The following communication sets a previously unrecorded manuscript by John Locke in context. The manuscript comprises his remarks on a bill to create a ‘Flax and Hemp Company of Ireland’, laid before the Irish House of Commons in November 1695, which circulated in London in late 1697. Locke likely made his remarks for the lord chancellor, Sir John Somers, among whose papers they survive. The manuscript sheds new light on Locke’s practical involvement in post-revolutionary political economy, on his engagement with Ireland, and on his thought regarding corporations and corporate corruption.

Richard Simon has long presented an enigma for historians, as his status as a pathbreaking textual critic and the opposition his work engendered from contemporary ecclesiastical authorities has sat uncomfortably alongside his consistent advocacy of his Catholic credentials. This article approaches this problem via an analysis of two hitherto understudied parts of his scholarly corpus. It first elucidates Simon’s distinctive plan for a new polyglot Bible in the mid-1680s before shifting attention some fifteen years to consider his work in French vernacular biblical translation, bringing out how the confessionally inflected content of his work in that field contrasted with his earlier critical scholarship. By revealing how Simon negotiated the relationship between scholarship and religion during his working life, the article foregrounds the continued import of confessionalized erudition at the turn of the eighteenth century while also interrogating the limits of its explanatory power as a historical category.

This article makes two important contributions. Firstly, it provides valuable insights into the motivations of working-class migrants in the second half of the nineteenth century, adding a new dimension to a scholarship focused on studies of forced migration or middle-class empire building. Its analysis of a rich body of published and unpublished letters from former institutionalized children reveals the primacy of financial gain in the migration decision and shows that working-class Britons saw the world beyond the British Isles as a space of opportunity, where they could leverage their mobility in pursuit of profit. Secondly, by arguing that juvenile emigrants need to be viewed as a heterogeneous body where age and gender made a difference in terms of experience, the article provides an important new perspective on institutional migration that has implications for wider literatures on childhood and youth. The average age of the boys studied for this article was sixteen and the research shows that they were active participants in the emigration process, shaping their own futures through their diverse decisions. Recognizing this significantly undermines the modern discourses of blame and victimhood that dominate the historiography and encourages us to re-evaluate our approach to nineteenth-century juvenile migration.

Leviathan’s famous pronouncement that England had been ‘reduced to the Independency of the Primitive Christians’ has often been understood to signal support for the newly ascendant Cromwellian Independents in England. This article ventures an alternative reading of the passage by investigating the notion of ‘Independency’ with an eye to wider European political discourses. Scholars such as Francisco Suárez contended for the natural independence of temporal sovereigns while specifying the juridical rights and reach of imperial power. The fact that Christ and the Apostles had eschewed involvement in temporal affairs clarified this initial independency. This original state was especially important in French narratives aimed at securing autonomy against both empire and church. In light of this, Hobbes’s statement may be interpreted as endorsing a time-delimited notion of free conscience given England’s ruinous political state, but one looking forward to the unified rule of a sovereign with civil and ecclesiastical power.

In 1764, while discussing female authors one critic suggested that the views of ‘the liberal’ were normative. But what did it mean to be a ‘liberal’ at this time? This article examines the ‘liberal and enlightened’ patterns of thought popularized by reviewers who belonged to the network of friends and acquaintances of the founders of the Monthly Review, the dissenters Ralph Griffiths and William Rose. Opposing different forms of ‘tyranny’, or authoritarianism, critics promoted ‘liberal and rational’ political principles and a social morality comprising the values of open-mindedness, reason, toleration, and ‘equity’ or justice as fairness. Focusing in particular on issues relating to gender, this article shows how conceptions of the ‘liberal spirit’ informed accounts of women’s capabilities, of their ‘genius’ and rationality. By the 1780s, the language of ‘liberal sentiments’ had spread within print culture, appearing in the New Annual Register, founded by Andrew Kippis, a leading critic at the Monthly, and in the work of political and social theorists such as Major John Cartwright or James Mackintosh. Yet, defeating stereotypical notions of gender could be complicated even for men who aspired to a place within the elite of the ‘enlightened’ or ‘liberal and philosophical’.

A new, ground-up narrative of the Buddhist Mobilization of Huế in central Vietnam in the summer of 1963 highlights the voices of its participants – the ‘People of the Pagoda’. Drawing on local records and personal narratives, the article explores the process of how the ‘People of the Pagoda’ forged a collective identity from daily activism and protests for religious equality. Months of various nonviolent collective actions – in the form of demonstrations, hunger strikes, and self-immolations – developed a strong, broad community within the distinctive spaces of Buddhist temples. The article emphasizes the relevance of culture, morals, emotions and identity in the Buddhist Mobilization’s enduring impacts on personal awareness and community networks. In contrast to much top-down, politically-oriented, and Sài Gòn-centric scholarship on this event in Vietnam War historiography, this essay examines the mobilization as a social movement in its own right and seeks to restore Huế’s significant historical role as the birthplace of this movement.

