In the inaugural issue of Past and Present, Eric Hobsbawm cautioned historians against the assumption that a capitalist economy has an inherent tendency to cost-saving and technological innovation, emphasizing that ‘It has a bias only towards profit’. Inspired by Hobsbawm, this article shows how a history of profit can elucidate the economic and social history of machines. Beginning with miners’ protests

The ability to foresee the outbreak of epidemic disease, and to predict its course, is a highly coveted skill. Most often associated with statistical techniques, such efforts to improve the health of communities are thought to be exclusively modern. Public health more generally is often said to be categorically distinct from pre-modern medicine, which was interested above all in individual patients

This article offers a new approach to the study of the persecution of the early Christians. Past scholarship on this topic has offered explanations built around inter-religious animosity, which are here exposed as the inevitable result of unquestioned assumptions about those responsible. It offers instead a hypothesis that the driving agency for the violence Christians suffered came from their immediate

This chapter analyzes a series of interconnected Italian cases in its enquiry into how disinformation was created, and how it impacted on society. It argues that disinformation is an inherent element of information itself. Disinformation is understood here as an intentional construction of fictional and often conflicting narratives, helpful in times of crisis and also in routine governance in the pursuit

By the early modern period, libelling a private individual had been legally redefined and was being tried at the court of Star Chamber, alongside cases relating to the monarch or government. This brought the ruination of individual reputations by spreading false rumours into the same realm as the circulation of nationally significant false news. Private libels typically took the form of verses, impersonations

Our modern concept of political free speech as an individual political right was first elaborated in detail three hundred years ago by two London journalists, Thomas Gordon and John Trenchard, in their best-selling, endlessly reprinted, anonymous newspaper column, known as ‘Cato’s Letters’ (1720–23). As is well known, Cato’s novel ideas about speech and press freedom proved hugely influential, especially

This chapter explores the intersection between two different kinds of nouvelle: on the one hand, a piece of news; and on the other, a literary genre, the novella. Both senses were current in the early sixteenth century when Marguerite de Navarre, the sister of the French king François I, wrote the collection of novellas now known as the Heptameron. Developing its model, Boccaccio’s Decameron, the Heptameron

Since its publication in 1642, Giovanni Baglione’s Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects from the Pontificate of Gregory XIII of 1572 until the times of Pope Urban VIII in 1642, has been classified as either largely factual or obviously biased, a reflection of the culture of slander in early modern Rome. Definitions of what constituted textual ‘truth’ have changed dramatically since Baglione

This chapter introduces the reader to the world of fiction and disinformation in early modern Europe. It starts by placing fiction and disinformation in the context of wider trends and developments, while also drawing a parallel between present practices and concerns and those of the early modern period (Section I). The chapter then surveys existing scholarship on these themes, highlighting the novelty

This chapter examines the conceptualization of Catholic liturgical practices within the Protestant anti-Catholic polemics of early modern England. I argue that, insofar as Protestants typically glossed such practices as ‘idolatry’, and thus, as the worship of a false god, Protestants explicitly accused Catholics of falling victim to the deceptive tendencies of their imaginations. Hence, for English

This chapter sheds light on the narrative strategies and techniques involving reported speech in Machiavelli’s diplomatic records and historical writings. The focus is on the diplomatic correspondence of his 1502 mission to Cesare Borgia and on his Discourses on Livy. Analysis of the rhetorical devices that Machiavelli uses to report his own words and those of others shows that his letters and the

Abstract This article investigates the archiving practices of a little-known group of Catholics in the Ottoman Empire, the Diyarbakır Chaldeans, in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It argues for a flexible definition of archives, based not on traditional characteristics such as links to a defined institutional repository, but on their purpose of community formation. The loose institutional

Abstract The aim of this article is to establish a new basis for exploring the network of ancient Greek city-states during the Classical and Hellenistic periods by applying Social Network Analysis to the record of inscriptions recording grants of proxeny. Proxeny was a generalized institution for facilitating interactions between Greek political communities. Because it left a rich and idiosyncratic

Abstract This article responds to Philip Slavin’s ‘Out of the West: Formation of a Permanent Plague Reservoir in South-Central Germany (1349–1356) and Its Implications’. Genetics has transformed the study of plague, one of the most lethal diseases in human history. But this technically demanding science raises questions of what constitutes valid evidence and supportable argument when examining historical

AbstractBetween the 1870s and 1914, tens of thousands of peasants left Austria-Hungary’s easternmost provinces of Galicia and Bukovina, heading for the Americas. This article places this episode in the context of contemporary global labour migrations while also emphasizing the distinctive characteristics of this mass exodus. Unlike most migrants around the world, Galicians and Bukovinans emigrated

In the originally published version of this manuscript (https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtab025), the author's name was erroneously given in the HTML as ‘M Rachel'.

