Recent writing shows that eighteenth-century Irish society was both less and more divided than was supposed by Lecky, whose History of Ireland in the eighteenth century (now over a century old) dominated so much subsequent historiography. Because Lecky enjoyed access to records that were subsequently destroyed his work will never be entirely redundant, but this article looks at ways in which his views have been and continue to be modified. It surveys the various interpretative models now being used to open up the period, which invite comparisons not merely with England, Scotland, Wales, and colonial America but also with Europe. It also considers how that endlessly fascinating decade, the 1790s, has emerged from the spotlight turned on it by a plethora of bicentenary studies.

Joseph Chamberlain's speech at Birmingham on 15 May 1903, which began the tariff reform campaign, produced divisions within the Unionist party on a scale unknown since the repeal of trie Corn Laws. Announced to a party tired and jaded after its difficulties in the conduct of the Boer War, imperial preference offered an outlet for frustrated imperialist idealism, a cause to which the enthusiasts of the party could devote themselves, ‘… in a few hours England, indeed the whole Empire, was in a ferment of indescribable excitement’ Enthusiasm for the new cause rapidly developed into intolerance towards any other opinion. In the summer of 1903 supporters and opponents of the new policy organized themselves into rival leagues: ‘For a decade the Unionist party, the great exemplar of political pragmatism, was consumed by ideological passion’. The epitome of this intolerance and ideological passion was the Confederacy, ‘this extraordinary phenomenon in English politics — a secret society with all the trappings of oaths, threats and codes’,s ‘a secret society of extremist wholehoggers … [which] … saw itself as the inquisitorial arm of the tariff reform movement…’ and whose avowed object was ‘to drive the enemies of tariff reform out of the Conservative party’.

On Saturday, 4 December 1154, eight hundred years ago, Nicholas Breakspear was elected pope. On the following day he was enthroned and crowned at St Peter's, Rome. Adrian IV was the only ‘pontifex natione Anglicus’ who has assumed the tiara.

The late Habsburg Monarchy produced two of the most renowned peace activists of their day: Bertha von Suttner and Alfred Fried. In comparison to these two Nobel Peace laureates, the main association of Austro-pacifism – the Österreichische Friedensgesellschaft (ÖFG) – is less well known. The article concentrates on this organization, which had been founded in 1891, and it draws attention to the political and intellectual environment in which it operated. The ÖFG originated in the milieu of Austro-German liberalism, but had an ambivalent rapport with liberal politics. The Austro-pacifists’ focus on supranational principles and dynastic loyalty sat uneasily with the national dimensions of Cisleithanian politics. The obstacles encountered by the ÖFG illustrate wider aspects of the political culture of fin-de-siècle Austria, ranging from the question of militarism in Austrian society to the challenges created by socialist and nationalist movements. As a whole, the article highlights the inherent limitations of Austro-pacifism, as reflected in its quest for respectability and its acceptance of the social and political order.

Among all the paper ephemera surviving from eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain, the humble Methodist ticket has attracted little attention from scholars and collectors. Issued quarterly to members as a testimonial to religious conduct, many still exist, reflecting the sheer quantity produced by 1850, and the significance of keeping practices, where Methodist habits were distinctive. This article explores first the origin and spread of tickets primarily within British Methodism, but also noting its trans-oceanic contexts. Apparently inconsequential objects, they shaped experience and knowledge, illuminating eighteenth-century religious life, female participation, and plebeian agency. Discussion then turns to patterns of saving and memorialization that from the 1740s preserved Methodists’ tickets. Such practices extended the lifecycle of the individual ticket and created the accidents of its survival, giving it new uses as an institutional resource. In recovering the dead, it acquired nostalgic value, but other capacities were lost and forgotten. The ticket's origins, uses, and preservation intersect with major historical and historiographical currents to complicate established narratives of print, urban association, and commerce, and to present alternative understandings of collecting.

