Often neglected by scholars, China actually played a role in America’s abolitionist movement from 1830 to 1865. Anti-slavery crusaders invoked the country to reinforce their moral suasion, which emerged as one major tactic against slavery after the 1830s. Appropriating the prevailing stereotype of China as an uncivilized and pitiable Other, they presented the characterization as a reference to expose the barbarity and hypocrisy of pro-slavery Americans, as well as the insincerity of Britons regarding abolition. Although white and Black activists emphasized different aspects along racial lines, they were united in leveraging this moral campaign to shame self-styled leaders of civilization into reconsidering their position on slavery. In the process, abolitionists sustained America’s Orientalist condescension toward the Chinese. China became an abolitionist weapon not because of its national power, but because of its perceived backwardness.

This article provides a close study of ‘Nice pickings’, a short piece of political disinformation generated within the London radical press. It examines the means and methods by which this became a viral text and reconstructs its pattern of circulation. It argues that, by passing rapidly and widely around a range of different media and audiences, by being susceptible to revamping and adaptation, and by providing a gateway onto a series of powerful stories already in circulation, this single paragraph illuminates some of the ways in which a national reform movement was forged in 1830.

In the context of increasing historiographical attention to the emotional content of French revolutionary politics, the essentially unprecedented nationwide consultation that produced the cahiers de doléances of 1789, now available as a searchable digitised corpus, offers a route into exploring the hopes, fears, and concerns of thousands of French people who participated directly in the cahiers’ composition. Mapping their uses of the concept of ‘trust’, and its manifold implications, offers new evidence on the nature and contours of the political relationships they believed they inhabited, and on the extent to which they were enacting agency over the prospect of change. It also provides material to contemplate the implications of the highly centralized, top-down reform processes actually initiated from the summer of 1789 onwards, and the violent complexity of their reception.

The 1893 drought will, according to the science journal Nature in July, ‘unquestionably take its place among the recorded events of history, if regard be had to its intensity [and] the length of time during which it has lasted’. Communities reported being stretched beyond endurance. Rivers ran dry, reservoirs dropped to record lows, wells failed, and domestic water supplies were restricted to a few hours per day. But while the 1893 drought was severe, it was not unusual. As this article reveals, urban and rural communities faced regular droughts of varying intensity and duration during the long nineteenth century. What did this mean for them? Where previous interest in extreme weather events has focused on recovering historic patterns, or examined resilience or adaption, this article explores the lived experiences of drought to offer a new perspective on the impact of weather shocks and water scarcity on people’s lives. By combining evidence from meteorological reports, newspapers, official reports, and local government archives, the article undercovers the fragility of urban and rural water supplies and examines how behaviours were adapted in response to water scarcity and precarity.

Proposing ‘the littoral’ as a subject of historical enquiry, this article centres on British rule over the waters, isles, and shores in nineteenth-century colonial Hong Kong. It argues that similar and connected to its rule over urban space, the British government endeavoured to regulate the colony’s watery fringes out of racial and other concerns. Commensurate with the growth of shipping, colonial rulers demarcated particular littoral spaces as mirrors or even extensions of land spaces. In the late nineteenth century, an emerging hierarchy of delineated navigational, anchorage, and quarantine spaces was discernible in Hong Kong’s littorals. Despite their efforts to structure littoral space, British colonial authorities failed to direct its actual usage. Not only did stakeholders compete and negotiate over using Victoria Harbour, but also, many Chinese watercraft countered official control by venturing across administrative boundaries. More broadly, the case of Hong Kong suggests perspectives for addressing the complexity of the littoral history of colonial port cities in Asia. First is the examination of connections between different areas within littoral space. Second is the inseparability between littoral space and urban space in terms of government policies. Third is the contrast between colonial designs and actual negotiations regarding the use of littoral space.

