This article examines the lived experiences of the older body—the embodiment of old age—from the perspective of older people. It uses letters written from 1680 to 1820 by twenty-two women and men aged between sixty and eighty-nine, selected from a corpus of over 391 letter writers. We begin by exploring the embodied experiences discussed by older people, as well as their understanding of the relationship between these experiences and their later years. The article finds that old age was experienced as highly variable and was subject to an ongoing process of recalibration. Central to that process was the corporeality of the aging body as experienced in the context of a range of social factors. The corporeality of the body was a factor for all but was not always framed negatively or even situated in the context of aging. The article then turns to the responses of older people to the life-stage of old age. The article finds them self-directed and proactive in continuing to live well. This is significant evidence for a self-consciously active, engaged, and embodied old age in early modernity. These older letter writers tended not to disavow old age but to accommodate and even embrace it.

This Roundtable marks the beginning of a new era for the Journal of British Studies (JBS). Volume 63, issue 4, October 2024, was the last traditional issue printed on paper. No longer will members of the North American Conference on British Studies receive a bound volume quarterly in the mail. We fully understand that for many of our readers the end of print is emotionally wrought, and it constitutes a loss that is tangible and personal. We know that many people enjoy reading the journal from cover to cover, or dipping in and out, and then archiving it on their bookshelves for future use. In using the journal in this way, our readers have cherished JBS as a material object. As scholars born into an age of mass communication, cheap print, long distance shipping, and widespread literacy, we have taken the format of the academic journal for granted. But as historians we know better than anyone that the only thing constant is change. This Roundtable demonstrates that print—what it is, what it enables, what it means—has always been both capacious and contentious. As editors, we hope these essays spark a critical consideration of the age of print and encourage us to move forward into the new era together, innovating in the ways we produce, disseminate, and consume knowledge.

Ces dernières décennies, certains travaux ont cherché à montrer que le plus-que-parfait tend à développer des emplois de passé perfectif dépourvus de toute notion d’antériorité. Le but du présent article est de reconsidérer ces analyses, en accordant davantage d’importance à l’anaphoricité de ce temps verbal. Après avoir rappelé les principales propriétés du plus-que-parfait, l’auteur note que les exemples discutés dans ces travaux concernent essentiellement deux contextes d’emploi. Plusieurs de ces exemples sont ici repris et réanalysés. L’auteur en conclut que ces travaux sous-estiment le rôle de l’implicite dans le fonctionnement anaphorique du plus-que-parfait, en exigeant inutilement la présence d’une expression temporelle susceptible d’interpréter l’anaphorique (antécédent). Il en résulte que l’hypothèse parfois avancée d’une aoristisation de ce temps verbal, outre son coût théorique, s’avère inappropriée.

Can United Nations peace operations improve their effectiveness and strengthen longer-term positive legacies in host nations by shifting to greater use of renewable energy? Since the end of the Cold War and the growth of modern UN peace operations, attention has been focused on the missions’ mandate of supporting political strategies for peace and core objectives such as protecting civilians. Could missions better meet their mandate with improved energy options and reduced emissions, or is there a trade-off with the core objectives? As the missions are nearly fully dependent on diesel generators to power their operations, what is the UN’s responsibility to reduce emissions at a time when addressing climate change is a priority of the UN Secretary-General? Is there an ethical case to make for the UN to support greater use of renewable energy where it operates? And could the UN partner with host nations and others to support a shift in energy use that benefits the communities that host peace operations? This essay argues that missions could reduce their emissions and leverage their energy needs to increase security, strengthen ties to local communities, increase energy access, and support the climate goals of host nations. Drawing on case studies in recent peacekeeping missions and the author’s review of UN commitments across mandates, the Sustainable Development Goals, peacebuilding, and climate goals, this essay will address this area of potential innovation that can help build a positive legacy for UN missions and countries emerging from conflict.

Since 2020, the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh has intensified, culminating in a 44-day war in 2020 and an Azerbaijani military offensive in September 2023 when Azerbaijan reclaimed control over the Nagorno-Karabakh territory. This has ushered in a new phase of the Karabakh peace process amidst a transformed security landscape in the Caucasus. Against the background of a more general reconceptualization of Armenia’s role in the region, shifting away from its traditional alliance with Russia towards closer ties with the West, the article examines the role of women in Armenia in this peace process and their postwar opportunities for agency. The analysis reveals that women’s substantive inclusion in Armenia’s peace process remains limited due to (1) elite-dominated hard power negotiation structures and militarized discourses, (2) societal and economic factors, and (3) “self-exclusion” of women and the need for empowerment. Despite these challenges, the article identifies opportunities for women to assert agency in Armenia’s new security environment, contributing to a more effective, sustainable, and inclusive peace process.

In nineteenth-century London, theater-going was a genuinely mass activity. Within a rapidly expanding entertainment industry, working-class playgoers abounded. Opened to the public in 1818, the Coburg Theatre, later renamed the Victoria and known as the Vic, developed an especially strong association with popular drama. Although much has been written on the kind of work that places like the Vic presented, much less has been said about their operation as plebeian public spheres, or what I term here “radical half-spaces.” Active in the campaign for political reform in the early 1830s, and the site of numerous socially critical melodramas, under the joint managerial team of David Osbaldiston and Eliza Vincent, the Coburg/Victoria would later align itself to Chartism. All the while, the theater continued to function as a profitable commercial enterprise. By showing how audiences at the Vic sought (and found) knowledge and cultural capital, as much as entertainment and spectacle, the article suggests that when considering the period's alternative radical spaces, account should be made of such avowedly populist establishments as London's minor theaters, and the complex assemblages of time, place, and people they represented.

