The Panama Canal was officially opened on 15 August 1914. At this point, the United States had been the builder of a difficult and controversial project for ten years and was to be the operator of the most important link between the Atlantic and the Pacific. To do this, it first helped Panama to independence, immediately annexing the canal zone. Thus, the construction of the canal is a classic lesson in colonial, (inter-)national politics and its interdependencies in the early twentieth century. At the same time, Panama was a fairly widespread topic of US popular music. This article investigates the effects of politics on cultural life, using the example of popular music referring to Panama. Applying a postcolonial approach, it will study the musical ways in which the United States constructed its pseudo-colony Panama as an Other in order to exercise power there and continue to form its own national identity.

Much of West Africa (and particularly the Sahel) may be once falling again under military government. This essay asks what, if anything, historians of Africa can contribute to an understanding of this phenomenon. I argue that writing the history and understanding the memory of military government will entail a renewed approach to political history and social theory. It will also entail confronting — just as so many citizens are currently doing — the peculiar failures of democracy in Africa's neoliberal era.

A debate has raged for decades over legal pluralism and its value for the study of law. Much of this back and forth has resolved to a fight over what law “is” and push-and-pull between legal centrists and pluralists. This introductory essay proposes a new framework for thinking about legal pluralism. Turning away from the centrist/pluralist binary, we instead ask what work legal pluralism as a category of analysis can do. The debate, we suggest, is a fundamental methodological disagreement about the normative work that categories of analysis do and the costs that historians should be willing to pay to reap the benefits of theoretically sophisticated frameworks of analysis which are interoperable between times and places. The debate about legal pluralism, we argue, can be productively reframed as a question about the benefits and drawbacks of the legal pluralist framework.

In 1064, Donnchad mac Briain, son of Brian Bóroma and deposed claimant to the kingship of Ireland, went on pilgrimage to Rome, where he was buried in the important basilica and martyr shrine of S. Stefano Rotondo on the Caelian Hill. More than a century later, in the transformative period 1176–1203 which followed the English conquest of Ireland, the papal legati a latere sent with full legatine authority and jurisdiction in Ireland appear to have been drawn exclusively from the church of S. Stefano. This article first considers the circumstances and symbolism of Donnchad's pilgrimage and burial, alongside its long-term impact on Hiberno-Papal relations and on the papacy's conceptions of Irish sovereignty in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. It also explores the careers and missions of the cardinal priests and papal legates of S. Stefano to the peripheries of Latin Christendom in the long twelfth century, including at least one legate in Ireland, Gerard, who has hitherto awaited formal identification. Based on the legatine evidence, it suggests that in the decades of the English invasion, the papacy began using the burial site of the heir to arguably the last effective king of Ireland as part of a conscious and consistent rhetorical strategy, allowing it to dispose matters of sovereignty in Ireland.

This article discusses political ‘moderates’, those individuals who reacted to the turmoil of the War of Independence by coalescing around a vision of a dominion of Ireland within the British Empire, with appropriate safeguards for minorities. It will consider how reformist gentry, parliamentary and former unionist elements came together to bring about their preferred settlement. Through statistical examination of the membership of the Irish Dominion League, the leading moderate movement, it will establish the political backgrounds, religion and social class of supporters, and demonstrate the various means by which moderates worked as intermediaries between British forces and the rebels. Southern unionists made efforts to avoid working with moderates and to retain a distinct political identity, and, ultimately, divisions within the movement, and the changing structure of Irish politics, inhibited the creation of an effective moderate party.

George Leonard Staunton, who travelled on the first British embassy to China in 1793, and his son George Thomas Staunton, who translated the Chinese legal code into English, are well-known figures in the history of China. Their British identity was constructed by George Thomas to conceal the family's Irish Catholic background, but in fact George Leonard used that background for the benefit of an imperial career that propelled him from Galway to the West Indies, India and, finally, China. It enabled him to win the support of the papacy for the British embassy to China, and his son to learn Chinese and make a career as a merchant and translator. Their story shows some of the mechanisms that connected the nineteenth-century British Empire in Asia to the Catholic Church which had been the great global institution of the early modern age. Moreover, a distinctively Irish concern with property law can be seen to have influenced George Thomas's great work on Chinese law. The Stauntons’ imperial careers made the family wealthy and much of this wealth came back to County Galway.

This article offers an in-depth examination of Sir Tobie Matthew’s conversion as an attempt to understand not only the internal process of conversion for one individual, but also its meaning for the English Catholic community during the early seventeenth-century. Matthew was an extraordinary figure. He was both learned and extremely well-connected, with friends in the highest echelons of the Roman Catholic Church, and in English society, and this despite his conversion. He maintained those relationships to his benefit throughout his life. Officially he was at times an exile from England and at other times at court, nonetheless he was always at the centre of dynastic politics. He maintained loyalty to England throughout his life, but clearly felt a draw to Catholicism for its intellectual tradition, emotional appeal, his desire to travel; and, perhaps, also for reasons of sexuality. Sir Tobie’s conversion reveals just how complex the relationship between religious and national identity could be after the Reformations.