This essay discusses the contours of what I call a new instrumental turn in Nigerian historical scholarship. It argues that the historical discipline in Nigeria is experiencing a new instrumental turn, which finds expression in several new features of academic history writing, teaching, and programming. Some aspects of this trend hearken back to the original instrumental history of the pioneers of Nigerian and African nationalist history; others represent something new, being responses to novel twenty-first-century anxieties and imperatives of nation-building, development, and the place of humanities knowledge in those aspirations. Unlike old conceptions of instrumentality, this new turn signals a more explicit agenda of problem-solving through historical research. It also entails a rather formulaic embrace of proposals for solutions to problems identified in or through historical research.

This article argues against the cliché (posited most famously by Alexis de Tocqueville and Carl Schmitt), that there were inherent correspondences between religious and political concepts. Such connections were historically contingent, and had to be forged by polemicists and apologists who eclectically drew upon a variety of sources. This is evident from an examination of differing Presbyterian reactions to the French Revolution. John Brown in Scotland combined an aristocratic Presbyterian ecclesiology with a Burkean view of authority to argue for an anti-democratic conception of “representative government.” By contrast, the Scottish-American Alexander McLeod synthesized radical Presbyterian political theology with Painite ideas of “representative democracy.” Thus representation emerged as the key concept in both authors, yet its compatibility with democracy was an open question. The examples of Brown and McLeod also show that religion, as much as “secular” politics, had to grapple with and re-imagine “democracy.”

This article examines the factors that enabled French merchants to enter the Spanish Indies markets during the 1620s, particularly in the period betwen the Peace of Monzón (1627) and the outbreak of the Franco-Spanish War (1635). It highlights how the French nation of Seville received unprecedented support from the Crown to develop their marginal enterprises in the Carrera de Indias. Royal patronage played a significant role in integrating—or exluding—wealthy merchant communities from the Spanish Atlantic trading system, therby expanding their networks for direct exchanges with the Americas. The study reconstructs French commercial connections within the Spanish Atlantic trade, contextualized alongside Flemish and Italian networks already operating in New Spain. These three nations dominated much of the cargo legally shipped to and from the viceroyalty in the 1620s and 1630s. The analysis details French business interactions with “native” and “foreign” merchants, their resilience following the economic reprisal of 1635, and observations on the reconfiguration of foreign trading networks alongthe New Spain axis during the Spanish Empire’s economic and political crises of the 1640s.

This article examines the fear of death in fourteenth-century Italy by analysing miracle testimonies through the methodological frameworks of terror management theory (TMT) and lived religion. It argues that devotion to saints served as a key coping mechanism for existential anxiety. Examples from the canonisation processes of Clare of Montefalco and Nicholas of Tolentino reveal how individuals turned to saints for protection, seeking to prolong life rather than accept death. This study provides both empirical and methodological insights into the medieval fear of death, illustrating its parallels with contemporary experiences of death anxiety.

This article analyzes the influence of hurricane strikes on the returns of sovereign bonds issued by Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Haiti between 1905 and 1930. The study uses a fixed effects regression model to isolate the impact of hurricane-induced destruction on bond returns, providing a deeper understanding of market reactions following natural disasters. The article shows that hurricanes during this period, which have the potential to cause significant damage, increase bond returns by an average of 0.9 percent in the same month. This suggests that investors demand a risk premium on sovereign bonds from hurricane-prone regions due to the direct impact and broader economic consequences of these disasters.