This article focuses on a copper still transported from London to the Mesopotamia estate in Jamaica and used to convert waste sugar products into rum, one of the many New World intoxicants which transformed British consumption patterns in the early modern period. Much has been written about the consumer revolution which allowed these commodities to be absorbed into everyday lives but less interest has been shown in the producer revolution needed to get the goods to market. The labour, skills, and materials embodied in the production and use of the copper still highlight how slave production of rum was integrated into a steadily advancing industrial capitalism linking dispersed sites and workers on both sides of the Atlantic. Rum production was a collaborative effort in which Caribbean plantations were inextricably chained to the local, regional, and international economies, and it involved adaptations in skills, tools, and techniques which were incorporated into Britain's long, slow industrial revolution.

Taking an anthropological approach, this article interprets Pagnol's critically acknowledged classic as a reinvention of a carnivalesque ritual practised in France from the late middle ages through the late 1930s, when ethnographers observed its last vestiges. By linking La Femme du boulanger (The baker's wife, 1938) to contemporaneous debates over gender, national decadence, and the definition of French cultural identity, I argue that the film recycles the charivari's long-standing function as a tool of popular protest against social and political practices regarded as detrimental to the welfare of the nation. In the context of the Popular Front, Pagnol's charivari ridiculed divisive partisan politics pitting Left against Right, symbolically purged class conflict from the social body, and created a new form of folklore that served as a focal point for the communitarian ritual of movie-going among the urban working and middle classes. In so doing, the film promoted the ongoing shift in public support away from the Popular Front in favour of a conservative ‘National Union’ government under Prime Minister Edouard Daladier, who in 1938–9 assumed the role of France's newest political patriarch.

After almost forty years of discussion and analysis, British policy at Munich in 1938 remains as controversial a subject as ever. But despite the fact that many thorough and important studies have been written, the focus of the controversy has not shifted very substantially. Much emphasis is still placed upon the ‘men of Munich’ and the question of whether they were guilty men who betrayed Czechoslovakia or reasonable and astute statesmen who sought to preserve the peace of Europe. And, in consequence, both their defenders and their critics have invested a great deal of effort in scrutinizing their contemporary writings to see whether their intentions in September 1938 were laudable or contemptible. However, it is by no means certain that the fundamental causes of governmental behaviour during a crisis are revealed in their clearest perspective by a concentration upon the contemporary utterances of policy-makers. For, by the time such a situation has been reached, the available options are normally strictly limited so that the task of the ‘decision-maker’ is often to provide a rationalization, both for himself and posterity, for a course of action which has been all but predetermined by earlier decisions. This article seeks to demonstrate that the Munich crisis was of such a type: that it represented a continuity in Britain's Central European policy and that the behaviour of the ‘men of Munich’ can only be judged in the context of this continuity. It argues, in fact, that the British adopted a policy of ‘passive pragmatism’ in defence of their world position throughout the inter-war period and that it was this which accounted both for their inaction between 1933 and 1937 and the Munich policy in 1938.

The 1890s can easily be portrayed as the era of missed opportunities in Anglo-German relations. Before the Kruger telegram, the Boer War, the Boxer rebellion and the Berlin to Bagdad railway, and most particularly before the naval race, it seems possible that Britain and Germany might have drawn closer together and that areas of mutual interest might have led to co-operation rather than antagonism. The failure to draw together in the 1890s, it can be argued, precipitated the series of disputes that progressively embittered Anglo-German relations. If only an understanding had been reached before each side became convinced of the other's enmity, if only men on both sides had been more reasonable, more judicious, more temperate, perhaps Europe could have avoided the division into armed camps, and perhaps the cataclysm of 1914 could have been averted.

During the nineteenth century, the Muslim Mediterranean became a locus of competing imperial projects led by the Ottomans and European powers. This article examines how the migration of people and ideas across North Africa and Asia complicated processes of imperial consolidation and exposed the ways in which North Africa, Europe, and Asia were connected through trans-imperial influences that often undermined the jurisdictional sovereignty of imperial states. It demonstrates that cross-border migrations and cultural transfers both frustrated and abetted imperial projects while allowing for the imagining of new types of solidarities that transcended national and imperial categorizations. In analysing these factors, this article argues for a rethinking of the metropole–periphery relationship by highlighting the important role print and trans-imperial networks played in shaping the Mediterranean region.