The transformation of nineteenth-century governing classes remains one of the greatest themes of European history. This article focuses on the social and familial life of 116 high-ranking treasury clerks offering a different perspective on the development of the nineteenth-century state and the transformation of its governing classes. Instead of conceptualizing the formation of this new administrative elite exclusively in terms of administrative reform, career advancement based on individual merit, educational networks, or the result of connections with cabinet officers – as hitherto has been commonplace in the literature – this article will show that treasury clerks’ marriage ties, familial networks, and intergenerational support sustained their careers, families, and status during middle life and old age. By using class, life-cycle, and family lenses, this article argues that the consolidation, coherence, and cohesion of the new ‘administrative elite’, that is, the men who attained the top positions in the treasury and from there moved to other public establishments from 1850 to 1914, was also the result of transitions in their life cycle and family life. Apart from recasting the ascent of this group in social terms, this approach produces significant insights into the development of the nineteenth-century state, the transformation of governing classes, social classes, and family.

The British government’s stance towards the American Civil War belligerents, while professedly neutral, has often been seen by historians as leaning, more or less strongly, towards the Confederacy. Its failure to prevent the Confederates from procuring warships in Britain during the war is regularly cited as supporting this viewpoint. This article examines in detail Britain’s response to the vehement demands from the US government to shut down the Confederates’ ship procurement programme in the context of Britain’s administrative machinery in the 1860s. It concludes that the state apparatus at the time was not fit for purpose, and in particular that it lacked central direction, was hidebound in its procedures, and was too dependent on individuals’ competence and integrity to rise to meet the challenge to British law and governance mounted by a determined Confederacy. However, Britain did make considerable efforts to prevent the Confederates from obtaining warships and did not set out with the deliberate intent to aid and abet the Confederate States by providing them with a navy, did not turn a blind eye to Confederate activity, and did not demonstrate a negligent disregard for its own laws.

In this article, we first explicitly argue that disability associated with poor eyesight was a socially constructed category dependent on the needs of the Post Office as an employer and its ability to construct workplaces which ameliorated the impact of vision impairment. The second part of the article addresses the institutional responses and technological landscapes of work which comprised the contexts within which visual impairment needs to be interpreted. This involves examining the importance of medical inspection by Post Office doctors which worked to exclude those with significant sight loss from postal employment. However, what was understood to constitute significant or irreparable sight loss varied across different government agencies, and different definitions of what constituted significant sight loss served as a point of contention between Post Office management and the Civil Service Commission. .

This article provides a comparative discussion of the theories of imperialism developed by three prominent scholars – Paul Samuel Reinsch, Ukita Kazutami, and Liang Qichao – in the 1900s. Such a discussion offers a fresh understanding of imperialism in the East Asian context from three perspectives. First, by revealing inter-textual connections between the three figures’ writings, it sheds light on Japan’s mediating role in the formation of Chinese knowledge of imperialism in a transpacific exchange of ideas. Second, it examines how the theories of imperialism travelled in the unequal international spaces created by practices of imperialism. Last, it draws attention to the consequences of embracing the Western ideal of national empire in East Asia, highlighting the fact that some Japanese and Chinese elites resisted Western imperialism on the one hand, but, on the other, drew inspiration from the ideal of imperialism to formulate their own expansionist agendas.

Manchester has long been a model for the class divisions characteristic of British Victorian cities, and this segregation has largely been attributed as a spatial phenomenon as informed by qualitative sources from the period. The digitization of historical source material, however, allows for quantitative assessments of residential differentiation. By analysing patterns of residential distribution using nineteenth-century, individual-level census data, it is revealed that early Victorian Manchester was characterized more by residential heterogeneity than segregation. In light of this finding, this article revisits the source base for early Victorian Manchester in order to reconcile the differences in the physical and social dimensions of segregation for a more accurate and holistic understanding of urban dynamics and the mechanisms of class formation. It explains this dissonance by exploring the city’s architectural, occupational, and cultural structures: while rich and poor lived cheek-by-jowl in the industrial city, temporal rhythms of employment, institutionalized cultures of class, and emerging modes of urban maintenance and discipline all produced practices which differentiated and isolated one class from another.

In Argentina, the years 1930–43 became known initially as the ‘Infamous Decade’, book-ended by General Félix Uriburu’s coup of September 1930 and a further military intervention in June 1943. Though Uriburu’s dictatorship only lasted until February 1932, the following eleven years – encompassing the presidencies of Agustín P. Justo, Roberto Ortiz, and Ramón Castillo – were characterized by widespread electoral fraud and corruption. Drawing mostly on police records, this article sheds fresh light on how, in everyday life, activists from across the political spectrum experienced, negotiated, and resisted state power and ideological conflict during this period. The history of everyday life has found fertile ground in Argentina and, consequently, everyday life history approaches have revealed important insights into more recent periods of authoritarian rule in the country, including the ‘National Reorganization Process’ of 1976–83. However, everyday experiences of both state power and ideological tensions during the ‘Infamous Decade’ remain overlooked. More generally, studies of this earlier period have often focused primarily on the nation’s capital or the province of Buenos Aires. In contrast, this article brings together material from across the country, to further understandings of political activists’ everyday experiences of state control, resistance, and ideological conflict between 1930 and 1943.

