The ability to control international flows of information constitutes one of the core elements of the soft power of any modern state aspiring to exercise some level of regional or global hegemony. This phenomenon has been previously examined by those who study long-distance communications mainly in the context of the nineteenth-century telegraph or the twentieth-century broadcast. However, inquiries focusing on the analogous historical role performed by the postal service during the early modern era are much more scarce. Building upon this premise, this study examines the strategic advantages gained by the Republic of Venice through its control of the mail exchange between Europe and the Middle East – a de facto postal monopoly established during the sixteenth century. Venice deliberately subsidized this service in order to prevent the rise of potential competition. Despite the substantial cost, this was seen as an effective investment through which the republic gained a set of tangible strategic advantages. In particular, it helped to extend Venice’s relevance on the European political scene long past the point when its traditional political, economic, and naval–military power was already fading away.

Anthony Kitchin, the bishop of Llandaff between 1545 and 1563, is traditionally seen as a self-serving careerist, an unprincipled hypocrite, and a pastoral failure. He was one of only two Marian Catholic bishops to serve under Elizabeth I, and Eamon Duffy memorably jests that he ‘would doubtless have become a Hindu if required, providing he was allowed to hold on to the see of Llandaff’. But re-evaluating Kitchin’s career uncovers a man with a consistent stance that was not unusual amongst his peers, and reveals that the Elizabethan government retained serious hopes of bringing numerous Marian bishops, not just Kitchin, into conformity. Still more striking, while Kitchin has been reviled as a hypocrite for swearing the 1559 oath of supremacy, there is persuasive evidence that he did not in fact swear that oath, keeping his see only through a contingent and awkward compromise with the Elizabethan state, and that the details of this compromise were conveniently forgotten, perhaps even deliberately suppressed. Re-evaluating Kitchin significantly advances our understanding of the period by contributing to the extensive and developing historiography on Catholic conscience and loyalty to the crown, helping problematize binary distinctions between zealous Catholic resistance and craven conformity.

The three decades spanning the 1930s, '40s, and '50s witnessed the birth of the modern global state system, characterized by a protracted and tortuous transition from a world of empires to a world of nation-states. The demise of Nazi, British, and Japanese empires emancipated millions of people across the world. However, as old empires dissolved, new post-imperial states continued older colonial-origin forms of ethno-religious discrimination and ruling-class dominance, or invented novel hierarchies. Hence, this epoch was marked by catastrophic outbursts of racial violence, sectarian war, and genocide. If majoritarian nation-states were the privileged offspring of this transformation, then refugees were the unwanted issue. The national citizen and the refugee were co-created. Against their forced displacement and subalternization, refugees re-politicized their selves. We define this as ‘the refugee political’: refugees constructing themselves as political beings and building wide-ranging alliances – with churches, politicians, and entrepreneurs; with peasants, industrial workers, and feminists. They became ‘subaltern internationalists’, linking the Dachen Islands to the United States, and maritime Southeast Asia to India; connecting central European Jews to Australian women, or impoverished Indians to Soviet and Chinese communists. They created new forms of ‘refugee polis’ – political communities which were simultaneously local and daringly transnational.

This article aims to further Noel Malcolm’s discussion on Thomas Hobbes’s involvement in the affairs of the Virginia Company and to add new perspectives on the subject. For instance, at the time Hobbes joined, William Cavendish was a prominent director and the head of the Bermuda subsidiary; numerous clues suggest that Hobbes attended more courts than the number proposed by Malcolm; moreover, Hobbes was commissioned to solve significant problems within both companies. Examining Hobbes’s views on monopolies suggests that his political work bears the traces of the experience he accumulated during the 1620s, and that ignoring what he observed leads to misreading what he wrote.

Forced displacement brings with it the loss of property, belonging, and identity. Objects encode the nexus between citizenship, property, and sense of belonging/emotional attachment. The article explores the connection between citizenship and property and thereby highlights the agency of victims and their refugee’s polis. This case-study focuses on Jewish Austrian citizens who fled from Austria to Shanghai during the Nazi occupation era, expelled by the Nuremberg racial laws. During this racial persecution, they lost their citizenship and subsequently all their assets, with most of their belongings stored at the port of Trieste. Surprisingly, even after the end of the Second World War and Nazi occupation, it proved very difficult for Jews to regain their citizenship and property, for reasons highlighted in this article. The post-war nation-state could not deliver justice to actors whose economic, social, and cultural lives had been shaped through forced migration. Following scandals like the ‘Woman in Gold’ dispute concerning the return of a painting by Klimt in 2006, legal transformation in the fields of monetary compensation and citizenship laws was only brought about by resolutely transnational political-legal activism.

