The topic of urban revolt in medieval Ireland has been overlooked by wider scholarship. This article offers the first detailed analysis of a revolt which occurred in Galway in the late fourteenth century. The basis of this study is a twentieth-century transcription made of an extract from a plea roll of the king’s bench in Ireland before the latter’s destruction in 1922, which records the judicial proceedings taken against one of the town’s rebels and provides an under-exploited (and not entirely reliable) narrative of the key facts of this rebellion. This article locates the actions of Galway townspeople within a wider European pattern of protest and rebellion in the second half of the fourteenth century and, more specifically, places the revolt in the context of contemporary political events in Ireland and England. The events in Galway should be viewed as a genuinely ‘popular’ revolt, challenging assumptions about the presumed loyalty of towns and cities in medieval Ireland to the English crown and its local representatives.

The article charts the changing fortunes of the Catholics of Lisburn, County Antrim from 1914–22. It begins by exploring the establishment of a local battalion of the Irish National Volunteers and analysing Catholic recruitment to the war effort, before turning to the Easter Rising (1916), its aftermath and the bitter sectarian riots of August 1920, following the assassination of RIC District Inspector Swanzy. This murder in the centre of Lisburn led to days of violence and forced many of the town’s Catholics to flee. This paper argues that relations between nationalists and unionists in the 1914–22 period should be understood in the context of unionist beliefs regarding their communal safety and that territorial security is key to understanding the presence and form of violence in the town during the Swanzy Riots. Finally, some consideration is given to how this case study of Lisburn offers insight into understanding communal violence elsewhere in Ireland, during the wartime and revolutionary period.

Recent commentaries on Iran have stressed attacks on workers and wages by a neoliberal regime bent on slashing costs in response to sanctions, stagnation, and inflation. At the same time, Iranian political elites and government experts uniformly advocate for higher minimum pay. Underneath this paradox lies a complex shift of class inequality away from salary scales determined by firms and government agencies toward a single minimum wage set every year by the Supreme Labor Council, the central body responsible for employment policy. The result is not labor discipline or wage repression but an unruly wage containment state. Integrating archival sources, interviews, and statistical data, the article examines how elite conflicts, societal interests, and economic forces have structured the politics of pay in Iran. Framed comparatively, Iran’s wage containment state is a product of the way in which politics, development, and international relations have shaped Iranian capitalism.

Ireland’s historical coordinates are shifting, prompting a re-examination of national narratives and of the assumptions and anxieties that have kept them in place. Increasingly, stories that disturb rather than coalesce with grand narratives are the focus of historical study, revealing the structural violence used to maintain societal order. This article argues that tending to bigger questions about power and smaller ones about human experience creates space for new and diverse histories. It explores the dynamics that shaped the grand narratives central to Irish history and proposes the idea of imagined and lived encounters as a way of thinking about differentiation, the relational nature of power and its impact on experience and everyday life. An analysis of the concept of respectability is used to probe how power functions. The article concludes with a consideration of the historical archive broadly defined, highlighting the benefits of embracing the ‘unreliable’ witness, listening and accounting for silences, touching the material, and considering imagination as a force constantly at play in the encounters that shape history. The acceptance of this dynamic instability in historical research creates possibilities for new voices and perspectives to emerge.

This article examines the Dublin House of Industry in the final decades of the eighteenth century. Established in 1773, the House of Industry was part of an effort to launch a nationwide system of workhouses and something like a poor law system for Ireland. By the 1790s however, there was a shift from the paternalistic governance of the founders of the house to a new way of managing the relief of the poor within the institution. During this decade, there emerged a new board of governors who adopted a supposed ‘scientific’ approach to philanthropy. Influenced by the ideas of such workhouse reformers as Count Rumford in Munich, the new governors attempted to enact a sweeping series of changes to transform life in the workhouse along ‘oeconomical’ lines. It argues that these transformations reflected broader patterns of social change in the capital, as well as shifts in attitudes to poor relief more generally.