Newspaper reporters routinely occupied the galleries of the adversarial and inquisitorial courts at the beginning of the twentieth century but whether their shorthand progressed to publication and into the public domain was sensitive to many factors. Newsworthy cases were self-selecting; headlines could be quickly constituted from verdicts and riders, and the verbatim replication of proceedings provided editors with ready content safe from libel. Scholars of Ireland rely heavily on digitized newspapers as surrogate sources for legal records destroyed in 1922, but the extent to which they can be used in that respect merits further and detailed research. This article takes a case study approach to show the methodological challenges faced by historians dealing with partial archival pasts and why digitized newspapers should be used with great caution. Using a sample of cases from Irish coronial court registers, it traces newspaper coverage over the course of a census year to ascertain discernible patterns. With a particular focus on suicide, it exposes the problems associated with using digitized newspapers in historical research, the limitations of search engine capacities, as well as the necessity for more critical analysis of the embedded gender and class biases that influenced editorial decisions.

Herbert Butterfield’s The Whig Interpretation of History (1931) is universally received as sceptical of ‘whig’ teleology in historical accounts and, therefore, of politically charged narratives of history. This view stands in need of a basic correction. Butterfield’s work targets teleological accounts which involve a determinate conception of progress such as would arm a partisan politics. He calls this the politics of the ‘general proposition’. Nevertheless, he does defend a conception of progress involving an indeterminate concept. The historian finds, intimated in the detail of the past, that progress is the fruit of interactions between opposing parties. The imperative for the statesman in the present, then, is to facilitate such interactions. In short, The Whig Interpretation of History is a positive work of political thought. Looked at this way, Butterfield’s later, controversial work, The Englishman & His History, does not appear to be in contradiction with the earlier book so much as a polemical expression of it. The two books together present what may be called Butterfield’s politics of historiography. Histories which present progress as a straight line, to be co-opted by one party, encourage precisely the political action which impedes progress. Butterfield, in short, is still a kind of ‘whig’.

The Easter 1916 rebellion occasioned significant civilian casualties. Having initially resisted the idea of compensating bereaved or injured civilians, the British government relented by establishing the Rebellion (Victims’) Committee (RVC) which assessed 550 compensation applications for death and injury. Utilizing these applications as well as Dublin Castle, Treasury, press, and parliamentary records, this article examines five aspects of the state’s treatment of civilian casualties: why the government’s initial opposition to compensation was eventually reversed; the establishment of the RVC, the bureaucratic compensation process, and the surveillance of working-class claimants; what the compensation claims reveal about the nature and circumstances of civilian casualties during the rebellion; how the Workmen’s Compensation Act (1906) was used to determine compensation awards and, consequently, how this minimized the state’s financial liabilities by treating civilian casualties not as victims of war but on a par with injured workers; and, lastly, why the workmen’s compensation legislation was an inadequate means of treating civilian war casualties. The RVC compensation records enable a unique case study of how the 1916 rebellion adversely affected the lives of ordinary men, women and children, and how the British state endeavoured to limit its obligations to make reparations to them.

A new, ground-up narrative of the Buddhist Mobilization of Huế in central Vietnam in the summer of 1963 highlights the voices of its participants – the ‘People of the Pagoda’. Drawing on local records and personal narratives, the article explores the process of how the ‘People of the Pagoda’ forged a collective identity from daily activism and protests for religious equality. Months of various nonviolent collective actions – in the form of demonstrations, hunger strikes, and self-immolations – developed a strong, broad community within the distinctive spaces of Buddhist temples. The article emphasizes the relevance of culture, morals, emotions and identity in the Buddhist Mobilization’s enduring impacts on personal awareness and community networks. In contrast to much top-down, politically-oriented, and Sài Gòn-centric scholarship on this event in Vietnam War historiography, this essay examines the mobilization as a social movement in its own right and seeks to restore Huế’s significant historical role as the birthplace of this movement.