This article provides a comparative discussion of the theories of imperialism developed by three prominent scholars – Paul Samuel Reinsch, Ukita Kazutami, and Liang Qichao – in the 1900s. Such a discussion offers a fresh understanding of imperialism in the East Asian context from three perspectives. First, by revealing inter-textual connections between the three figures’ writings, it sheds light on Japan’s mediating role in the formation of Chinese knowledge of imperialism in a transpacific exchange of ideas. Second, it examines how the theories of imperialism travelled in the unequal international spaces created by practices of imperialism. Last, it draws attention to the consequences of embracing the Western ideal of national empire in East Asia, highlighting the fact that some Japanese and Chinese elites resisted Western imperialism on the one hand, but, on the other, drew inspiration from the ideal of imperialism to formulate their own expansionist agendas.

Proposing ‘the littoral’ as a subject of historical enquiry, this article centres on British rule over the waters, isles, and shores in nineteenth-century colonial Hong Kong. It argues that similar and connected to its rule over urban space, the British government endeavoured to regulate the colony’s watery fringes out of racial and other concerns. Commensurate with the growth of shipping, colonial rulers demarcated particular littoral spaces as mirrors or even extensions of land spaces. In the late nineteenth century, an emerging hierarchy of delineated navigational, anchorage, and quarantine spaces was discernible in Hong Kong’s littorals. Despite their efforts to structure littoral space, British colonial authorities failed to direct its actual usage. Not only did stakeholders compete and negotiate over using Victoria Harbour, but also, many Chinese watercraft countered official control by venturing across administrative boundaries. More broadly, the case of Hong Kong suggests perspectives for addressing the complexity of the littoral history of colonial port cities in Asia. First is the examination of connections between different areas within littoral space. Second is the inseparability between littoral space and urban space in terms of government policies. Third is the contrast between colonial designs and actual negotiations regarding the use of littoral space.

This article explores the politics of pageantry in colonial Uganda. As activists looked toward independence, they engineered competing visions of national material culture. Creating political emblems raised complex questions about the moral and theological significance of party colours. Throughout Uganda’s colonial history, debates about flags reflected sectarian struggles between Protestant and Catholic communities that dated to the late nineteenth century. In imperial and Ugandan history writings, flags are often associated with the pageantry of conquest or eventual post-colonial state building. But we know very little about the internal debates that accompanied the invention of the state’s material culture. This article pushes us past a superficial association of flags with either colonial conquest or Cold War liberation and into the conceptual and religious worlds that undergirded the hoisting of flags. Arguments about flags propelled Ugandan politics throughout the twentieth century. By looking at the varied ways that activists imagined the materiality of post-colonial Uganda, we can develop new approaches to intellectual history writing, moving into highly contested visual terrains where patterns, theologies of colour, and struggles to standardize party and national flags animated political mobilization and dissent.

The Elizabethan reign has lately emerged as a formative period for English ideas about the liberties of the subject and the ‘ancient constitution’ of the realm. Recent work has described the development of such ideas as having been driven by an organized campaign against the English ecclesiastical courts: a legal and intellectual effort that had emerged from the misgivings of certain ‘puritan’ lawyers about the powers claimed by new prerogative jurisdictions. The primary grievance of the campaign has been identified as having been the church courts’ use of the oath ex officio, and the campaign’s primary defensive tool has been identified as having been the twenty-ninth chapter of Magna Carta. But overlooked manuscripts reveal a more complex story. This article shows that the law of excommunication was as important to the campaign in question as Magna Carta. In addition, a re-examination of the life and work of James Morice, one of the principal lawyers responsible for the campaign, demonstrates that the law of excommunication deeply structured his understanding of the royal supremacy, and of the legal relationship between England’s secular and ecclesiastical polities – particularly as they had existed in the distant medieval past.