Singlewomen in the European past, 1250–1800. Edited by Judith M. Bennett and Amy M. Froide. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania University Press, 1999. Pp. vi+352. ISBN 0-8122-1668-7.

Renaissance culture and the everyday. Edited by Patricia Fumerton and Simon Hunt. Philadelphia: Penn State Press, 1999. Pp. vi+366. ISBN 0-8122-1663-6.

The crimes of women in early modern Germany. By Ulinka Rublack. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999. Pp. ix+292. ISBN 0-19-820637-2.

The 1896 Berliner Gewerbeausstellung was a transformative moment for city and nation alike. The exhibition announced Berlin's pre-eminence as a scientific and industrial city and bolstered an emergent German national identity. Including displays of Egypt and Germany's formal colonies also revealed Germany's competence as a colonial power. By illustrating its skill in both aggressive conquest and subtle intervention, city and nation thought themselves capable of competing with European rivals at home and abroad. However, the two visions of colonialism, cloaked in the guise of mass entertainment, have rarely been brought into conversation with one another. This article seeks to discuss this colonial–Oriental dichotomy by focusing on tensions between education and entertainment in display techniques, particularities of racial difference in ethnographic display, the use of advertising, and the insertion of new technologies. Contributing to a deeper understanding of race, empire, and modernity in the German context, the Gewerbeausstellung offers a jumping off point for further comparison to other local, regional, and international exhibitions and an avenue to explore how notions of modernity factored into formal and informal imperial arrangements. Ultimately, it sheds light on how an exhibition helped to fashion a global, imperial city at the turn of the twentieth century.

In the great and widespread revival of medieval studies by which the nineteenth century was distinguished, no province was so long neglected as that of academic institutions and scholastic thought. The pioneers of the historical revival were, almost without exception, men deeply influenced by the romantic movement, and many of them were antiquaries rather than historians; their successors, especially in England and Germany, were principally concerned to trace in the Middle Ages the origins of national institutions and racial characteristics; to neither party did the speculations of what seemed an outworn religious organization make any appeal. Even those scholars who, in France and elsewhere, were themselves Catholics and ecclesiastics, were also men who had been brought up in an age of transition and adaptation, when traditional religion was on the defensive, and were often more sympathetic towards the various systems of philosophy—idealist or ontological—that flowered and fell in Germany and north Italy in the period after the French Revolution. Meanwhile, in the century before that great cataclysm, the scholastic thought of the thirteenth century, rejuvenated by the Italian and Spanish theologians of the counter-Reformation, had been all but submerged by successive waves of Jansenism, rationalism and the new philosophy of Kant, and had only survived in a few schools as a dry and formal discipline. To all alike, therefore, whether Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans or free-thinkers, the vast mass of manuscript material which survived from the scholastic period to cumber the libraries appeared destitute of literary or human interest, and daunted the boldest with its bulk and its technical terminology.

The military triumphs and the political eclipse of Marlborough epitomize much of the history of the Treaty of Utrecht. He was, as even Bolingbroke acknowledged, the great successor to William, keeping the Grand Alliance together and imparting to it a rapid and vigorous motion in sharp contrast to the delays of William's ‘languishing out disastrous campaigns’. As ‘the greatest general, and as the greatest minister, that our country or perhaps any other has produced’ (to quote Bolingbroke again), he was deeply involved in the prolonged negotiations leading to the peace. But Marlborough and the Whigs were discredited and ousted from office in the course of the negotiations, and the peace was the work of a Tory ministry which claimed that the terms showed a reaction from the impracticable proposals of the Whigs to the more sound, statesmanlike and feasible, concepts of William III.

Scholars, journalists, and government officials have tried to understand al-Qa'ida and its predecessor, Maktab al-Khidamat, since the early 1980s. These efforts increased significantly after the 11 September 2001 attacks against the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon. Yet, despite this attention, questions remain unanswered. What factors have influenced al-Qa'ida leaders over time as they have made and executed strategic decisions? How have they defined their relationship with affiliated groups in the context of these decisions? This present article utilizes private al-Qa'ida documents, captured by United States Navy Seals during a raid on Osama bin Laden's compound in Pakistan, and recently released to the public, to answer these questions. In doing so, it casts doubt on some of the conventional explanations for al-Qa'ida's trajectory between 2004 and 2013.