This article analyses the political economy of consumption in Poland during the crisis of 1980–1 through economic-policy debates among Communist Party and Solidarity experts. It asks how conflicts over everyday economic needs shaped political confrontation and the decision to impose martial law. The central argument is that the crisis resulted not from a simple failure of socialist production but from the erosion of a paternalistic system of allocating goods. This weakness was exposed both by Solidarity’s challenge to the state’s monopoly over defining scarcity and by the party’s own long-term consumer policies based on austerity as a recurrent instrument of governance whose implementation became politically blocked. The article outlines the systemic logic of socialist consumption, emphasizing accumulation, subsidized prices, and chronic allocation tensions, and examines late 1970s debates on needs and rational consumption. It then analyses the 1980–1 confrontation, showing how Solidarity legitimized consumer grievances yet resisted responsibility for stabilization, producing policy paralysis. Finally, it demonstrates how martial law enabled comprehensive austerity and price reform aimed at restoring financial stability and external creditworthiness. Based on Communist Party and Solidarity documentation, the article shows how struggles over consumption revealed structural limits of paternalistic governance under late socialism.

The original and most commonly worn British Gay Liberation Front (GLF) badge often features in archives holding material on GLF, yet there is limited scholarship on why and with what effect this badge was worn. By combining archival research and oral histories, this article uses this badge to explore the experience and identity of GLF members both during GLF’s formal existence and in its afterlife. During GLF’s initial existence, between 1970 and 1973, the badge was a means of coming out to oneself and others. In turn, wearing the badge helped to construct and reinforce a new and distinct gay community. After the breakup of GLF, the badge continued to be worn and its imagery evoked to demonstrate allegiance to GLF and its ethos, whilst a tradition of gay badge-wearing emerged as a legacy of GLF. Overall, this badge was a major tool to signify identity and build community, not just during GLF’s initial existence, but up to the present day. Through its combination of extensive oral histories and archival research, this article provides new insights into how material culture can be used to understand social movements and their long-term impacts.

This article examines how three nineteenth- and twentieth-century philanthropic organizations – the British Aborigines’ Protection Society (APS), the American Indian Rights Association (IRA), and the Australian Association for the Protection of Native Races (APNR) – functioned simultaneously as opponents of colonial violence as well as instruments of colonial governance. These groups were vociferous advocates for Indigenous rights and welfare, yet they also directly contributed to building administrative structures of empire. The APS worked to generate metropolitan interest in Indigenous affairs, framing protectorates as both economically beneficial and a matter of national security. The IRA positioned itself as a fact-finding body, supplying the US government with on-the-ground surveillance that enabled more precise administrative control. The APNR acted as a public relations arm for Australian settler governments, deflecting criticism of state violence while promoting assimilationist policies. All three organizations reinforced colonial authority by outsourcing key governmental functions to private actors, and their reliance on voluntary labour and philanthropic donations underscores the contingency of imperial rule on non-state institutions. Bridging historiographies of humanitarian activism and colonial governance, this article argues that these groups were not merely critics or collaborators but infrastructural components of empire.

In the 1950s and 1960s, changes in the international situation, such as decolonization in Asia, led some Australians to question the usefulness of keeping the ‘White Australia Policy’, the basis for the country’s immigration system since Federation in 1901. Some argued that Australia’s international reputation, especially with newly independent countries in Asia and Africa, could be harmed by the maintenance of this policy. Events such as the Sharpeville Massacre in apartheid South Africa in 1960 caused further introspection into Australia’s racialized system. However, as pushes to reform the policy grew, others used international events to resist reforms. Using speeches by politicians and documents produced by policymakers, this article will show how events, such as the Notting Hill riots in Britain, the Little Rock controversy in the United States, and the Sharpeville massacre, were used as warnings about Australia potentially introducing similar ‘racial problems’ if it allowed more non-white migration. This article argues that these concerns tapped into a transnational whiteness that shared anxieties about decolonization, civil rights and non-white immigration in the post-war period, bringing a racialized solidarity forged at the turn of the twentieth century into the Cold War era.