheless, in 1633. However, instead of being charged with a crime to be proved, as required by canon law, he was subjected to pre-trial interrogation and intimidation, and he confessed to a made-up crime. His conviction entailed another repudiation of the static sun, on pain of harsh punishment. In subsequent years, even though he was reckless in expressing preference for the condemned theory, he still did not advocate it. In fact, in writing to the Tuscan ambassador to Venice in 1641, he insisted that the Copernican system was false, because theologians said so. However, he went on to say that the opposing Ptolemaic view was actually erroneous, while the other was merely insufficient – because stellar parallax (which would prove the earth’s orbit) could not yet be measured.

Recently, there have been several histories of the British Empire written through the lens of a single family. These works – which this review refers to as imperial family biographies – trace the activities, ideas, and/or connections of a group of individuals from the same family, usually spanning more than one generation, as they roved across the time and space of empire. They facilitate an understanding of a networked, informal British Empire, held together by personal bonds and material goods, and an imperial politics shaped by emotions, affections, and identities. Currently, imperial family biographies tend to prioritize asking what families can reveal about empire, rather than what empire can reveal about families; family networks are used as case studies, dictating the bounds of study and illustrating wider imperial themes. This review argues that this genre of history writing is most successful when families are interpreted as imperial agents that drove historical change, rather than merely conduits for individual action or means by which individuals were connected across empire. This can be achieved through a thorough engagement with the historiography on families and through centralizing concepts such as family identity, family culture, family structure, and family function.

This article offers an in-depth analysis of a little-known work, George Wallace’s A system of the principles of the law of Scotland (1760), which contains the first text in Britain that explicitly advocated total and immediate abolition of both slavery and the slave trade. Wallace’s demand was that the Scottish court immediately recognize the inalienable natural liberty of any person arriving from the American colonies, and he thus anticipated by over a decade the first court cases in Britain which did precisely that. But Wallace went even further, drawing on a wide range of ideas and theories to reject any possible justification for slavery in any form. This article discusses the ways in which he constructed his novel philosophical, political, and legal arguments, the intellectual context of his uncompromising antislavery position, and the surprisingly wide reception of his now-forgotten work. It focuses on Wallace’s nuanced engagements with his multiple sources, including his debts to Montesquieu and to his father, Robert Wallace, a freethinking Church of Scotland minister. Close attention is given to George Wallace’s radical appropriation of Roman law, as well as the laws of nature and nations – traditions that had previously been used to justify, rather than challenge, slavery.

This article examines how three nineteenth- and twentieth-century philanthropic organizations – the British Aborigines’ Protection Society (APS), the American Indian Rights Association (IRA), and the Australian Association for the Protection of Native Races (APNR) – functioned simultaneously as opponents of colonial violence as well as instruments of colonial governance. These groups were vociferous advocates for Indigenous rights and welfare, yet they also directly contributed to building administrative structures of empire. The APS worked to generate metropolitan interest in Indigenous affairs, framing protectorates as both economically beneficial and a matter of national security. The IRA positioned itself as a fact-finding body, supplying the US government with on-the-ground surveillance that enabled more precise administrative control. The APNR acted as a public relations arm for Australian settler governments, deflecting criticism of state violence while promoting assimilationist policies. All three organizations reinforced colonial authority by outsourcing key governmental functions to private actors, and their reliance on voluntary labour and philanthropic donations underscores the contingency of imperial rule on non-state institutions. Bridging historiographies of humanitarian activism and colonial governance, this article argues that these groups were not merely critics or collaborators but infrastructural components of empire.

Taking its departure from the dependence on human and equine bodies to be healthy and capable of performing their various tasks in early modern societies, the article studies what notions of human and equine health and ability ordinary people embraced, by using a large sample of court cases from Sweden. It is shown that people made sense of human and equine illness as physical weaknesses or as bodily subjugations by disease entities, and that it was not meaningful to differentiate between illness and injury, since a diminished capacity for work was at the core. Particular yardsticks of capability are also identified, in relation to which people’s and horses’ abilities to carry out alternative tasks were assessed. Importantly, it is shown that people did not depart from universal categories of human or equine physiology, but from how individual men, women, and horses used to be and be able to perform certain tasks. An implicit framework of a task-oriented functionality for working bodies is identified, which, it is finally suggested, shows similarities with and predates mechanistic physiology. It is thus suggested that working people’s task-oriented ways of understanding working bodies should be considered in historical studies of the rise of mechanism.

Depictions of numeracy among non-Europeans were a prominent feature of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Anglo-European travel writing, but remain largely overlooked in the extensive scholarship on travel, knowledge, and empire. This article shifts attention from traditionally ‘scientific’ forms of numeracy such as mathematics and astronomy towards more fundamental counting, calculation, and communication skills, to examine the way in which mutually reinforcing hierarchies of otherness and numerical knowledge were constructed in travel accounts. Focusing particularly on writings about China and the Americas, it demonstrates the way in which European written and mathematically precise numeracy was perceived as superior to oral, embodied, and object-based practices observed elsewhere. Exploring the reception of these ideas in eighteenth-century Britain reveals that numeracy became integral to emergent notions of European modernity and civilization. The example of numeracy, this article suggests, demonstrates the interrelationship between social relations in national context and global power structures.

The 1893 drought will, according to the science journal Nature in July, ‘unquestionably take its place among the recorded events of history, if regard be had to its intensity [and] the length of time during which it has lasted’. Communities reported being stretched beyond endurance. Rivers ran dry, reservoirs dropped to record lows, wells failed, and domestic water supplies were restricted to a few hours per day. But while the 1893 drought was severe, it was not unusual. As this article reveals, urban and rural communities faced regular droughts of varying intensity and duration during the long nineteenth century. What did this mean for them? Where previous interest in extreme weather events has focused on recovering historic patterns, or examined resilience or adaption, this article explores the lived experiences of drought to offer a new perspective on the impact of weather shocks and water scarcity on people’s lives. By combining evidence from meteorological reports, newspapers, official reports, and local government archives, the article undercovers the fragility of urban and rural water supplies and examines how behaviours were adapted in response to water scarcity and precarity.

Asianism, the idea that Asian nations should unite and overcome Western imperialism, was thought to have faded as the Second World War ended. At that point, China appeared embroiled in a civil war, India in Partition. Yet their visions for Asia’s future have been overlooked. This article examines how they envisioned Asia’s economic revival through the UN Economic Commission for Asia and the Far East (ECAFE). It argues that the Chinese diplomat P. C. Chang, frustrated with a Eurocentric UN, led UN members in the Global South to advocate an institution that supported Asia’s developmental aims. Although China and India believed that ECAFE should help Asian economies surpass their pre-war levels, they disagreed on how to achieve that object. ECAFE was not simply an example of the neglected post-war Asianism and non-Japanese Asianism. Chinese and Indian ideas about ECAFE helped redefine Asia’s self-identity: from a shared cultural heritage to prosperity and ‘modernity’. However, despite the rhetoric of unity, the disagreements between China and India over ECAFE indicate that Asia in the late 1940s lacked international solidarity. As Nationalist China declined, India supplanted its leadership of Asianism. The competition between different strands of Asianism helped lead to alternative post-war visions, such as Afro-Asian internationalism.