Riga, the capital of Soviet Latvia, was the first city in the USSR where television was created outside the Slavic linguistic space. This presented Soviet television with a brand new challenge of tackling bilingualism in the only available television programme, bringing with it viewer frustration as reflected in letters addressed to the studio. To relieve the republican television studios and their only programmes from the issue of bilingualism, in 1960, the CPSU called for the creation of a second republican programme – the retransmission of Moscow’s Central Television. This article tracks the development of the issue, focusing on the case study of a western-orientated, non-Slavic Soviet republic where negotiations regarding the place of Russian in a given field of public life took fifteen years, involving stakeholders of various levels. Thus, the article offers an opportunity to study certain aspects of Soviet nationality policies in the Soviet Western periphery under Khrushchev and Brezhnev from the viewpoint of a single, specified problem.

To delay paying wages to seamen, the late Stuart Navy issued them instead with “tickets” to be redeemed for cash after months or years of delay. Seamen often sold the tickets at deep discounts to ticket buyers, who became government creditors for unpaid wages, one of the largest items in the national debt. Ticket buyers were savagely attacked in pamphlets. This article is a preliminary exploration of ticket buying, focusing on the large minority of buyers who were women. It shows that many of them were in fact the wives and widows of the seamen, working in the crowded streets around the Navy Office and in the cottages of the maritime communities nearby. Navy pay books are introduced as a key source; the business of one trader is evaluated using her financial papers, and the work of others assessed from probate records. Ticket buying opened up related opportunities for women as brokers of deals and as professional receivers of wages. But while pawning could be used as protection against the growing hazard of unpaid tickets, even with deep discounts it was difficult to make even a moderate return in the trade. Ticket buying was not a route to fortunes.

What political imaginaries have existed beyond the nation-state? What might the misfitting (queer?) materials of the past—those unamenable to inclusion in narratives of national resistance—teach us about colonial and apartheid pasts? What alternatives to the colony and its contemporary forms might we imagine now? To respond to these questions, this essay assembles an archive of twentieth-century Capetonian queenliness, placing the historical Queen Elizabeth in proximity with textual renderings of the queer queens of apartheid Cape Town. A fictional, tongue-in-cheek, book review, published in Drum magazine in 1977, figures as a paradigmatic text of a mid-century popular textual genre that is animated by the sensibility that I call “camp royalist.” The critical impetus that animates camp royalism provokes us to reconsider how we represent colonial and apartheid pasts and invites us to think about possible future, nonnational, political collectivities and critiques.

This essay examines the working relationship between Charles Darwin and the Edinburgh gardener John Scott that developed in the wake of the publishing of the Origin of Species (1859). As the essay shows, Darwin sought to utilize Scott’s horticultural knowledge and experimental expertise in order to provide some of the specialized botanical evidence that the Origin was not intended to provide. Scott, meanwhile, sought to use Darwin’s patronage and tutelage in order to overcome his modest status as a gardener while making contributions to scientific knowledge. And for an intense two-year period (1862–4), Darwin and Scott’s relationship was productive and mutually beneficial: not only did Scott’s work supplement Darwin’s ongoing botanical research on sexual development and fertility, but also his Primula experiments appeared to provide ‘physiological’ evidence of speciation via selective breeding. What the essay argues, however, is that there were limits to what Scott was able to achieve due in part to his social standing and perceived character that ultimately cast a shadow over his findings.

Sir Albert Howard helped popularize the idea of translating ‘Eastern’ practice into ‘Western’ science in the field of agriculture. His approach to composting has been foundational to organic farming and counterposed with the field of agricultural chemistry. This depiction of feuding ideologies – organic versus chemical – is based largely on Howard’s opposition to the fragmentation of scientific knowledge and its products, especially artificial fertilizer. One underexplored aspect of Howard’s contest with the agricultural research establishment is the role played by intellectual property. This article contributes to Howard’s historiography by examining three topics related to his life’s work that concern money and patents: (1) the financial support for the Institute of Plant Industry at Indore, (2) an artificial manure patented by employees at Rothamsted Experimental Station and (3) a rival method in British municipal composting. I argue that Howard’s ideological difference with agricultural chemists was not reducible to generating soil fertility with compost. Rather, the feud consisted of a larger debate about innovation, ownership and the societal benefits of scientific research.

The study of the history of science is widely understood to be undergoing a profound and much-needed transformation, from a subject focused on Europe to one encompassing the entire world. Yet the aims of the field have always been global. During the decades after the Second World War the inevitable progress of Western science was seen as the key to its role in world history. From the 1970s the rise of cultural history and laboratory ethnographies undermined this assumption. Indebted to colonial anthropology, these approaches revealed that the power of science was not inherent, but the result of local and contingent processes. Explanation needed to be symmetrical in analysing practices of all kinds wherever they were found, from economics and divination in West Africa to supernatural healing and particle physics in the American heartland. The geographical and conceptual broadening of the field is thus a long-delayed outcome of developments extending back many decades. It also means that references to the ‘global’ in history of science – even more than elsewhere in the humanities – continue to resonate with the universalizing aims of the natural and social sciences.