This article explores how Protestants defended the co-existence of multiple translations of the Bible into English in Elizabethan England. The matter of biblical plurality is considered through the prism of the debates surrounding bible translation which occurred throughout the 1580s between the Catholic translator of the Bible into English, Gregory Martin (c. 1542–1582), and the English Protestant polemicist William Fulke (1537/8–1589). It is contended that this debate, which has tended to be cast as a storm in a teacup, reveals how Protestants responded, innovatively, to the publication of the Catholic English New Testament. Attention is paid to how Martin attacked the existence of the many different Protestant English bible translations in circulation and, reciprocally, how Fulke defended them. This study of the Martin and Fulke debate thereby unsettles some long-standing assumptions about the combative relationship between different versions of the English Bible and it points, instead, to ways in which contemporaries might have seen the plurality of translations as spiritually and polemically advantageous. Fulke's arguments help us to comprehend how, prior to early seventeenth-century attempts to restrict the existence of multiple English bibles, some Elizabethans responded to, and even defended, the plurality of English bible translations which had come to exist.

Even as emperor, Napoleon was concerned with the émigrés. Although his general amnesty for the émigrés, which was promulgated on 26 April 1802, permitted most of the émigrés still inscribed on the ‘general list’ to return to France, it also excluded those belonging to six compromised categories. The number of these exceptions was not to exceed 1,000, the decree stipulating that the first 500 should be named within four months. As it turns out, it actually took the Ministry of Police more than two years to prepare a draft list of exceptions, which ran to more than 800 names. But it was not until 1807 that the first official list of émigrés (la première liste de maintenue) was finally decreed. Surprisingly, that list contained only 171 names. A second list released in 1810 added only 29 more. Examining these much-reduced lists, which have been almost entirely ignored, throws useful light on Napoleon’s continuing worries about the émigrés after 1804. For even then, he saw the Bourbons and the last émigrés as his personal enemies, threats to the security of the Empire, and possibly even reminders of what he saw as his fragile political legitimacy.

This article contributes to a recent shift in the study of early modern political thought, moving away from a state-centric view of the period towards an interest in the political significance of a range of other communities. More specifically, I argue that debates about the scope of one key concept, that of societas, resulted in different visions of the relationships between a variety of human associations. To demonstrate this, I reconstruct Johannes Althusius’s theory of societas and compare it to those of several contemporaries, ranging from Renaissance Ciceronianism to Jean Bodin and Hugo Grotius. I show that Althusius provided an innovative juridical interpretation of societas, which he used to ground a conception of politics according to which all human associations, from the family to the corporation to the state, are political. This complements traditional theological interpretations of his thought, which alone cannot fully account for its distinctiveness. Althusius’s conception of politics enabled him to chart an original middle way between two options available at the time: on the one hand, the isolation of politics from social and religious life; on the other, its subordination to or full identification with other kinds of community.

This article addresses the process of decolonization carried out by wartime Japanese occupation authorities, exemplifying how it played out on the ground in 1940s China with a focus on the ‘uprooted elite’ – that is, the former Western colonists of the treaty ports. After the outbreak of hostilities in December 1941, these civilians were haphazardly categorized as ‘enemy nationals’ and subjected to enemy alien regulations. This culminated in a far-reaching general internment policy from early 1943 until mid- to late 1945, when a bittersweet Allied liberation shut Japan’s ‘Civil Assembly Centres’ down. Despite Western imperialists’ desires to resurrect racial privilege and recapture a modicum of their colonial possessions, the process of ethno-political and socio-economic relegation and replacement initiated loosely under the political schema of Imperial Japan’s ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’ proved to be largely irreversible as post-imperial domestic regimes advanced nationalization agendas. The uprooted elite were not merely passive objects enduring racial upheaval, removal, and ‘repatriation’. They navigated a complex and changing reality, exercising what rights they could in order to try to improve their lot. They benefited from humanitarian aid, administered by neutral Swedish and Swiss consular networks and the International Committee of the Red Cross operating on a global scale.

Historians have increasingly stressed the impact of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars on Britain and Ireland. Less attention, however, has been paid to the legacies of martial mobilization after 1815. Drawing on hitherto unused press and archival sources, this article assesses the implications of wartime military expansion for the music profession, and musical culture more generally, in the decades after Waterloo. It demonstrates that men and boys who honed their instrumental skills in uniform embarked on a variety of civilian musical careers, becoming instructors, wind performers, composers, and even opera singers. The article traces the post-war circulation of regimental instruments and reveals that a multitude of militia and volunteer bands remained active long after demobilization. The wartime proliferation of military bands, moreover, encouraged the subsequent spread of quasi-martial wind ensembles in wider society. Finally, the article proves that brass bands were first introduced to Britain and Ireland in a regimental guise. The influence of the military on musical culture after 1815, in short, was palpable and often profound, and manifested itself in numerous ways and settings.

