Social media content creation is hugely popular with second-generation Arab immigrants to the UAE who lack a path to naturalized citizenship, particularly as a space to perform their belonging in the nation. This essay analyzes the work of two Arabophone content creators on Instagram and YouTube who use comedy to perform as quintessential “Dubai kids.” While they align with the state mission of presenting the UAE positively on social media, these creators produce ironic content that makes visible practices of belonging by second-generation youth who distance themselves from inherited politics of national and gender identity. The affective communities that form around these satirical content creators offer a model of belonging in which binaries of citizen and noncitizen can be elided, staging performances of immigrant identity uniquely local to the UAE.

Historians have long argued that abolitionism, as a distinct political project, never fully took root in the Ottoman Empire. While anti-slavery measures emerged from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, they are often seen as state-imposed responses to diplomatic pressure. From a state-focused perspective, abolition indeed appears to be the result of actions by the Ottoman state and international community, inevitably so, given its entanglement with the emergence and development of the Congress system in the aftermath of the Congress of Vienna. Yet a focus on individuals, organizations, and institutions also suggests a subversive, practical abolitionism concerned with everyday injustices rather than lofty ideals. This paper examines such efforts, reframing abolitionism as a political issue rather than a moral one detached from broader transformations. By situating abolitionist thought within the late Ottoman Empire’s increasingly radical politics, it challenges the conventional state-centered narrative, highlighting the diverse actors who shaped anti-slavery discourse and action.

By examining how Irish racial attitudes intersected with national and cultural identity, this article dismantles the idea that conceptions of race and racism are somehow peripheral or irrelevant to the nation's social history. Outlining a series of racialised incidents perpetrated against overseas students in mid-twentieth-century Ireland, it explains how attitudes to newcomers and ethnic ‘others’ can shed new light on post-independence national identity. By highlighting these distinctive aspects of national discourse, this article begins incorporating Irish understandings of race and diversity into the overwhelmingly white field of Irish history. It also adds an Irish perspective to a growing body of literature on race in predominantly white societies and challenges scholars to consider how conceptions of history, culture and identity fostered social inclusion and exclusion and conditioned attitudes to national and ethnic outsiders.

The 1892 collision between the British merchant ship Ravenna and the Japanese torpedo boat Chishima generated a three-year legal debate over jurisdiction in territorial waters. Challenging the conventional notion that the coastal State enjoyed full sovereignty over its maritime territory, this article argues that contested jurisdiction in territorial waters was ubiquitous at the turn of the twentieth century. In addition to imperialism, which played a pivotal role in transforming the coastal waters of semi-colonial countries into overlapping legal zones, political speculations and the absence of a uniform legal standard also put the coastal State's assertion of maritime sovereignty into question. On the one hand, semi-colonial states, such as the Meiji government, sometimes strategically avoided asserting maritime sovereignty when they deemed it appropriate for national interests. On the other hand, there was also a wide cleavage of opinions among Western powers regarding coastal jurisdiction. Scrutinizing the entangled currents of imperialism, political speculations and maritime laws in the Chishima case, this article contributes to the burgeoning scholarship on the polycentric oceanic world by displaying the rarely discussed contested jurisdiction in territorial waters before World War II.

This article explores the Department of Education's programme of co-operation and rationalisation within the Irish post-primary school sector during the period 1966–70. Through a systematic analysis of government files and private convent archival collections, especially those of the Presentation Sisters, combined with oral history interviews, this study provides a unique insight into how co-operation and rationalisation in the post-primary sector were reconciled at ground level. It exposes the previously hidden history of voluntary secondary school authorities and the role they played in educational reform during the 1960s and explores how individual school authorities received, responded to and reacted to this new government initiative. To a large extent, the success of co-operation and rationalisation depended on the willingness of school authorities to accept and comply with departmental directives. This study, thus, expands understandings of the history of the Irish education system in general and of the reform period (c.1957‒72) in particular.

This article examines Catholic architecture in Ireland prior to the passage of An act for the relief of His Majesty's Roman Catholic subjects (10 Geo IV, c. 7), popularly known as the Act of Emancipation, in 1829. It focuses on one case study building — the chapel, now church, of St John the Baptist in Cashel, County Tipperary. Bringing together a range of documentary and visual sources, this building is analysed according to its site, its specific architectural stylistic features, and in relation to the social and liturgical contexts for its development. The article contributes to the ongoing reassessment of the impact of the penal laws and the varied experiences of Catholics through the late eighteenth-century period of relief and reform, through its spatial, formal and contextual close reading of one hitherto overlooked building. In doing so, it deepens understanding of how architecture was used as a statement of civic identity and political intention by Catholics of status and means. It also contributes to contemporary understandings of regional classicism and to the specific meaning of ecclesiastical architectural style in late-eighteenth-century Ireland across denominations. Finally, this article considers the treatment and ‘strategic forgetting’ of this period of pre-1829 Catholic building activity during the era of grand architectural expansion at the end of the nineteenth century.

In English testamentary history, there is a clear divide between Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman testamentary practice, with the primary difference being that in the latter case, heritable land could not be bequeathed. Once the transfer of land required the livery of seisin, a practice introduced during the reign of Henry II (1154–89), it was not possible for a gift of land to take effect upon the death of the owner, and the royal courts did not consider the intention to dispose of a tenement, as expressed in a will, sufficient in itself to complete the transfer. Nonetheless, an examination of extant wills from the period 1180–1300 demonstrates that some testators (or indeed beneficiaries) may have thought that bequests of land were possible or even enforceable. How do these wills fit into the legal framework of the time? If a bequest could not be enforced in the royal courts, what reasons might someone have for attempting to make one, and how might they try to ensure that the bequest held?

This article uses inventory evidence for the possessions of households in later fifteenth-century County Dublin, an area largely characterised by rural settlement. Because household goods are often only indifferently recorded, its focus is less on individual cases than on larger patterns of consumption between social groups. In particular, by making comparisons with inventories from later medieval England and from the wine-growing Gers region of south-west France in the mid fifteenth century, it explores both how far evidence from County Dublin fits within and helps suggest wider European ‘peasant’ and ‘bourgeois’ patterns of consumption. By extension it explores the boundaries between the urban and the rural and how far a hybrid suburban identity can be discerned. In some cases a combination of close reading and statistical analysis is used to recover occupational identities, something that the source does not specifically record. The significance of the material culture of specific households is examined in two instances — one that of Lady Margaret Nugent, a wealthy and devout widow living in Dublin's St Michan's parish, and the other that of a couple who managed an inn located next to one of the city gates.