This paper assesses the historical validity of the famous tale that, near the beginning of the Greek War of Independence (1821–32), the Hellenic revolutionary army offered lead ammunition to their Ottoman enemies who they were besieging on the Athenian Acropolis. This gift was presented to the Turks in an effort to halt their quarrying of the Parthenon and the other classical monuments on the hill-top, within the masonry of which the Ottoman defenders were searching for the ancient lead clamps which could be melted down and recast into ammunition. This paper will, however, demonstrate that there is a lack of contemporary evidence to support the tale and the earliest recorded references to the story only occur some four decades after the event was claimed to have taken place. Yet despite this lack of eyewitness evidence, from the early 1980s onwards, the tale has been frequently passed off as historical fact and referenced with regularity by campaigners lobbying for the return of the Elgin Marbles from the British Museum.

From the 1920s through the 1940s, European and Anglo-American Protestants perceived a crisis of humanity. While trying to determine religion's role in a secular age, church leaders redefined the human being as a theological person in community with others and in partnership with God. This new anthropology contributed to a personalist conception of human rights that rivalled Catholic and secular conceptions. Alongside such innovations in post-liberal theology, ecumenical Protestants organized a series of meetings to unite the world churches. Their conference at Oxford in July 1937 led to the creation of the World Council of Churches. Thus, Protestants of the transwar era supplied the two main ingredients of any human rights regime: a universalist commitment to defending individual human beings regardless of race, nationality, or class and a global institutional framework for enacting that commitment. Through the story of Protestant thinkers and activists, this article recasts the history of human rights as part of a larger history of critical reappraisals of humanity. Understanding why human rights came into prominence at various twentieth-century moments may require abandoning ‘rights talk’ for human talk, or, a comparative history of radical anthropologies and their relationship to broader socio-economic, political, and cultural crises.

Research on the relationship between England and Protestant Germany during the sixteenth century has recently experienced a revival. A significant area of concentration for confessional interests among Lutherans a century ago, Anglo-German relations took a backseat in Reformation historiography during the twentieth century, but during the last decade or so a host of scholars in the UK, Germany, and USA have once again turned their attention to the topic. This review article surveys trends in scholarship on Reformation studies in both England and Germany before turning specifically to works considering instances of interaction, co-operation, and adaptation across the confessional and geographic divides. Gathering a considerable array of secondary materials, the article offers an overview of the merits and criticisms of previous analyses and concludes by pointing out a few areas for future inquiry.

Despite the well-established historiography examining the South African war's impact upon British society, little attention has been paid to the plight of British soldiers’ families or to the charitable efforts mobilized to maintain them in the absence of adequate state support. This article, focusing on the key charity in the field, the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Families Association (SSFA), examines the SSFA's wartime policies and considers how the Association's actions influenced subsequent state policy-making. It explores the motivations and attitudes of its middle-class, mostly female, volunteers, on whose sustained commitment the work of the SSFA depended. In analysing the sources of the SSFA's funding, it considers how class and regionality shaped public giving to patriotic philanthropy. Finally, it investigates how perceptions of soldiers’ wives and mechanisms for their support in the First World War were affected by the South African war experience. Overall, the article aims both to demonstrate the importance of philanthropic aid to soldiers’ families in understanding the domestic impact of this imperial war, and to trace the longer-term effects on the development of policies towards servicemen's dependants.

This article analyses the relationship between imperial expansion and popular visual culture in late seventeenth-century Venice. It addresses the impact of the military on the marketplace of print and examines the cultural importance of commercial printmaking to the visualization of colonial motifs during the 1684–99 war with the Ottoman Empire. Through a broad array of single-sheet engravings and illustrated books encompassing different visual typologies (e.g. maps, siege views, battle scenes, portraits of Venetian patricians, and representations of the Ottomans), the article re-examines key questions about the imperial dimensions of Venetian print culture and book history. In particular, it shows how warfare and colonial politics militarized the communication media, and highlights the manner in which prints engaged metropolitan viewers in the Republic's expansionist ventures. In so doing, the analysis demonstrates how the printing industry brought the visual spectacle of empire onto the centre stage of Venetian cultural life.