The artificial language of Esperanto would achieve remarkable success in early twentieth-century Europe. Its popularity there is not surprising: though designed as a universal language, Esperanto was essentially European in its grammar and lexicon. But this Europeanness – or, more precisely, this near-Europeanness – also spoke to communities living further afield. In India before the First World War, groups regarded as Europeanized by most Indians but as Indian by most Europeans found Esperanto a literal language with which to articulate their social location. As an ‘Esperantist’, there was no contradiction between being Indian and participating in European society, and to claim the label offered a shorthand that others (whatever their relationship to the movement) could readily grasp. This article considers these dynamics against the backdrop of a visit to India by the Irish Esperantist John Pollen, an event that sheds light on both the inner workings of the Indian movement and the importance that non-Indian Esperantists assigned to it. The popularity of Esperanto would eventually decline in India with the First World War, but until it did, the movement – indexical of Europe yet resonant in India – would promise a transnational community to which many in India felt they could aspire and belong.

Studies of women religious during the early modern period have often focused on questions surrounding lack of choice, usually about whether they had been coerced to join a convent. This article argues that, in the case of the English convents formed in continental Europe after the Tridentine reforms, not only did most women opt to enter convents of their own free will, but that there was a further level of choice involved. Namely, women chose which convent they wished to enter, a decision process largely neglected by the existing historiography. It opens by considering the regulations the convents operated under as part of the Catholic Reformation, and argues that both the communities and individual women were involved in the decision process surrounding entry to convent life. The second section explores how women navigated any external influences, while the third section argues that spirituality was a key motivating factor for a woman choosing a community. In short, women were not just choosing to become nuns, but were exercising their own agency in deciding which convent to join. Committed candidates meant a strong community and, in the case of the English convents, it meant they could navigate the extra challenges of exile.

The British government’s stance towards the American Civil War belligerents, while professedly neutral, has often been seen by historians as leaning, more or less strongly, towards the Confederacy. Its failure to prevent the Confederates from procuring warships in Britain during the war is regularly cited as supporting this viewpoint. This article examines in detail Britain’s response to the vehement demands from the US government to shut down the Confederates’ ship procurement programme in the context of Britain’s administrative machinery in the 1860s. It concludes that the state apparatus at the time was not fit for purpose, and in particular that it lacked central direction, was hidebound in its procedures, and was too dependent on individuals’ competence and integrity to rise to meet the challenge to British law and governance mounted by a determined Confederacy. However, Britain did make considerable efforts to prevent the Confederates from obtaining warships and did not set out with the deliberate intent to aid and abet the Confederate States by providing them with a navy, did not turn a blind eye to Confederate activity, and did not demonstrate a negligent disregard for its own laws.

The original and most commonly worn British Gay Liberation Front (GLF) badge often features in archives holding material on GLF, yet there is limited scholarship on why and with what effect this badge was worn. By combining archival research and oral histories, this article uses this badge to explore the experience and identity of GLF members both during GLF’s formal existence and in its afterlife. During GLF’s initial existence, between 1970 and 1973, the badge was a means of coming out to oneself and others. In turn, wearing the badge helped to construct and reinforce a new and distinct gay community. After the breakup of GLF, the badge continued to be worn and its imagery evoked to demonstrate allegiance to GLF and its ethos, whilst a tradition of gay badge-wearing emerged as a legacy of GLF. Overall, this badge was a major tool to signify identity and build community, not just during GLF’s initial existence, but up to the present day. Through its combination of extensive oral histories and archival research, this article provides new insights into how material culture can be used to understand social movements and their long-term impacts.

The arrest of Thomas Cromwell in June 1540 and his inescapable execution on 28 July offered a chance for the Catholic powers of Christendom to hope and work for the end of the English schism. In 1540, Charles V proposed colloquies between the different confessions in his empire and in the same spirit conceived an alliance with Henry VIII. Both Charles and Henry practised to deceive, but two mysterious Imperial missions to England in July 1540, which the removal of Cromwell made possible, and the manner of Henry’s welcome of them, provide proof of the seriousness of their intent. The brief period between Cromwell’s arrest and his death was exploited by both Henry VIII and European powers to attempt reconciliation, or, at least, to temporize. This article analyses complex diplomatic reports to show how Cromwell’s fall assumed significance far beyond England, as new evidence of an abrupt realignment at a climacteric of European dynastic politics and Reformation diplomacy reveals.

The arrival of an English translation of The structural transformation of the public sphere in 1989 set anglophone historians about revising Habermas’s original explanation of the development of the public sphere in the eighteenth century. In particular, his ‘model case of British development’ came under fire. Notably absent from these many critical appraisals is consideration of the wider British empire. Herein lies the problem that this article addresses: the rise of a ‘British public sphere’ has been described in national terms, and as a result those communities that were living beyond the realm have been left out of the discussion. In essence, the dominance of the nation-state in historical studies has obscured another transitional phase through which a British public sphere began, and in the end failed, to integrate political communities in Ireland and the American colonies in the evolving political structures of the imperial state. By recovering the features of this ‘imperial public sphere’, and the colonial presses that brought it into existence, we can begin to transcend national frames of analysis and reassess where the national stories we have inherited fitted into the larger story of what was really still an age of empires.

