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.

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 makes two important contributions. Firstly, it provides valuable insights into the motivations of working-class migrants in the second half of the nineteenth century, adding a new dimension to a scholarship focused on studies of forced migration or middle-class empire building. Its analysis of a rich body of published and unpublished letters from former institutionalized children reveals the primacy of financial gain in the migration decision and shows that working-class Britons saw the world beyond the British Isles as a space of opportunity, where they could leverage their mobility in pursuit of profit. Secondly, by arguing that juvenile emigrants need to be viewed as a heterogeneous body where age and gender made a difference in terms of experience, the article provides an important new perspective on institutional migration that has implications for wider literatures on childhood and youth. The average age of the boys studied for this article was sixteen and the research shows that they were active participants in the emigration process, shaping their own futures through their diverse decisions. Recognizing this significantly undermines the modern discourses of blame and victimhood that dominate the historiography and encourages us to re-evaluate our approach to nineteenth-century juvenile migration.

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.

From 1942 to 1945, the Indian National Army (INA) and its civilian wing, the Indian Independence League (IIL), operated in Japanese-occupied Asia to prepare for wars against Britain. Led by first Rash Behari Bose and then Subhas Chandra Bose, the INA recruited members from diverse Indian communities in Asia. This article examines the spiritual training that the INA launched in Malaya in 1943 to unite Indians outside the subcontinent. Through twenty-three lectures, the spiritual training taught a strand of Indian nationalism by creating a historical narrative, which helped reproduce the Indian National Congress’s vision for India. Contrasting with existing literature that attributes the lectures solely to Chandra Bose, this article traces the lectures to the works of Behari Bose, Mohandas Gandhi, and Jawaharlal Nehru. It further argues that Behari Bose’s leadership of the IIL and the INA and the spread of Nehru’s political ideas in Malaya shaped the lectures. Accordingly, the article restores the importance of the lesser-known Behari Bose in the INA and the Indian independence struggle. More broadly, it demonstrates the relationship between violent and non-violent movements, and questions the historical memory about the anti-colonialists who worked with the Axis powers.

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.

Though historians have often traced the evolution of LGBT ‘communities’ in the United States, they have left the genealogy of queer ideas of ‘community’ underexamined. This article begins to address this lacuna by charting the bifurcated early history of these ideas in the nation’s ‘gay capital’, San Francisco. It identifies homophile activist José Sarria’s 1961 campaign for San Francisco city supervisor as the event that introduced the notion of a ‘gay community’ to lasting effect into local homophile organizing. Sarria’s camp mobilized the idea as a resistance tool for the fight against state repression. In the following years, the concept established itself across local homophile activism. Simultaneously with the rise of ‘gay community’, some homophile leaders also developed coalitional visions of ‘community’. These were inspired by Black freedom organizing and prioritized building community with other marginalized groups. Only a mid-1960s struggle over the orientation of the country’s first homophile community centre led to a lasting sidelining of this coalitional tradition. The reconstruction of this bipartite history challenges enduring myths of a monolithically conservative homophile movement, and helps explain the subsequent success of a homonormative gay politics in the late 1960s and 1970s.

During the First World War, British military bands went on tours to Paris (1917) and Italy (1918) to generate support for the Allied war effort. These ‘propaganda tours’ marked the culmination of a trend that emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century when military musicians assumed the role of cultural envoys of the state. With retreat from ‘splendid isolation’ at the turn of the century, the nascent entente cordiale witnessed a burgeoning relationship between British and French military bands. While the impetus for these tours came from outside government, the Foreign Office’s cancellation of a tour to Germany in 1907 against King Edward VII’s wishes shows that these activities were considered more than benign gestures of international musical co-operation. After over two years of war, professional propagandists harnessed the mass appeal of military music by organizing concerts designed to reverse dwindling morale and present a unified Allied war effort. Although it is hard to assess their effectiveness, contemporary accounts and similar missions in the interwar period suggest that they met their objectives. By consulting a wide range of materials, from concert reviews to diplomatic correspondence, this article aims to bridge the gaps between political, military, and cultural history by showing the relevance of military music to all three sub-fields.

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’.

This article explores the politics of pageantry in colonial Uganda. As activists looked toward independence, they engineered competing visions of national material culture. Creating political emblems raised complex questions about the moral and theological significance of party colours. Throughout Uganda’s colonial history, debates about flags reflected sectarian struggles between Protestant and Catholic communities that dated to the late nineteenth century. In imperial and Ugandan history writings, flags are often associated with the pageantry of conquest or eventual post-colonial state building. But we know very little about the internal debates that accompanied the invention of the state’s material culture. This article pushes us past a superficial association of flags with either colonial conquest or Cold War liberation and into the conceptual and religious worlds that undergirded the hoisting of flags. Arguments about flags propelled Ugandan politics throughout the twentieth century. By looking at the varied ways that activists imagined the materiality of post-colonial Uganda, we can develop new approaches to intellectual history writing, moving into highly contested visual terrains where patterns, theologies of colour, and struggles to standardize party and national flags animated political mobilization and dissent.

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’.

Passions and affections, notwithstanding their potential and capacity for disorder, were fundamental to the workings of the early modern world and lay at the centre of ethical life. Yet, most scholarship ignores the inseparability of emotion and ethics for early modern society. This article reviews the current state of scholarship in three fields: history of philosophy, history of emotions, and English society and governance, highlighting the assumptions and arguments which have led to the mistaken severance of affect from morality, the exclusion of ethics from histories of emotion, and the omission of emotion from studies of English power and authority. It argues that this separation is anachronistic and impairs our ability to understand governance in early modern England. This was a world of fused affect and morality which underpinned particular notions of power and authority. That governance was located within an ethical/emotive paradigm has been given insufficient attention.