There is a fine timber moulded cornice in a front room of the building that was once the House of Industry at Gressenhall, Norfolk, while along the eastern wing of the building one can still see the architectural features of an elegant open arcade. Why were such features included on a structure built to keep the poor at work, where residents spent their days making sacks, spinning, and working in the farm fields that surrounded the institution? Creating a digital 3D model of the 1777 House of Industry has allowed us to peel back the historical residue of the post-1834 Poor Law Union workhouse and re-engage the building's architectural features in their original context. The resulting building's peculiarly elegant characteristics reflect the emerging ambitions and defensiveness characteristic of the newly constituted ‘guardians of the poor’ who constructed it, while its permeable walls indicate considerably lower barriers between the workhouse and the outside world than is generally thought. By applying an innovative, digital humanities methodology to a significant social history topic, this article argues that virtual modelling and traditional archival research can together shape a new approach to the history of the Old Poor Law's institutions for the poor.

The author and politician Morgan Philips Price (1885–1976) is best remembered today as a sympathetic eye-witness to the Russian Revolution and commentator on events in Soviet Russia throughout his long life. Less well known are his activities in Germany, to which he travelled in 1918 to observe the course of the November Revolution and better communicate his favourable view of Bolshevik Russia to Western Europe, and where he remained until 1924. In the summer of 1919, Price was arrested and held without trial in Berlin's Moabit prison, an incident which he later insisted was instigated by the British authorities. This article examines the extensive files on Price kept by the British security services in order to verify this interpretation of his arrest. In so doing, it will argue that a consideration of the case not only sheds light on an interesting aspect of Price's biography but also reveals much about the prevailing mind-set amongst some leading British military officers, security personnel, and politicians, and the methods by which they sought to neutralize perceived ‘revolutionary’ threats in the months after the First World War.

The Polish Brethren, usually known as Socinians, were perhaps the most infamous Christian sect belonging to the so-called ‘Radical Reformation’. Renowned for their anti-Trinitarian beliefs and their rationalistic approach towards religion, the Brethren also discussed theological-political concepts such as the legitimacy of magistracy and warfare. Relevant literature on the Brethren's socio-political views underestimates their participation in contemporary debates on the ius belli, describing them as pacifists who generally opposed politics and violence until the 1650s, when some of them began defending a more conventional approach towards magistracy and warfare. This article proves that this shift toward a more standard Protestant position occurred as early as the 1620s, when Johannes Crell and Jonas Szlichtyng, two of the most prominent spokespersons among the Brethren, reconciled politics and the Brethren's faith in their writings. The article highlights how the historical situation of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth urged them to revise their views on magistracy and warfare, and it argues that they were assisted in this by their education in European universities, especially the Lutheran Academy of Altdorf near Nuremberg, which provided them with different perspectives on the legitimacy of defensive warfare.

Republicanism has been one of the most influential political ideologies in modern Irish history; however, it remains conspicuously undertheorized by historians of the revolutionary period. While recent historiography has challenged representations of anti-Treaty Sinn Féin as a mindlessly destructive, anti-democratic force, the extent of ideological and rhetorical continuity linking the Provisional Government formed to assume control of the Free State on 7 January 1922 with the pre-Treaty republican tradition has not been understood. This article rejects the historiographical thesis that the Provisional Government abandoned republican ideas. Drawing from the Cambridge School's contextualist account of republicanism as a polysemic and contingent political language, it highlights the vigorously contested nature of republican thought in the intellectual firmament of revolutionary Sinn Féin and argues that the Free State leadership articulated its vision of politics and society through classical republican concepts of ‘civic virtue’ and the ‘common good’. It is suggested additionally that the colonial dynamics of the Anglo-Irish relationship helped to shape the vision of republican citizenship promoted by an administration possessed of a deep-seated determination to refute historical perceptions of the Irish people as congenitally ‘unfit’ for sovereignty.