The British Raj formally ended on 15 August 1947. In the years following the bifurcation of British India into Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan, between 11 and 18 million people migrated to escape sectarian pogroms at the hands of the majority population. By 1950, many South Asian – specifically Bengali – refugees were radically critiquing decolonization. Theorizing from their experiences of proletarianization, East Bengali refugees argued that decolonization had been incomplete. The postcolonial Indian state was a neocolonial state allied to Western imperialism. Refugees imagined themselves as part of a worldwide struggle between Anglo-American imperialism and Sino-Soviet-led socialist anti-imperialism. Refugees assembled in hundreds and thousands across the Indian state of West Bengal to overthrow regimes of big private property. They condemned the operations of money economy. They aimed to overcome capitalism. Inspired by Chinese communists, they built a vast confederal democracy uniting refugee camps and colonies – a ‘refugee polis’. This article offers a socially-contextualized intellectual history of this epic transformation, which delegitimized the postcolonial Indian state and dramatically drew the country, through struggles waged by refugees, into the tumult of the Cold War. The article prompts us to visualize the subaltern origins of the Cold War in India.

Since its foundation in 1724, the regius chair has been held by twenty-two men. In this study, I consider a small selection of them, using a range of sources including a guard book in Cambridge University’s archives and portraits in order to reflect on their lives, works, and reputations and on ways of analysing the history of one specific post. The central role of the university’s registrary and the scope of incumbents’ intellectual concerns are also discussed. Implicit is a measure of scepticism about ‘professionalization’ as an explanation for the nature of historical practice over three hundred years and about existing interpretations of past claims that history is a science.

Soviet mass operations against a number of ethnic minorities were one of the most large-scale state-run terror campaigns in European history. The partial opening up of the formerly closed Soviet archives has had an enormous impact on the study of the Great Terror and its most secret part, ‘the national operations of the NKVD’ implemented in July 1937 to November 1938. The aim of this review is threefold. The first is to discuss the main approaches in the recent studies of the national operations of the NKVD with respect to the following topics: the role of Stalin in the dramatic turn of nationalities politics, the intent, implementation, and magnitude of the national operations; and dimensions for further research. The second aim is to examine contemporary academic discussions from the perspectives of the research project ‘Swedes, emotions, and moral diplomacy in the Great Terror. Foreign Office’s rescue operation in the Soviet Union, 1937–38’, in which the author took part. The third aim is to focus on the importance of the local context when accessing both the motives and the implementations of the national operations.

This study develops and expands some of the arguments of a lecture I delivered on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the foundation of Cambridge’s Historical Tripos. Its central proposition – that it is meaningful to talk about ‘Cambridge History’ and to discuss its distinctiveness – remains central to this published version of the lecture, as does the idea that the Tripos has always embodied that distinctiveness as a form of social memory. Both the Tripos as a structure and the Faculty archive as a source come into play in helping to make sense of the Cambridge trajectory over the past half century. The lecture lays stress on some persistent legacies from the Cambridge tradition, identifies some strands that developed internally after 1945, and considers the impact of external influences on Cambridge History. Taking the story up to the ‘new’ Tripos of 2022, the lecture concludes that the legacy has exercised more control than has innovation and that the Historical Tripos is best understood as a continuing conversation with its own past.

Across the one hundred years of its existence, The (Cambridge) Historical Journal has been both a purveyor and the product of history. This centenary article explores the Journal's growth and evolution from both of these perspectives, and suggests three different stages in its development.