Scholars studying the Second World War animal by-products industry have underestimated the systematic nature and broad scope of German intervention. This article examines how the close co-operation between French and German veterinarians, reflecting a shared professional interest in animal slaughter and disease control, facilitated the large-scale restructuring and modernization of French carcass disposal under Nazi occupation from 1940 to 1944. Animal by-products were an important resource for Germany’s war effort. Drawing on the previously unexploited papers of Wehrmacht veterinarian Conrad Herbig and the archives of the Vichy Salvage Service, I argue that German veterinary officers, in collaboration with their French counterparts, leveraged their expertise to impose a new vision of hygienic and efficient rendering practices in France. Herbig’s experiences in the Indre-et-Loire department reveal how the Nazi occupation authorities harnessed French material and institutional resources to direct French hides, fats, and bones towards German military production, even as logistical constraints limited their ambitions. Franco-German veterinary collaboration under Vichy represented an intensification of long-term trends towards professionalization, industrial concentration, and hygienic regulation in the French meat industry. This microhistorical case-study thus sheds new light on the dynamics of the occupation and its post-war impact on French agriculture and food production.

This historiographical review engages with recent works in British colonial and South Asian history that shed light on the emergence of the concept of ‘society’ or the ‘social’ in South Asia. The review explores three main areas for the study of the social concept including: scholarship on liberalism and colonial law; histories of colonial sociology and knowledge production; and materialist histories of political economy and concept formation. The review then outlines some avenues for further research, focusing particularly on questions of form, language, and translation that have largely been overlooked in existing scholarship. It suggests that while there are robust accounts of the uses of the social concept in South Asia, what is missing is a consideration of the vernacular histories of this concept, including how it came to be articulated in South Asian languages. Ultimately, the review makes the case that conceptual history must take into account both the historical transformations that produced certain concepts as well as the languages and aesthetic and documentary forms through which we come to know those concepts.

The artificial language of Esperanto would achieve remarkable success in early twentieth-century Europe. Its popularity there is not surprising: though designed as a universal language, Esperanto was essentially European in its grammar and lexicon. But this Europeanness – or, more precisely, this near-Europeanness – also spoke to communities living further afield. In India before the First World War, groups regarded as Europeanized by most Indians but as Indian by most Europeans found Esperanto a literal language with which to articulate their social location. As an ‘Esperantist’, there was no contradiction between being Indian and participating in European society, and to claim the label offered a shorthand that others (whatever their relationship to the movement) could readily grasp. This article considers these dynamics against the backdrop of a visit to India by the Irish Esperantist John Pollen, an event that sheds light on both the inner workings of the Indian movement and the importance that non-Indian Esperantists assigned to it. The popularity of Esperanto would eventually decline in India with the First World War, but until it did, the movement – indexical of Europe yet resonant in India – would promise a transnational community to which many in India felt they could aspire and belong.

The resettlement of Hungarian refugees who had fled the Soviet invasion in 1956, from Austria to the United States, is generally perceived as a success story. Austria received extensive international support and most of the refugees were integrated quickly into American society. This great willingness to help is usually explained by reference to the Cold War dichotomy. But beyond political considerations, a close look at the admission processes also reveals that economic interest and labour power were significant factors that favoured reception and integration. And, although religious relief organizations played a major role in co-ordinating the resettlement process, religion was not a main criterion for emigration to the United States. This article looks at the process of resettlement of Hungarian refugees from Austria to the United States in 1956–7. It thereby locates the movement of Hungarians within the broader context of Cold War history, economic growth, labour demand, and international relief.

This article analyses industrial working-class life narratives of the 1950s to 1980s, during a time of increasing air and water pollution in Imatra, a Finnish industrial pulp and paper mill town. Many residents worked for either Enso-Gutzeit, not only the largest local employer but also Europe’s largest pulp and paper mill, or the hydropower plant, in a variety of maintenance and production roles. Using oral histories concerning working life, the article considers the sensory experiences of pollution that individuals and communities witnessed and committed. In order to protect their community, silence was used as a form of nonverbal communication for much of the post-war period to convey tolerance of environmental degradation and ecological collapse. The impacts of pollution are invisible today, which creates a unique oral history that blends past and present environmental knowledge. Informants use silences, sentences lacking subjects, laughter to communicate nonverbal embarrassment, and repetitions to share thoughts they find uncomfortable or those they consider shameful. As a microhistory of an industrial community, this study reveals how and why residents performed an acceptance of pollution by examining the at times contradictory relationship between sensory experiences of air and water pollution.

Arnold J. Toynbee is considered one of the most crucial figures in the historiography of twentieth-century world history. Although Toynbee’s reputation has significantly waned since the 1950s among many professional historians in the English-speaking world, especially in Britain, some renowned world historians, such as William H. McNeill and Jürgen Osterhammel, have reassessed Toynbee as a pioneering European historian who envisaged world history beyond Eurocentrism since the emergence of the field of global and world history in the 1980s. This article reconsiders the global meaning of Toynbee’s world history beyond this historiographical narrative on Toynbee in the anglophone context by revealing that influential Japanese historians had already found significant potential in his world history in the mid-twentieth century, almost three decades before his reassessment in English-speaking academia. In particular, the article demonstrates how Japanese historians, such as Suzuki Shigetaka, Eguchi Bokurō, and Uehara Senroku, received Toynbee’s idea of world history with various motivations and historical contexts. The research also argues that, despite the differences in their receptive intentions and backgrounds, they interpreted Toynbee as a significant European intellectual who made a self-critique of conventional historical studies in Europe and demonstrated the possibility of rewriting world history beyond Eurocentric assumptions.