This article explores the relationships between ritual, material culture, and political authority in early modern Japan by focusing on the Japanese tea ceremony, a highly formalized socio-cultural activity elaborated from the customs related to the consumption of powdered green tea. The article analyses one of the Tokugawa Shogunate's annual processions, the so-called, ‘Travelling of the Shogun's Tea Jar’ – a ritual developed around the Shogunate's acquisition of its annual stocks of tea – which was formalized as one of the official annual events in the early seventeenth century. It argues that the tea ceremony became a part of routine business in the Tokugawa Shogunate and continued to perform its customary functions in supporting military elite's political life. In turn, the tea ceremony was authorized by shoguns and domain lords through public rituals and regular consumption. Consequently, the tea ceremonial practice was institutionalized in the shogunal administrations, creating a class of tea professionals and generating networks of tea providers. Moreover, the practice of tea was embedded in the everyday life of the warrior elite, both at the national and regional levels, until the final fall of the Tokugawa Shogunate in 1868.

Beginning in 1689, England was struck by not one but three economic shocks. First, the war against France – Europe's greatest military power – attracted swarms of hostile warships and privateers that heavily damaged English maritime trade, while military expenses also led to a doubling of the tax burden. Second, wartime conditions and government mismanagement sparked a currency crisis in 1695–7 that halted much domestic commerce and caused a run on the recently founded Bank of England. Third, William III's reign brought rapid inflation in the cost of the necessities of life, especially food and fuel, which resulted in prolonged widespread hunger from 1693 onwards. Yet, these hardships have rarely received more than a passing mention in political histories of the Glorious Revolution and do not fit easily into the narratives of economic expansion in the later Stuart period. Close analysis of these ‘hard times’ demonstrates the limits of histories that emphasize long-term developments over short-term crises. Using evidence from a wide range of local and national archives, this article shows the impact of these shocks on the lives of ordinary people.

In this historiographical review, I analyse recent works on the history of economic growth and provide a starting point for thinking about how this literature fits together as a discrete field of research. The questions being asked in these texts are relatively new, and as of yet no attempt has been made to identify the major themes that are driving this research. In putting these works into dialogue with each other, across the disciplinary boundaries of history, ecology, anthropology, economics, and political science, we can see that a new subfield of academic inquiry is emerging. Driven by concerns over climate change and rising economic inequality, this new research aims to understand the obsession with economic growth that has shaped so much of our contemporary world.

Why people trust is a question that has preoccupied scholars across many disciplines. Historical explorations of trust abound, but we know relatively little about the workings of trust in the history of investment. Despite becoming increasingly mediated and institutionalized in the nineteenth century, the market for stocks and shares remained local and embedded in personal relations to a significant extent. This created a complex trust environment in which old and new forms of trust co-existed. Investors sought information from the press, but they also relied upon friends to help them navigate the market. Rather than studying trust in the aggregate, this article argues that focusing on the particular allows us to appreciate trust as an emotional and ultimately imaginative process depending as much on affective stories as rational calculation. To this end, it takes the case of a Bath clergyman and workhouse schools inspector, James Clutterbuck, who solicited investments from a wide network of friends and colleagues in the 1880s and 1890s. By capturing the complex interplay of friendship, emotions, and narrative in the formation of trust, the article offers a window onto everyday financial life in late Victorian provincial England.

The structuring of time in the early modern period has traditionally been associated with a broad, European-led shift towards ‘accuracy’, and with it connotations of ‘modernity’. Yet, a fuller examination of the temporal world of early modern merchants challenges such a teleology. Taking as its focus the English East India Company (EIC), this article situates concerns for accuracy in the management of time (and with it profit) within a broader spectrum of temporal influences, including seasonal, indigenous, and embodied time. It draws upon the experiences of the merchant Isaac Lawrence (1639–79), whose trade began around the Mediterranean Sea but ended in the service of the EIC in Persia. Like many of his contemporaries in the Company, Lawrence died relatively young and in obscure circumstances; however, the survival of his personal papers through his brother William Lawrence affords vital insights into how time was observed, measured, and felt within mobile early modern lives. Read alongside Company records, Lawrence's experience makes clear the necessity of reading subjective temporalities into historical understandings of time within global frameworks.