Tolls were not only fundamental to the operation of early modern English markets, but also had the capacity to generate tensions that belied their seemingly unremarkable role in contemporary economic affairs. Yet, tolls and toll disputes have received little attention in studies of market regulation and have also been neglected in studies of the politics of grain supply and marketing. This article revives tolls as an object of enquiry and suggests that they occupied an ambiguous position within early modern English economic culture. Tolls raised complex questions about how self-interest operated in a society that conceptualized bargaining primarily in communal terms and emphasized the social and moral obligations that should underpin it. While this was arguably true of tolls on all goods, it was especially true of tolls on grain – a commodity that occupied a singular place in contemporary socio-economic relations. By examining how competing parties in toll disputes articulated and sought to defend their interests, and how their respective tactics changed over time, this article sheds new light on the dynamics involved in England’s transition from one way of thinking about economic activity to another.

Childbirth in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century England was not simply a medical affair but a social and religious event, with an associated array of complex devotional practices. This article challenges the widely held view that such practices were generally confined to the home and shows how the English parish church accommodated public devotional childbirth customs and objects. Using the perspectives of space, materiality, mobility, and recycling, I investigate a set of mobile material culture associated with childbirth (namely prayer beads, linen, and girdles) which moved between the parish church and domestic spaces. The article explores the shifting devotional significance of these objects, not only as they moved through space but also through time, by examining their fate during the English Reformation. Highlighting the previously under-examined public presence of the childbearing woman in the English parish, the article demonstrates that attention to devotional spaces and objects can shed new light on the emotional experiences of childbirth and women's wider religious and social practices during a period which was simultaneously one of incremental change and intense upheaval.

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.

This article argues that our understanding of the sixteenth-century Jesuit encounter with Japan is improved by taking into account the role gender played in cultural translation. Recent histories of the mission and the writings it produced have highlighted the strategies adopted by Jesuits to rely on and manipulate knowledge of local cultures to facilitate conversion. Yet, few scholars have used gender as a lens to read the actions and ethnographies performed and produced by Jesuits in overseas missions. Using Luís Fróis's Tratado das contradições e diferenças de costumes entre a Europa e o Japão (Treaty on the contrasts and differences between Europe and Japan), I argue that skilled cultural interpreters used gender as a determining lens to approach the primary task of conversion, but also the secondary task of cultural mediation. Unlike the invasion of the Americas, the ephemeral infiltration of Asia was accomplished through European accommodation of Asian political vocabularies and conduct. Examining the epistemological tools Fróis used to build knowledge of the Other sheds light on the initial stages of the unequal encounter between the Japanese and the Jesuits and how it changed based on a growing understanding of Japanese politics, class, and society.

Studying the food practices of one vast and prominent Irish household reveals a complex history of consumption, status, and power in sixteenth-century Europe. This article is a close analysis of the little studied but unusually detailed household accounts of William Fitzwilliam, lord deputy of Ireland during 1572–5 and 1588–94. It first discusses how early modern historians have probed similar records and how these examples can be interpreted. The following sections examine the specific foods consumed at Dublin Castle and the high cost, distinctive rhythms, and deep symbolism of grand-scale dining at the viceroy's primary residence. This study of the everyday life of one of the most powerful officeholders in England and Ireland offers fresh perspectives on the region's political history. It also adds to the burgeoning study of Irish consumption, showing that the country was connected to continental developments. More than an Irish story, this article offers evidence of Europe-wide changes, like the elaboration of courtly cuisine and the shifting associations of foodstuffs, and how these changes were filtered through local circumstances. It suggests too how historians can make productive use of household accounts, sources well suited to comparison and combination with other disciplinary approaches.

Beer was a staple of early modern diets across northern Europe and the Atlantic World. While its profound social, economic, and cultural significance is well established, little is known about the nature and quality of the drink itself, particularly its nutritional characteristics. Until now, attempts to estimate calorie and alcohol content have been monodisciplinary in approach, involving either theoretical calculations based on grain content, or a rough approximation with modern equivalents. Using sixteenth-century Ireland as a case-study, this article describes an interdisciplinary approach to the problem of early modern beer. Exploiting a rich seam of unpublished archival material, the project recreates an early modern beer, using the most appropriate ingredients, equipment, and processes possible. Scientific analysis of the finished drink offers new perspectives on beer as a dietary staple. The project is a model for integrating practical or experimental approaches into mainstream historical study, and the practice of radical interdisciplinarity. It represents the most comprehensive effort to recreate an historic beer in any context to date, bringing together historians, experimental archaeologists, agronomists, microbiologists, brewing scientists, craftworkers, farmers, and maltsters to tackle problematic questions about the past.