During the First World War, British military bands went on tours to Paris (1917) and Italy (1918) to generate support for the Allied war effort. These ‘propaganda tours’ marked the culmination of a trend that emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century when military musicians assumed the role of cultural envoys of the state. With retreat from ‘splendid isolation’ at the turn of the century, the nascent entente cordiale witnessed a burgeoning relationship between British and French military bands. While the impetus for these tours came from outside government, the Foreign Office’s cancellation of a tour to Germany in 1907 against King Edward VII’s wishes shows that these activities were considered more than benign gestures of international musical co-operation. After over two years of war, professional propagandists harnessed the mass appeal of military music by organizing concerts designed to reverse dwindling morale and present a unified Allied war effort. Although it is hard to assess their effectiveness, contemporary accounts and similar missions in the interwar period suggest that they met their objectives. By consulting a wide range of materials, from concert reviews to diplomatic correspondence, this article aims to bridge the gaps between political, military, and cultural history by showing the relevance of military music to all three sub-fields.

In eighteenth-century south-western Europe, actors involved in local conflicts reshaped both their views of corrupt behaviours and their political practices. While these historical phenomena occurred simultaneously, their relationship is far more complex than a straightforward cause-and-effect dynamic. Through four local case-studies, this article examines the multiple connections between changing perceptions of corrupt practices and political reform. New evaluations of abuses and frauds spurred reforms in some cases; in others, corruption was redefined once the reforms had been implemented, to justify those reforms (or their failure, if they did not succeed). Some case-studies show that there was no link between the two processes, while others reveal that the logics of the political changes prevented tackling practices which had started to be seen as corrupt. The article demonstrates that there was a transformation in the evaluation of certain practices that began to be classified as corrupt, and establishes links between these changes and the reforms implemented from the mid-eighteenth century onwards. Additionally, by placing south-western European regions within a broader framework, it challenges deeply rooted assumptions about the backwardness of these polities and their former colonies as a consequence of failed transitions to modern notions of corruption.

This article offers the first comprehensive history of Anglo-American married couples who co-published together, c. 1870–1939. It departs from the tendency to solely focus on the detrimental impact of marriage on women’s professional lives and the framing of middle-class women as simply either marrying or working as ‘spinsters’ before the Great War. It instead centres couples who together carved out enviable new positions, arguing these endeavours should be recognized as a growing socio-cultural phenomenon of this era. Moreover, it unpacks the significance of the prominent public discourse circulated to readers across the English-speaking world about such relationships. The most ‘popular’ partnerships were celebrated as simultaneously ‘exceptional’ collaborators and ‘ordinary’ married couples. Their dual-working lifestyles and intellectual compatibility was held up as holding the key to unlocking greater marital happiness. However, invested in carving out their roles in a deeply hierarchical, capitalist world, ‘popular’ couples often remade and propagated regressive ideas about gender, class, and racialized difference. Still, the article contends that the paradoxes in this discourse facilitated the creation of an imaginative space where readers could explore and self-actualize new perspectives about the ways they, and those around them, might partake in work cultures and intimate relationships in twentieth-century society.

This article investigates the personal history of Luo Longji, a distinguished Chinese liberal in the twentieth century. A controversial figure, Luo has two contradictory images in history: a democratic warrior and an enemy of the people. The two contrasting images, this article argues, reveal a fundamental dilemma of twentieth-century Chinese liberalism, which tries to reconcile the tension between the protection of individual freedom and a quest for a strong nation-state based on popular sovereignty. Defining himself as a disciple of Harold Laski, Luo reinterpreted the latter’s political ideas in a new historical context. On the one hand, Luo applauded individual disobedience of the despotic state and protested Chiang Kai-shek’s autocracy in favour of human rights and freedom. On the other, Luo’s nationalist fervour deeply shaped his liberal programme, hoping for a democratic nation-state as the guardian of people’s rights and freedom. This national liberalism led him to cast aside Laski’s anti-statist pluralism and instead exalt state sovereignty to represent the Chinese people’s general will. As a result, Luo was made an enemy in the 1950s by the democratic and constitutional polity he actively helped to build. Chinese liberalism was thus defeated by its own logic in Mao’s China.