AbstractIn the 1830s, plague, which had been all but forgotten by most Europeans, was on everyone’s lips again. Shortly after the Ottoman and Egyptian governments instituted their first permanent quarantines, the disease broke out in the Levant and the Nile delta, and the global medical community watched anxiously to see whether these new western Mediterranean-style quarantines would be able to contain

When Switzerland was created in 1848, one of its founding fathers went by the name of ‘Borneo Louis’. Before becoming a Swiss state builder, he had served as a mercenary in the Dutch East Indies. There he had founded a family with his native ‘housekeeper’, Silla. In Switzerland, he continued to benefit from Silla’s exploited labour. Stories such as these seem unusual today, not for historical but for

Almost exactly a hundred years after the Permanent Settlement of 1793 revolutionized property relations in Bengal, a far less studied legislation would subtly extend the rule of property to include the province’s waters. Bengal’s Private Fisheries Protection Act 1889, which is usually regarded as having been motivated by conservationist or economic concerns, was in fact an attempt to resolve intractable

This article studies the intertwined processes of popular protest and archival suppression in early modern Venice. It concentrates on a cycle of contention extending over several months in 1569, including a labour protest that started among the workers of the state shipyard and turned into a large revolt, anonymous placards and food riots. Such was the extent of the unrest that a major explosion in

West European visitors to the Ottoman Empire in the early-modern period frequently referred to sodomy. They depicted it as a common practice there, associated particularly with ‘renegades’ (converts to Islam). The report of an investigation into a sexual scandal at the Venetian embassy in Istanbul in 1588, discussed here, shows special sensitivity to this issue. Historians generally discount the comments

Abstract During the political and military upheavals between the 1770s and 1820s, societies and states across the Atlantic world grappled with intricate issues of political belonging and sovereignty. Along with the rise of new concepts of national citizenship, older concepts of monarchical or imperial subjecthood underwent fundamental changes. While scholars tend to ascribe these transformations to

Abstract In recent decades, economic historians have revisited the Industrial Revolution in a global context. Their interpretations rely mostly on comparative methods. This article shows instead that there is a profound and significant relationship between industrialization and global exchange, and that consumption of cotton textiles was central to such a relationship. Yet, historians should not consider

In the 1880s, ordinary fishers and other commoners who were intimately familiar with the seas left the Japanese archipelago in search of bluer waters. Ending up in South-East Asia and Australasia, these hyakushō used their local knowledge of nature to navigate unfamiliar ecological contexts and create ocean-spanning infrastructures capable of facilitating their everyday lives. The resulting transnational

AbstractIn the first two centuries ce, the Roman senate transformed from an assembly of Italian landowners into a multi-regional group. The admission of thousands of provincials into Rome’s governing elite is often taken as evidence for the successful integration of subject populations. This article challenges such views of the senate as an inclusive institution. It shows that the overwhelming majority

In the above article (https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtaa004), the Abstract was inadvertently omitted. This error has now been corrected online. The Publisher would like to apologize for this error.

Abstract:The world’s first nationwide, publicly funded welfare system emerged and solidified in England over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Its influence on society and economy during this period was profound, but this article is the first attempt to determine the scale of its impact by examining the amount of money annually spent on relief across the whole period. Drawing

Global histories have fixated on connections, notably in their treatment of colonial and postcolonial port cities. While such cities have been intensely connected places, however, they have also been intensely bounded ones. The present article takes as an example of this phenomenon the archetypal port city of Calcutta (now Kolkata) and its historical boundary, the Maratha Ditch. From the eighteenth

Universal manhood suffrage — the right to an equal vote for all adult males, regardless of racial, economic or literacy conditions, as adopted by some Spanish American countries in the 1850s, at a time when very few countries in the Western world had done so — is the subject of this article. It considers in more detail the experience of New Granada (Colombia), with some comparative references, especially

This article attempts to reconfigure current historiographical debates on war disability, which have hitherto tended to rely on ‘masculinity’ as an analytical framework. Instead, the case of the Francoist war disabled of the Spanish Civil War underscores the need to consider war disability in relation to broader social hierarchies, and the socio-political topographies in which these operate. In doing