In December 1654 a large naval force departed from Portsmouth and sailed across the Atlantic. Its goal was to expand the English Commonwealth in the Caribbean at the expense of Spanish colonies. The Gloucester, a third-rate frigate recently constructed as part of Oliver Cromwell's ambitious shipbuilding programme, was one of the largest and most heavily armed warships of the expedition. Combining analysis of courts martial accounts, inventories, journals, letters, sailing instructions, and wills, this article argues for the Gloucester's importance as a case study and microcosm for understanding the economic, political, religious, and social problems that the navy and wider Protectorate faced. It revises traditional historiography about the topic that has underestimated the significance of the naval context to the Western Design. Crucial to this new history is that the extreme hardships and religious divisions created tensions that targeted the leadership of Admiral William Goodsonn. Of particular importance in this narrative is Benjamin Blake, captain of the Gloucester, who clashed with Goodsonn over key policies. By focusing on the Gloucester and exploring its crew's experiences, this article shows that the English navy was a restricted and internally conflicted force when operating at the peripheries of the state network.

This article offers a new interpretation of the history-writing produced in Enlightenment Scotland. It argues that after the Jacobite rebellion of 1745 was blamed on Scotland's ‘feudal’ institutions, Scottish jurists and historians began to interrogate what it meant to become 'modern'. Instead of accepting the Whig claim that England provided the ideal model for social and political development, they subsumed English history into a broader debate about whether and how modern Europe had emerged from its feudal past. By reconstructing this debate, the article shows how Scots rewrote European history in ways that subverted the English whig tradition while rejecting universal or ‘cosmopolitan’ explanations of social progress. In doing so, the article reopens the question of how the Scottish Enlightenment shaped British imperial culture across the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

This article recognizes the significance of commercial entertainment producers in early modern England operating outside of London. In doing so, it offers fresh methodological approaches for understanding pre-modern social status. I explore the geographical and social places of independent bearwards – individuals who kept bears for the commercial sport of baiting. Regional figures involved in entertainment production have been little explored and left behind frustratingly few biographical details. Yet three generations of one family – the Whitestones of Ormskirk in Lancashire (1610s through the 1630s) – do leave substantial surviving documentary evidence about their activities, assets, and networks. I use the Whitestones's probate inventories and wills and their and their neighbours’ court depositions and petitions to offer for the first time a holistic appraisal of the material, economic, and cultural circumstances of the bearward. By stepping inside the households and communities of several generations of independent entertainment producers, we can appreciate their complex and variable social status and the role of commercial recreation in social mobility. I finish by considering the human–animal relationships that underpinned the bearward's place in early modern England, offering fresh evidence of bears’ living arrangements and a theoretical framework for discussing their exploitation in the blood sport industry.

Traditionally, anti-standing army ideology in the 1690s and 1700s has been viewed primarily through an English prism. As a result of the unique contribution of Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, the place of Scotland has also been examined in this regard, particularly in relation to the ‘paper war’ of 1697–9. However, Ireland also loomed larger than has previously been acknowledged within the associated debates. This was evident both in the arguments advanced and in the writers who advanced them. Several individuals with close connections to Ireland – both Anglo-Irish and English Protestants – figured prominently among the anti-standing army writers, including Robert Molesworth, John Trenchard, Sir Francis Brewster, and Henry Maxwell. That they did so requires explanation, given that the army in Ireland offered the minority Protestant ruling elite the greatest security against a Catholic Jacobite rebellion. The involvement of these men in anti-standing army debates also highlights their engagement in an Irish Protestant context with the idea of a Gothic constitution and the extent to which their writings contributed to the post-Glorious Revolution whig canon. Yet the debates also highlight the limitations of such ideology when faced with the question of Irish identity and confessional allegiance, the constitutional relationship with England, and the presence of a standing army in Ireland. One proposed solution to such limitations was political Union.