Are refugee ‘return’ and ‘repatriation’ the same thing? This article investigates the mid-century emergence of these two key concepts in the context of the entangled histories of post-1945 displacement and resettlement in Palestine/Israel, which has long had the dubious distinction of serving as a central site of international experimentation vis-à-vis modern questions surrounding mass expulsion and the possibilities of return. Despite the deeply interwoven nature of Palestinian and Jewish displacement, scholars have generally accepted these histories as distinct and segregated national memories. Such accounts actively ignore a crucial set of actors in the making of these forced migrations and their aftermaths: the ‘international community’, made up mainly of the victorious Allied powers, who constructed the framework within which such nationally bounded interpretations could be perpetuated and sustained. This article therefore aims to bring the international dimension to the forefront and to combine it with the history of concepts (Begriffsgeschichte) to examine how the concepts of ‘return’ and ‘repatriation’ evolved – and diverged – in the aftermath of the Second World War, in the context of an emerging modern international refugee regime designed primarily to serve superpower interests.

This article assesses the changes in humanitarianism by locally stationed British government officials after the Balkan Wars and after the First World War. Studies have examined British humanitarian goals in the Ottoman Empire in relation to the First World War, but lacking is an assessment of efforts from locally stationed British officials, with a particular absence of research regarding the Balkan Wars. We find that while British humanitarianism was expanded after the First World War, the framework for those changes was established during the Balkan Wars. Comparing evolving humanitarianism during these time periods is best seen via changes in the range of intervention strategies to create ‘good government’, to prevent and stop atrocities, and to care for refugees. Unlike the British relationship with the Ottoman government during the Balkan Wars, Britain’s humanitarian stance in 1918 and 1919 was matched by a stronger grasp on power in Constantinople and over the Ottoman Porte. However, as the political, social, financial, and military demands of the post-war landscape undermined Constantinople’s power, so too was British humanitarianism undermined.

This article examines the social and political aspects of late nineteenth-century water management in Batavia (now Jakarta), the capital of the Netherlands Indies. Through a detailed analysis of how a mixture of old and new water technologies featured in the city’s public debates and decision-making, it argues that water infrastructure served as a key site of social control over the city’s diverse population. From the 1870s onwards, deep-bore artesian wells linked to public hydrants were introduced to provide a reliable and hygienic supply of clean water. This was a response to long-standing concerns over the city’s waste-blocked canals and their deleterious health effects. The article shows how these technologies came to be entwined with new, punitive social norms, enforced through both formal regulations on water use and informal complaints over wastefulness; moreover, these norms had a clear racial dimension, being directed primarily against the city’s Asian communities and repurposing long-standing stereotypes. Yet, beyond official discourses, a close reading of these debates shows that Batavia’s canals and hydrants also functioned as grassroots sites of negotiation, where different ideas – not just of water and land but of the very concept of public spaces and the colonial public sphere – met and occasionally clashed.

This article sheds light on the political thought of prominent authors belonging to Baltic German aristocratic families, examining their responses to the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the rise of the Third Reich. Focusing on the writings of authors such as the international lawyer Mikhail von Taube and the philosopher Hermann Keyserling, it examines the peculiar combination of uprootedness and cosmopolitanism which characterized the political thought of these unmoored elites. Lacking a definite attachment to specific post-imperial successor states, these authors demonstrate a recursive loyalty to their own family history. An elite group among the diverse sets of people and nationalities fleeing the Russian empire as it descended into revolution and civil war between 1917 and 1922, including Jews, people from the Caucasus, Poles, and many other nationalities, the Baltic German nobility stood out as representatives of an ethnic and religious minority whose ancestors had settled on the Baltic littoral long before the Russian empire or other states in the region had emerged. The article contributes to a new approach to the intellectual history of refugees from a global perspective, which emphasizes the importance of language, faith, nationality, and social class as factors shaping ideas about political attachment among displaced intellectuals.

Despite a growing body of research on sexual violence in Irish history, and on recently reported historic sexual offences, few studies have focused on sex offenders who were prosecuted and convicted contemporaneously in the early decades of the Irish Free State. This article examines hitherto restricted archival files on sixty-five offenders who were convicted of unlawful carnal knowledge under the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, and, in doing so, constitutes the first comprehensive analysis of convicted sex offenders during the formative years of the independent Irish state. The findings reveal the modus operandi of these perpetrators and that the majority of the victims were exploited by someone who was known to them. The article also challenges the view that there was little recognition of child sexual abuse as a societal problem in the early years of the state and demonstrates that there was an awareness of predatory individuals within Irish communities during this period.