Owing to the prevailing definition of ‘dynasty’ as a line of succession, historians have long neglected the fundamental tensions that underlie succession, and have undervalued both the active attempts of princes to control these tensions as well as their ability to anticipate the need to adjust to changing circumstances. Yet premodern dynasties were well equipped to anticipate and develop coping mechanisms

This article reveals how the beginning of US Reconstruction precipitated a revolutionary crisis in Cuba and Brazil, the last two slave societies in the Atlantic World. Throughout the US Civil War, slave-owners in Cuba and Brazil faced the immense challenge of containing black revolutionary currents across the Atlantic. Despite their intensive policing of black transnational networks, many slaves in

This article offers a comparative study of city states in the Christian and Islamic spheres of the later medieval Mediterranean world, with a particular focus on Italy, Syria and al-Andalus. Medieval city states are not usually associated with the Islamic world, but rather with a narrative that has foregrounded the exceptional nature of European cities in world history, especially the famous city republics

Egypt’s successful struggle over ownership of the Suez Canal under President Gamal ʿAbd al-Nasser in 1956 is usually seen as pivotal in the history of decolonization. Scholars have written about how the Suez War brought many of the classical themes of decolonization into focus, such as sovereignty over natural resources, the hegemony of the new Cold War order, the rise of popular anti-colonial nationalism

This article investigates how the concept of ‘conscience’ emerged as a battleground within the French Catholic Church and as a politicized concept with implications for ideas about human rights. State-sponsored torture during the Algerian War (1954–62) prompted dissident Christians to pioneer the use of ‘individual conscience’ as a tool of resistance. The Christians of the anti-torture movement embraced

The political status of the Cocos-Keeling Islands, a group of twenty-seven small atoll islands in the Indian Ocean about 1,700 miles west of Australia, remained unresolved from the time of the islands’ settlement in 1827 until their effective incorporation into Australia in 1984. For a century and a half, protection shopping helped to create and sustain the islands’ condition of suspended sovereignty

AbstractItalian communes from 1300–1600 bought and sold numerous towns and castles from Crete (enfeoffed to Venice in 1205) to Arezzo (offered to Florence in 1384) to Tabarka (given as mortgage to a Genoese family in 1540). Despite the popularity of this custom, however, existing scholarship claims Renaissance cities expanded territorially through violent conquests that centralized government finances

Following the abolition of the transatlantic trade in African captives, slave traders from France, Spain and Cuba devised strategies of concealment to perpetuate and even expand their enterprise. A close reading of the unexpurgated logbooks and business correspondence of the Jeune Louis, a French ship that transported more than three hundred captives from the Bight of Biafra to Havana in 1825, identifies

What did an eighteenth-century politician do all day? This may sound a mundane query, but the simplest questions are often the hardest to answer. The meaning and mechanisms of eighteenth-century high politics have long been debated. Was government personal, local and the possession of a narrow elite, or ideological, proto-modern and answerable to public opinion?11 Was politics a masculine bastion,

This viewpoint is meant as a contribution to debate over the nature and significance of the ‘Justinianic Plague’, which struck Western Eurasia between the sixth and eighth centuries ce, and the methodological challenges posed by attempting to reconcile historical evidence with that derived from the realm of the Natural Sciences. In recent years, major advances have been made in our genetic understanding

In the Indian historiography of law and labour, master–servant regulations are an under-explored subject. Based on English precedents, these regulations acquired a specifically colonial nature when applied to control labour in the growing city of Calcutta. Questioning the assumed associations of domestic servants with privacy and informality, this article shows that in fact they were unambiguously

This article demonstrates that deaf men and women were integrated into early modern communities through use of sign language, and that Protestant concerns about preaching and hearing promoted sign language as a legitimate form of communication. Historians have believed that the Protestant emphasis on preaching excluded deaf people from heaven. However, not only did contemporaries believe that deaf

This article adds a temporal dimension to our interpretation of confessional relations. While historians are increasingly attuned to the subtleties of space in their interpretation of interconfessional contact, we also need to acknowledge interactions differed according to multiple intersecting calendars and societal rhythms. I use a case study of the watering place of Spa (current-day Belgium) around

The impact of medieval lordship on the society it dominated has not received the attention it deserves. This article stresses the need to look at lordship from the bottom up, making an effort to understand how much and in which ways lordship weighed on the life of subjects, by developing the notion of its ‘pervasiveness’. Such a concept is arguably the most effective if we want to evaluate how seigneurial