From the Second Anglo-Dutch War to the fall of the United Provinces (c. 1670–1795), dozens of English writers published accounts of their travels across the North Sea. The English and the Dutch were bound by centuries of intellectual, political, and cultural interaction. Factors like a shared confession and similar economic structures meant that Anglo-Dutch relations were uniquely intimate, and this close relationship allowed a nuanced and complex exploration of political ideas. This article recreates one of those ideas that was repeated so often in English travel writing: that the Dutch Republic was free. This freedom was presented as a Faustian pact. In practice, the Dutch state guaranteed many freedoms that the English lauded, such as the right to property, to government accountability, and to efficient justice. However, English writers disdained the theories that underpinned these freedoms, which were viewed as egalitarian and republican. It was argued that these suspect doctrines led the United Provinces down the path to licentiousness, luxury, and decline. Paradoxically, therefore, the nature of Dutch freedom determined both the country’s rise and its fall.

In 1863, Emperor Tewodros II of Abyssinia (present-day Ethiopia and Eritrea) took a British consul hostage; five years later, the British sent a punitive expedition. This military expedition continued the brutal tradition of earlier ones and shaped later campaigns in Sudan and West Africa in the 1890s. Typically, a large contingent of non-military personnel accompanied these expeditions and the 1868 expedition to Maqdala was no different. What was unique for Maqdala was the inclusion of a member of staff from the British Museum. We argue that a letter from Charles Thomas Newton, keeper of the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities, to Sir Roderick Murchison, the president of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS), illustrates that the plunder of cultural heritage was planned. We also argue that the plunder did not go to plan. The inclusion of a man from the museum made this expedition unique in the museum's history. The acquisition of these objects through colonial violence constitutes a strong moral reason for their repatriation from the British Museum and the numerous institutions in which they are dispersed. Understanding the planning involved in their plunder illustrates the entanglement of politics and imperialism with scientific and cultural institutions that constituted the backbone of Victorian Britain.

In the summer of 1780, anti-Catholic riots led by Lord George Gordon in London left hundreds dead and stretches of the city burnt and destroyed. Eighteen months later, during a tense period in the city's history, London was invaded by brown-tail moth caterpillars. The metropolis and surrounding countryside disappeared behind the tents and nests of the insects, prompting widespread fear of famine and plague. With the memory of the riots still fresh, philanthropists such as Jonas Hanway and entomologists like William Curtis sought to assuage the public's fear, insisting that the brown-tail moth outbreak was part of the normal operations of nature, that the infestation bore no danger to the public, and that efforts to alarm the public or describe them as dangerous were contemptuous. At the same time, the conjurer and philosopher Gustavus Katterfelto, performing in the city, sought to profit from the public agitation, developing spectacles and performances that promised the insects would soon deliver famine, plague, and ruin on the city. This article examines the intersection of scientific authority, public fear, and performance, showing that the outbreak placed tremendous stress on the relationship between scientific authority and security in the metropolis.

This article analyses the biggest pilgrimage event of the Napoleonic era, showing how Catholics used imperial opportunities and imperial loopholes to progress on their path toward religious revival. In September 1810, more than 200,000 pilgrims rushed to the small provincial city of Trier to venerate one of Christianity's most important relics, the Holy Coat of Jesus. This pilgrimage could take place and grow to such gigantic dimensions because both clerical elites and laypeople deftly navigated territorial frameworks created by the Napoleonic state. In the Rhenish borderlands to which Trier belonged, French hegemony enabled the return of the relic to the city in the first place, but pilgrims subsequently exploited the malleability of public order that also characterized imperial governance. The great pilgrimage of 1810 represented neither a form of exclusively top-down mobilization orchestrated by the church and controlled by the state, nor an act of overt, politicized opposition – even as state officials, in turn, proved undeniably hostile to pilgrim mobility and ‘superstition’. The article therefore argues that, in the more peaceful parts of Napoleon's empire, pilgrims and pilgrimage organizers accelerated post-revolutionary Catholic renewal by using that empire rather than either resisting or collaborating with it.

Taking a global approach to the American Civil War from the vantage of China, this article explores the nineteenth-century transnational connections and disconnections that linked the American community there to distant diplomatic crises unfolding in the Atlantic. Such episodes as the raiding of the Confederate privateer Alabama and the Trent Affair reached China's Americans through newspaper articles and correspondence that described an Atlantic theatre dominated by the spirit of war. Such reports had an ambiguous effect in China. On the one hand, they undermined American mercantile enterprises that had been poised to expand into China's interior. On the other, they created only ephemeral ripples of discontent amongst a wider Anglo-American community ultimately bound together by common interests and a sense of racial and cultural solidarity. I argue that while rumour and speculation were powerful forces capable of crippling the United States’ merchant marine, colonial society in ports such as Hong Kong proved surprisingly resistant to metropolitan socio-political crises. Through the central case-study of the Alabama and related debates sustained in 1860s China, this article accordingly explores the extent to which (semi)colonial societies were susceptible to or insulated from metropolitan crises.

