Maarten Prak's Citizens without Nations merits praise for what he has added to our understanding of early modern and modern European history. He presents persuasive arguments and evidence for how variations among early modern European cities and their citizens together with subsequent variations among relations between cities and state shaped the modern relations between European national states and their citizens. Prak also extends the concept of citizenship to China and the Ottoman Empire where neither the ideological, nor the institutional features of European citizenship existed by discussing Chinese and Ottoman urban social, economic, and political practices that in early modern Europe relate to citizenship. Such a move makes invisible the early modern ideological and institutional foundations of the Chinese and Ottoman practices he recounts. It additionally creates the problem of determining how, if at all, what he calls Chinese and Ottoman citizenship mattered to nineteenth-century Chinese and Ottoman subjects as they encountered for the first time Western notions of citizenship. In order to write global history, we need more studies of Chinese, Ottoman, and other histories, which explain the changing political architecture of relations between people and those who ruled them to complement what Maarten Prak's fine study of citizens without nations gives us for European history.

In Citizens without Nations, I argued that national histories have overlooked a large and significant range of citizenship practices that can be found in towns and cities across the pre-modern world. These practices related to local politics (elections, consultations), to economic activities (guilds), to social policies (poor relief), and to military defence (civic militias). This rejoinder addresses three issues raised by critics Jack Goldstone, Katherine Lynch, and R. Bin Wong in relation to my book on urban citizenship in Europe, Asia, and the Americas: ideas, including religion, nations, and economic growth. All three have a lot to do with the implications of global comparisons. Ideas and nations have taken distinct forms in the various world regions. Foregrounding them makes comparisons more difficult. Urban contexts, on the other hand, can be more easily compared. Economic development was introduced in the book as a benchmark to see if and how citizenship arrangements might have impacted prosperity. The economic numbers are, however, still fragile for the pre-industrial era. Therefore, they will have to be supplemented with qualitative studies, which are slowly but surely emerging also outside Europe.

The collapse of the Soviet Union set Russia’s ruling elites the challenge of nation-building: while “Russians” had to be imagined as a political community on behalf of which the newly established Russian state was ruled, their national history needed to be narrated. Crucial for this enterprise was interpreting the Soviet past. Although the latter was used for political purposes by both Boris Yeltsin (who attempted to break with it) and Vladimir Putin (who established continuity with it), a politically usable interpretation of the Russian Revolutions was never found. Such is the consensus that emerged in 2017. Challenging this consensus, I argue that a specific interpretation of the Revolutions—nested within a narrative that covers Russia’s history from Kievan Rus to the contemporary Russian Federation—has been developed in Russia. Turning Russia’s politically problematic past into a politically usable one, this interpretation is (re)produced through the project Russia—My History. As Russia—My History (initially developed within the Russian Orthodox Church) is becoming a part of state-sponsored efforts to forge an “official” vision of Russian history, the interpretation of the Revolutions (re)produced through it is growing in influence in present-day Russia.

While the furrows of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century religious writing on music have been deeply ploughed, eighteenth-century English sermons about music have received relatively slight scholarly attention. This article demonstrates that the ideas of sympathy and sensibility characteristic of so much eighteenth-century thought are vital to understanding these sermons. There is an evolution in this literature of the notion of sympathy and its link to musical morality, a development in the attitude towards music among clergy, with this art of sympathetic vibrations receiving ever higher approbation during the century's middle decades. By the time that Adam Smith was articulating his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and Handel's oratorios stood as a fixture of English musical life, religious thinkers had cast off old concerns about music's sensuality. They came to embrace a philosophy that accepted music as moral simply because it made humankind feel, and in turn accepted feeling as the root of all sociable experience. This understanding places the music sermon of the eighteenth century within the context of some of the most discussed philosophical, social, literary, musical and moral-aesthetic concepts of the time.

The career of William Babell (1688–1723), an English composer of German birth, has recently been reassessed by me following identification of a manuscript source in Bergamo, which appears to be a collection of his harpsichord music. The manuscript shows he was an important keyboard composer active in Britain immediately prior to the publication of Handel's Suites de Pieces pour le Clavecin (1720), and it has provided insights into his working methods. The major items – eleven substantial toccatas mostly in prelude–fugue form together with two suites – are replete with the cadenza-like passagework familiar from his arrangements of arias from operas produced at the Haymarket Theatre between 1706 and 1714, which were published in three collections in his lifetime (in 1709, 1711 and 1717). They also reveal the range of influences on his keyboard style, illustrating how he adapted material from music by French, Italian, German and English composers. Though the source is not an autograph, it was copied towards the end of Babell's life by an individual close to him, to judge from the large number of pencil corrections that appear to be the composer's own. The manuscript therefore has biographical implications, suggesting that there was a composer-supervised project to bring together his keyboard music, perhaps in order to prepare some of it for publication, which never saw completion.

This article outlines a number of potential contributions that a consideration of early eighteenth-century conceptions of musical expressivity might make to certain present-day philosophical and psychological accounts of musical emotions and their expression. Taking as its central case study a performance by Christian Gerhaher in Peter Sellars's 2014 staging of J. S. Bach's St John Passion, the article calls for closer attention to both the historical specifics of music's expressive capacities and the corporeal dimension of performance (past and present). It argues that a more sustained engagement with these domains can productively complicate some fundamental assumptions that underpin current approaches to musical expression.