In the mid-nineteenth century huge blocks of ice were harvested in New England and transported to port cities as far away as Bombay, Calcutta and even Hong Kong. After expanding in scale for a few decades, the trade would suddenly decline in the latter part of the century. Almost all histories of the ice trade have attributed this decline to the rise of artificial ice. Through a focus on the trade between the United States and India, however, this article argues against this popular conclusion. It instead shows how the ice trade was both a product and casualty of important shifts in the global economy in the middle of the 19th century that affected the cost of moving ice across the oceans. When treated seriously as a global commodity, ice, this article argues, provides a useful window into these vital shifts in the global economy and highlights the importance of taking circulation more seriously in commodity histories.

This study explores the intricate design of title pages in nineteenth-century Persian lithographed books, comparing the Eastern-style title pages prevalent in Indian publications with the Western-influenced designs found in Iranian lithographed books. Rooted in Indian publishing traditions, the Eastern model emphasised structured bibliographic details, refined calligraphy, and floral ornamentation. In contrast, the Western-style Iranian model drew inspiration from Persian manuscript and bookbinding traditions, a broader ornamental vocabulary shared across media, particularly the lachak va turanj (medallion-and-corner) compositional scheme. While Iranian designers rarely adopted the Eastern model in books published in Iran, Indian publications occasionally incorporated Persian design elements, demonstrating selective cross-regional exchanges in Persianate book design. Rather than developing a standardised informational layout, Iranian title pages prioritised visual composition and ornamental hierarchy, often relegating bibliographic information to colophons or extended dedicatory texts. Accordingly, the Western style is defined less by informational structure than by visual organisation, which distinguishes it fundamentally from the Eastern model. This study focuses on Iranian and Indian examples, drawing on rare Persian lithographed books to examine how differing conceptions of the book shaped title page design in the nineteenth century.

This article uses digital Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to visualize changing crop choice over time in nineteenth-century equatorial eastern Africa. It maps the locations of crops mentioned in early imperial sources, using contemporary cartographic representations of the region as a base. This enables a novel visualization of changing agricultural potential and vulnerability to climate variability over time. The maps contextualize the growth of commercial and political centers, a series of famines during years and seasons of below average rainfall, and the well-known environmental challenges of the early colonial period.

By reconstructing the boundaries of a ‘community’ that shared the same emotional horizon when it came to love, this article explores the role that concepts of romantic love played in the development of modern ideas of sexuality, with a specific focus on the relationship between women, sexual desire and pleasure. After a brief description of the Italian historical and cultural context in which Paolo Mantegazza developed his sexual science and the role that romantic love played within it, I analyse his Fisiologia dell’amore to show how, even without explicit references to sexual acts, the book clearly alludes to sexual desire and pleasure. I then examine a selection of letters from Mantegazza’s female readers to demonstrate their enthusiasm for the book. Finally, I show how ideas of romantic love and the introspective enquiry prompted by reading Mantegazza also affected women’s awareness of themselves as sexed beings capable of and entitled to experiences of pleasure.

This article examines the institutional evolution and professionalization of the state police in Prague during the final decades of the Habsburg monarchy, arguing that the transformation of the Prague State Police between 1893 and 1910 represents a proactive effort in modern state-building. Drawing on reports from the Prague Police Directorate and the Bohemian Governor’s Office, it analyzes how recurring episodes of mass violence—specifically the unrest of the early 1890s, the riots of December 1897, and the nationalist disturbances of 1908—exposed the structural vulnerabilities of a security apparatus designed for routine policing rather than mass politics.

The article highlights a significant shift in administrative strategy: the movement away from a reliance on military intervention, which was increasingly viewed by civil authorities as a “double defeat” that undermined the legitimacy of the constitutional state. Instead, police directors such as Georg Dörfl and Karel Křikava successfully advocated for a robust, civilian-controlled force characterized by increased manpower, modernized equipment, and the establishment of a dedicated reserve for professional training. By 1910, the Prague Guard had largely expanded, reflecting a fundamental reconceptualization of urban order where protest was accepted as an unavoidable feature of political life to be contained by professional civilian forces rather than crushed by the army.