The Irish Land War was a pivotal conflict in the history of liberal political thought. With significant impacts on both sides of the Atlantic, events in Ireland were about more than Irish self-determination. Heavily reliant on a discourse of natural right, and asserting a relationship between land ownership and democratic-republican citizenship, the Land War provided a vehicle for popular radical opposition to an increasingly positivist liberalism. This article examines the rationales and political assumptions underlying the demand for land, and how such arguments catalysed an intellectual response among liberal political thinkers. Particular moral and metaphysical ideas about the distinctiveness of land allowed agrarian and labour radicals to reassert individualized but non-possessive rights to natural resources. Rooted in a materialist politics of the human body, this purposive conception of land posed a significant threat to claims for private property, social order, and the ameliorative authority of the state, pressing both liberal and conservative thinkers away from unstable notions of individual rights. The crisis over Irish land helped to shift the terrain of political argument away from questions of participation and popular power, and toward amelioration and public welfare.

This article argues that projects to make Britain's imperial history visible to the public through the display of statues, the establishment of a history museum, and the renovation of historical markers solidified a colonial narrative about the British empire's permanence in India during the first two decades of the twentieth century, decades in which anticolonial unrest threatened the British occupation of the subcontinent. The monumental scale expressed permanence. An imperial aesthetic linked the cities important to showcasing the empire in Calcutta, New Delhi, and London. Contrary to mainstream assumptions that commemorations should be preserved for the sake of documenting history, these markers enacted a British story of triumph at a moment when mass campaigns against British rule were occurring. Coming at the end of a long nineteenth century of statue mania, when many European nations installed memorials to national heroes, the installation of monuments in India presented a colonialist public history of events such as the Black Hole incident of 1757 or the rebellions of 1857. Drawing from Viceroy George Curzon's ambitions in historical preservation and monumentalizing, the article shows how he stabilized a British narrative of India amid anticolonial campaigns of protest.

This article examines the life of Lady Elizabeth Anson (1725–60), daughter of Philip Yorke, 1st earl of Hardwicke, and the wife of Admiral George Lord Anson, first lord of the admiralty. Using a sample of her letters, this article argues that Lady Anson engaged with letter-writing as an inherently political activity. Previous studies of Lady Anson’s correspondence have emphasized her role in the Yorkes’ political network, but this article foregrounds her marriage to Lord Anson and her life at the admiralty. In a marriage shaped by the strains of naval service, Lady Anson used her talents as a letter-writer to establish a role for herself as her husband’s political partner. Building on the work of Elaine Chalus, Judith Lewis, and Sarah Richardson, this article explores the ways in which Lady Anson used letters to disseminate intelligence and negotiate patronage. It examines her friendship with the powerful admiralty secretary, John Cleveland, and considers the ways in which her physical proximity to the admiralty office gave her privileged access to the inner workings of the Royal Navy. Consequently, her writing provides important insights into the ways in which elite women could use letters to establish their own political authority.

This article explores the place of Finland and the Swedish military volunteers of the 1918 civil war, and 1939–44 Finno-Soviet wars, in the Swedish fascist imaginary. The loss of Finland to Russia in 1809 was heavily romanticized in Swedish nationalist culture, and shaped Swedish responses to both conflicts, mediated through famous literary works which encouraged a sense of shame and betrayal. Through examination of the historical relationship between the two countries, the volunteer effort in 1918, and the subsequent emergence of fascism in the interwar period, it is shown that this imaginary of the Finnish–Swedish relationship strongly shaped Swedish fascism. The article traces key military volunteer veterans in various fascist organizations, and the symbolic appropriation of the veterans. Rather than a comparatively peaceful manifestation of fascism in neutral Sweden, Swedish fascism was possessed of a heavily militarized imaginary rooted in violent proxy conflicts in its former eastern borderlands – in this regard it also showed substantial overlap with Swedish conservative nationalism.