This article investigates the writings of three German-Jewish intellectuals: Kurt Grossmann (1897–1972), Hannah Arendt (1906–75), and Günther Anders (1902–92). It argues that all three thinkers dealt, in their lives as well as their writing, with the construction of a common refugee polis. Yet this engagement was limited by a political-existential predicament that, through their attempts to reclaim their agency, turned their historical and philosophical works into a renegotiation of their own biographies. The article focuses on key chapters in Arendt’s The origins of totalitarianism, in conjunction with her essay We refugees; on Grossmann’s books The Jewish refugee (co-authored with Arieh Tartakower) and Emigration: the history of the Hitler-refugees 1933–1945; and on Anders’s essay ‘The emigrant’. As victims of National Socialism who fled from Nazi Germany to the US, these authors represent a distinctive view of the transition from the Second World War to the era of the Cold War. Reclaiming agency served as a way to resist subjugation by Nazi race ideology, yet it also circumscribed their belief in the radical potential of the political refugee, resulting in Arendt’s focus on totalitarianism, Grossmann’s limiting the refugee polis to Jewish refugee organizations, and Anders’s inward existential gaze.

This article examines how naval pageantry shaped public understanding of British sea power in the interwar years. Rather than being a period in which there was a danger of the Royal Navy becoming ‘lost to view and forgotten’ as some contemporary observers feared, this article instead demonstrates that naval pageantry was a crucial way in which members of the British public engaged with and memorialized aspects of Britain’s naval and national history following the ‘crucible’ of the First World War. Naval pageants were used by a range of officials, associational bodies, and non-state actors to promote naval heritage, tradition, and continuity. Yet, such events were not simply conservative or anti-modern, also emphasizing the ongoing importance of the Royal Navy through militarized depictions of modern naval warfare. Finally, naval pageantry formed a significant part of the commemorative landscape of the post-war years, in part dedicated to those who lost their lives at sea during the First World War. As this article illustrates, naval pageants provide important insights into the often contested and complex cultural legacies of the First World War, alongside broader issues of the period including heritage, commemoration, militarism, modernity, conflict, and peace.

As contemporaries noted, the long months from the Munich Crisis (autumn 1938) through to the end of the Phoney War (spring 1940) felt like a ‘war of nerves’. The battlefields were physical and material as much as psychological and imagined. Turning to sources that reveal visceral experience, we can explore the internal and internalized history of the international crisis. First, I listen to writers, politicians, academics, anthropological researchers, psychiatrists, and advertisers as one after the other they projected this overwhelming nervous disorder onto bodies and onto the body politic. In his largely forgotten Journal under the terror, 1938 (1939), the Bloomsburyite, prolific man of letters, and literary scholar F. L. Lucas emerges as a perspicacious narrator of the war of nerves, and he was both witness and victim of a world he described as filled with ‘nervous breakdowns’. Second, I exhume the casualties of this war of nerves, a group of people who exercised their bodily autonomy and self-determination to free themselves from the world in crisis. Based on a dataset of 185 cases, the ‘crisis suicides’ – ‘committed daily by people terrorised at the thought of a war’ – constituted an apparent epidemic. Together these bodies of evidence of bodily experience make a case for reframing and renaming the period, and identifying the first battle of Britain’s ‘People’s War’.

The Franciscan Missionaries of the Divine Motherhood (FMDM) arrived in Ireland in 1942, to establish and run Portiuncula Hospital in Ballinasloe, county Galway. This was not without its challenges and this article explores many of those challenges in the context of the construction and management of the hospital between 1942 and 1970. FMDM sisters were women in a patriarchal church and needed to also negotiate their place within the similar frameworks of the medical profession, civil service, and government, while being subject to gossip as to the work they were doing. The article is a revealing case-study of some of the global changes in medicine that had been taking place since the 1920s. It is also an example of how modern methods of healthcare were having an impact on the Irish healthcare system, with medically trained Catholic religious sisters at the forefront. The story of women religious in twentieth-century global Catholicism is a relatively unattended one. This case-study allows historians of religion to better understand the internationality of Catholic religious congregations, examining concepts of unity and disharmony, and the various efforts they made to confront but also comply with the patriarchal structures in which they found themselves.

In historical global refugee studies, the voices of migrants and their agency have become of growing interest. As recent research shows, migration is a complex process that is not simply obstructed by states but rather negotiated between different actors. Within these processes, migrants play a vital and active role as so-called ‘agents of experience’. This article analyses how specific migration processes have been negotiated by exploring the agency of German-speaking refugees from the Holocaust in wartime Australia with a particular focus on the negotiation of citizenship legislation. Relying on social cognitive theory, it focuses on actions taken at an institutional level of refugee agency. This allows for the understanding of how refugees have organized themselves and reveals what they did at an institutional level to become a point of reference for the Australian government and to influence its decision to introduce the new legal term of ‘refugee alien’.