This study proposes a new qualitative method in historical pragmatics to extract politeness formulae for master-servant directives from nineteenth-century French advice literature. Whereas traditional politeness models study strategic face-saving, this study investigates non-strategic, routinized or conventionalized politeness by mapping explicit linguistic instructions in historical prescriptive metasources. Because etiquette and conduct books targeted middle-class households – typically defined as having at least one live-in servant – they routinely discussed interactions with servants. The self-built corpus comprises 43 sources: etiquette and conduct manuals, alongside servant manuals. Through close reading I manually extract politeness formulae, which are compiled into a formulary. Historians underline servants’ harsh conditions and social erasure, typically mirrored by bare imperatives. Advice on a kind prosody is widespread, but politeness formulae (e.g. voulez-vous? – je vous prie) only emerge in the 1870s, when the crisis of domestic service begins. This shift suggests that domestic service was increasingly viewed in transactional rather than purely hierarchical terms. Despite these changes, master-servant, servant-master and peer directives remain rigidly compartmentalized. The article addresses a notable gap in French historical im/politeness studies by showing how politeness formulae in prescriptive discourse reveal the persistence of caste-like social structures in nineteenth-century French domestic service.

This article examines how Miskitu King Robert Charles Frederic (1824–42) used colonial contracts with foreign merchants to advance his political agenda in Moskitia, on Central America’s Caribbean coast. Drawing on European and Central American archives, this study challenges narratives that portray Indigenous leaders as passive actors in colonial expansion, highlighting how the king strategically wielded contracts to facilitate the import of foreign capital through concessions and loans. His mastery of international finance enabled resistance to imperial domination while allowing him to consolidate power, maintain independence, and participate in nineteenth-century Atlantic political transformations. However, this strategy compelled him to facilitate the entry of financial capitalism into Moskitia, subsequently defining his kingdom’s fiscal governance and external relations. By examining Robert Charles Frederic’s learning process in navigating Caribbean political and Atlantic financial systems, this article contributes to scholarship on Indigenous agency in colonial encounters and reveals how peripheral actors mediated the global spread of economic institutions.

This article explores the nineteenth-century history of ship’s ballast to study global maritime mobility ‘from below’, both socially and materially. Though mostly overlooked by contemporaries and historians alike, ballast was both a necessary resource for and a constraint on sea travel. This article examines ballast in four steps. First, it defines ballast in terms of its function, materiality, and value. Second, it studies ballast in the littoral zone, where specialized ballasting organizations depended on precarious labour and where both its production and disposal became entangled with environmental agendas and concerns. In a third step, the article focuses on ballast at sea, where it materially and sometimes detrimentally impacted the experience of ‘being in transit’. Finally, the article considers the transition to water ballast as an example for the persistence and staying-power of seemingly obsolete technologies and associated labour regimes. Ballast was an obscure but powerful enabler of sea travel. Maintaining this connectivity rested both on the widespread mobilization of labour for ballast practices and on the global movement of vast amounts of otherwise useless weight.

This article proposes a mixed-method approach to examine historical censuses with regard to race. It does so by exploring various kinds of demographic records from nineteenth-century Buenos Aires in order to test the conventional hypothesis of a significant census underenumeration of the city’s population of African descent. Starting from the overall progression of census results, the article is divided into three parts. The first of these deals with potential under-coverage, the second with the possibility of classificatory changes, and the third with vital statistics, largely derived from parish books. With special attention to two censuses of the 1850s, it concludes that Buenos Aires’s Afro-descendant population likely did suffer serious demographic decline between 1840 and 1890.

This research examines migration in Linares during the third quarter of the nineteenth century, focusing on migration chains. The city experienced a significant increase in population due to the mining boom, which led to an almost sixfold increase in the population over a period of 30 years. Using data from the 1873 population register, which includes more than 22,500 individuals, this study confirms the effectiveness of the migration chain framework in analyzing internal migration during the preindustrial and early industrialization periods. This approach has revealed the significant influence of this form of social capital in determining migratory flows to Linares, highlighting the importance of places of origin in the spatial distribution of the city and in the occupational specialization of the migrant population. The findings suggest that migratory chains played a key role in providing information about opportunities at the destination, as well as in reducing the costs associated with the search for employment and housing.

The first ever field mission of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) took place in Montenegro in the winter of 1875–76. Although the expedition was little documented by what was then a new organization, a rediscovered trove of private archives has shed light on how it was carried out. Three delegates were sent to Montenegro with the aim of supporting the creation of a new relief society, aiding wounded soldiers and spreading awareness of the original Geneva Convention of 1864. Although the delegates were forced to adjust their ambitions, the Montenegro mission marked an important milestone in the burgeoning International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement and sparked debate over the recognition of new National Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies by their sister Societies. This article outlines the ICRC’s first experience in the field and examines the mission’s legacy.