This article analyses the struggle for possession of the House of Baha’u’llah in Baghdad during the 1920s and 1930s. One of the Bahai religion’s most sacred sites, the House of Baha’u’llah was the subject of protracted legal and political-diplomatic disputes following efforts by anti-Bahai activists to appropriate it from its Bahai custodians in 1921. The ensuing case touched almost every facet of the Iraqi judicial system, galvanised the international Bahai community and captured the attention of the British colonial state, the Iraqi government and the League of Nations. This article explores the causes and implications of the dispute, which can be considered one of the first incidents of religious persecution in modern Iraq. Rather than explaining the incident with reference to the intolerant attitudes of the Shi`i majority, the article argues for the role of the institutions of colonial modernity – the Mandates system, the new minorities regime, the praxis and discourse of colonial expansion, and the internationalism of the interwar period – for the unravelling of the case itself and for affecting modern, secular articulations of anti-Bahai prejudice.

In 1610, just over fifty men were granted hundreds of thousands of acres of land as part of the estates allocated to English undertakers in the Ulster Plantation in the counties of Armagh, Cavan, Donegal, Fermanagh and Tyrone. Exactly who these individuals were and why they were given estates remains understudied. This article closely explores the process whereby lands were petitioned for by consortiums of individuals in 1609 and early 1610, before assessing who, from amongst the well over 100 applicants, were actually granted lands. Where possible, it considers the background of many these individuals, their ties to the court and officials in England and Ireland, and their material resources. It also highlights how the applicants for lands who had the greatest financial means to make a success of it were generally ignored in favour of petitioners whose ability, from a material perspective, to implement the articles of plantation was highly dubious, something which many senior officials, such as the viceroy of Ireland, Arthur Chichester, had been anxious to avoid.

A long tradition of comparative scholarship has succeeded to establish the impact of Roman legal environment on rabbinic law making during the first two centuries CE, particularly in the field of family and status. Yet, the specific channels for acquiring this knowledge have hitherto remained a matter of conjecture. This paper argues that the rabbis were exposed to the contents of the current legal handbooks. Tractate Qiddushin (on betrothal) of the Mishnah includes two peculiar units: the first (1.1–5) regarding forms of acquisition and the second (3.12) on the status of newborns. Both units appear in key points in the tractate and exhibit striking structural and conceptual similarities to extended portions of the Roman school tradition regarding the laws of status, as handed down in Gaius’ Institutes and Pseudo-Ulpian's liber singularis regularum. It is therefore suggested that these units provide the earliest literary attestation already around the turn of the third century CE for the dissemination of Roman legal education among non-Roman provincials in the East, who sought to adjust their local practices into Roman-like legal structures.

This article revisits the roots of anti-statism in the United States by analyzing opposition to the introduction of compulsory school vaccination and medical examinations at the local and state levels in the Progressive Era. It shows that the widespread use of compulsory schooling laws to promote vaccination in the late nineteenth century, which led to establishing compulsory school medical exams and school nurse programs in the early twentieth, precipitated intense conflicts over states’ police powers. Exploring the controversy over school vaccine requirements in Utah between 1899 and 1901, the article reveals that resistance to public health interventions in schools fused skepticism of science with a gendered defense of individual and parental rights to challenge states’ power over children. The article then traces how these conflicts filtered up to the federal level, framing arguments against a proposed federal department of health in the 1910s. Led by the National League for Medical Freedom, opponents directly linked the reach of the police powers via compulsory school health initiatives with the expansion of federal power, arguing they were connected in a plot to establish “state medicine” that imperiled the gendered freedom of the “individual”—i.e., the white male citizen—over the home.

Until today, not only the general public but also scholars of colonialism and imperialism debate about the extent to which Europeans were aware of the centrality of racial discrimination for colonialism and empires. Those who stress that racism was the foundation of European colonialism appear to be anachronistic. However, as this essay demonstrates, at least the British of the late nineteenth century were well-aware of the constitutive character of racial discrimination for their Empire. During the “constitutional panic” which the proposal of the Ilbert Bill in 1883 caused, the arguments exchanged in newspapers, town hall meetings and parliamentary debates revealed the racist foundation of British India. One contemporary observed “the unhappy tendency of this controversy to bring into broad daylight everything which a wise and prudent administrator should seek to hide.” This essay seeks to bring into broad daylight once again what has been widely forgotten or ignored. Statements in Parliament expressing that it was “perfectly impossible and ridiculous, so long as we retained our hold on India, to give Native races full equality” testify for explicitness of the debate. Analyzing the arguments against the Ilbert Bill, which sought to introduce full racial equality in the judiciary, serves for better understanding the foundation of British India.

‘Nations,’ political geographer Jim MacLaughlin tells us, ‘literally have to be built from the ground up.’ During the Irish Revolution, republicans engaged in the construction of a counter-state which included the sporadic application of alternative policing arrangements and a judiciary in the form of Dáil courts, as well as a representative assembly that was driven underground for much of the War of Independence. However, several recent and highly original works of scholarship underline once again that the revolutionary period was as much about destroying British state apparatus and perceived symbols of colonialism as it was about creating a new nation-state. This thread of destruction has been explored from a micro-level (the burning of a village) to a national level (the burning of roughly 300 country houses). Justin Dolan Stover's highly anticipated Enduring ruin examines environmental destruction between 1916 and 1923 utilising a broad definition of environment that incorporates man-made structures, and their destruction, alongside rural landscapes. Stover's palpable rendering of the Easter Rising, for example, contends that ‘artillery bombardment, machine-gun fire, ensuing fires, looting, the collapse of asbestos-lined tenements, human and animal casualties, and odours indicative of unattended death grounded the rebellion's ruinous scope’ (p. 8). Enduring ruin innovatively elucidates the impact of this unique ‘sensory stamp’ on combatants and civilians while chronicling how propagandists utilised the imagery and language of the Great War to cultivate a sense of victimhood and elicit international sympathy (pp 12–13, 112–18). Other chapters examine the impact of less overtly political environmental damage and the impact of reprisals by crown forces. Like Donlon and Dooley's monographs, Stover tactfully considers the interaction between landscape and people throughout, drawing attention to the important area of the revolutionary period's impact on the mental health of combatants and civilians (pp 74, 92–7). This work adds a highly original perspective by presenting the impact of tree felling, road trenching and incendiarism, contrasting the ‘romanticism’ of sawing trees ‘by hand under the cover of darkness’ with ‘the disillusionment of the mechanised evisceration of nature experienced along the Western Front’ (p. 61). Alongside using weather reports to illustrate how ‘extreme weather did not stymy guerrilla activity’, the author also employs a sample of 2,183 incidents of ‘landscape manipulation and ensuing damage to the built and natural environment’ which, like the burning of big houses, correlates to the more violent areas of the country (pp 70–73).

This article works to recover the life story of Qudsiyya Khurshid, a once well-known Mandate Palestinian intellectual and educator, who wrote essays for publication and for broadcasting on the Palestine Broadcasting Service, while working as a principal at girls’ schools in al-Bireh and Jerusalem. One of a number of educated women active in the Mandate public sphere, she disappeared from public consciousness after the Nakba. But in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, where she had moved with her husband, a naturalized U.S. citizen, she became a prominent figure in civic work and as a community speaker on Palestinian and Middle Eastern life and culture. Recovering her full life story makes it possible to better appreciate the opportunities available for Palestinian women during the Mandate period and to similarly appreciate the efforts and impact of early Palestine activism among displaced Palestinians in the United States.