Why did women’s roles change so dramatically in the West in the period after 1945? These years saw major changes in those roles, and in dominant understandings of female selfhood, from a model based on self-abnegation to one based on self-fulfilment. The roots of this shift have often been located in the post-1968 feminist movement and in economic change. Examining this question through the lens of

This article argues that historians have underestimated the agency which Catholics, a politico-religious minority within the Dutch Republic, wielded in surviving the Reformed regime in seventeenth-century Utrecht, the main theatre of the confessional struggle between Calvinists and Catholics on Dutch soil. The Reformed public authorities strategically attempted to deprive Catholics of their spaces

AbstractThis article examines mid-nineteenth-century Anglo-French relations through the prism of musical standardization. Bringing together perspectives from musicology, history of science, and political history, it demonstrates the holistic value of musical practices for the study of processes of political integration. In 1859, Napoléon III's government determined a national pitch to which musicians

In the above article (doi:10.1093/pastj/gtz028) the figure entitled ‘Viari and Campari in the Italian Peninsula, c. 1200-1500,’ was initially entitled ‘Campari in the Italian Peninsula, c. 1200-1500.’ This has now been corrected.

In the above article (https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtz010) the following acknowledgment was inadvertently omitted:

There has been a rich body of scholarship in recent years that challenges the accepted idea of the spread of nationalist thinking in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by highlighting the flexible, ambiguous, opportunistic or instrumental ways in which the inhabitants of central and eastern Europe engaged with ideas about nationhood. However, so far these discussions of ‘national indifference’

This article explains how the Brazilian Alberto Santos-Dumont, who at the turn of the twentieth century became the first global celebrity aeronaut, operated as a symbol of ‘technological cosmopolitanism’ — a world view that ostensibly promoted a vision of global unity through technology-enabled exchanges while simultaneously reproducing a core-periphery imagined geography that threatened to erase marginalized

Among the clichés in modern European history, one of the most common is of Italy as ‘the least of the Great Powers’, unable to punch above its weight in the international arena and classed as a ‘latecomer’ to imperial conquest. In this article, I suggest instead that historians have been looking in the wrong place, and in the wrong period, for evidence of Italian ambition. By concentrating on territorial

One of the most important developments in Atlantic history has been the incorporation of Africa into narratives of slave life and culture. Once considered a vague background or a prologue, Africa is now recognized as fundamental to understanding crucial features of American slavery. Once seen as alienated, isolated, atomized members of a crowd, enslaved Africans are now understood to have come in groups

AbstractThroughout the later Middle Ages, bishops across Latin Christendom issued statutes to guide the clergy and instruct the faithful within their dioceses. Following the lead of medieval jurists, modern scholars have understood this local episcopal legislation as disseminating and reinforcing the so-called ‘universal law’ promulgated by popes and general church councils. Yet a closer look at the

The nineteenth century saw an explosion of mass media as well as an expansion of colonial states. These two processes mutually influenced each other, and at the intersection lay a thin layer of individuals who could gain inordinate power to influence global information flows. This article follows the career of one such individual, Messaoud Djebari, an Algerian man who generated several controversies

This article shows how English supporters of Jewish immigration in the 1650s articulated a universal model of Christian hospitality for all foreigners fleeing religious persecution, regardless of whether they adhered to the Protestant faith of their English hosts. It thus urges a reconsideration of the widespread assumption that European Christians in this era were willing only to admit their own co-religionists

In introducing this issue of the journal — our 250th — we feel the presence of our predecessors. Past and Present is not overly concerned with its own past, but its editors have, at key moments, reflected on the founding principles of the journal and their persistence over the decades. In 1983, to mark the 100th edition, three of the founding editors, Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton and Eric Hobsbawm

abolitionist movement, 20, 29

AbstractOne of the ways in which towns and cities in pre-industrial Europe responded to food crises was by establishing public grain stocks, intended for relief. This article shows how purchases and distribution of grain in Holland were affected by the long-term developments of commercialization and state formation. Two conclusions stand out. Firstly, both the acquisition of supplies and the distribution

AbstractOn 10 August 1792, the Parisian sans-culottes surrounded the Tuileries Palace, overthrew the monarchy and helped to found a Republic. What might otherwise have taken centuries to achieve appeared to materialize within hours. During the preceding weeks, sans-culotte discourse began to coalesce around the belief that a demonstration of collective violence could enable France to bypass the ordinary