This article investigates the personal history of Luo Longji, a distinguished Chinese liberal in the twentieth century. A controversial figure, Luo has two contradictory images in history: a democratic warrior and an enemy of the people. The two contrasting images, this article argues, reveal a fundamental dilemma of twentieth-century Chinese liberalism, which tries to reconcile the tension between the protection of individual freedom and a quest for a strong nation-state based on popular sovereignty. Defining himself as a disciple of Harold Laski, Luo reinterpreted the latter’s political ideas in a new historical context. On the one hand, Luo applauded individual disobedience of the despotic state and protested Chiang Kai-shek’s autocracy in favour of human rights and freedom. On the other, Luo’s nationalist fervour deeply shaped his liberal programme, hoping for a democratic nation-state as the guardian of people’s rights and freedom. This national liberalism led him to cast aside Laski’s anti-statist pluralism and instead exalt state sovereignty to represent the Chinese people’s general will. As a result, Luo was made an enemy in the 1950s by the democratic and constitutional polity he actively helped to build. Chinese liberalism was thus defeated by its own logic in Mao’s China.

Existing research into the deindustrialization that afflicted northern England and Scotland during the twentieth century has focused predominantly on men’s experiences of unemployment and strikes. In contrast, this article examines the relationship between women’s employment and deindustrialization through the lens of three new towns in north-west England. Skelmersdale, Runcorn, and Central Lancashire were established during the 1960s and 1970s, partly with the aim of attracting employers and workers to a region experiencing industrial decline. Competing constructions of women’s work, both paid and unpaid, informed how the towns were planned, managed, and experienced. The new towns widened employment opportunities for female workers, but they did not significantly reshape gender roles because women remained responsible for housework and childcare while men were conceptualized as breadwinners. To explore this contradiction, the article analyses archival material produced by the development corporations that planned the new towns, alongside original oral history interviews conducted with women who lived and worked in them. It argues that even in situations of deindustrialization and rising male unemployment, women’s jobs did not displace men’s. Rather, the new towns represented a continuation of and a departure from existing patterns of employment, demonstrating that state-led urban development was fraught with gendered tensions.

This article analyses how Labour women MPs championed the needs of ‘the housewife’ in parliament in order to improve the lives of women, especially working-class women, during the Attlee administration. Relying on personal experience to make their case, these women spoke as housewives, not just for housewives, using gendered experiences for political ends. This article examines how they applied the politics of housewifery to two specific contemporary economic challenges: the cost of living and the impact of taxation. In doing so, and in contrast to the established literature, it shows how far Labour women were prepared to challenge party and government policy on behalf of women. It thus contributes to historiographical debates about the Labour party’s relationship to consumerism and affluence as well as gender and austerity. Building on Brian Harrison’s influential study of interwar women MPs, it also responds to a recent call made by Miles Taylor in this journal for more attention to women as legislators in the post-war period. Methodologically, it emphasizes the benefits of qualitative analysis of ‘big data’ sources.

During the First Taiwan Strait Crisis, Chiang Kai-shek ordered the evacuation of 18,000 local fishermen and their families from the Dachen and other offshore islands in Zhejiang Province. The resettlement to Taiwan was assisted by the US Seventh Fleet. In mainstream historiography, the evacuation is treated as an unimportant sideshow to the Strait Crisis. Little is known about the people who were displaced. This study explores the experiences of Dachen refugees using recently declassified archival documents and oral history. It argues that, despite the refugees being praised as model anti-communist citizens or ‘righteous compatriots’ by the Nationalists, the Nationalist–US resettlement programme in Taiwan failed miserably, due to its ‘wartime developmentalist logic’. The logic considered displaced people not as deprived human beings who needed assistance but as human resources to be utilized by the state for developing sparsely populated regions. This article also argues that the Dachen refugees were not just powerless victims of powerful nation-states. They were active agents in their own story, trying to make the best of difficult circumstances by constantly protesting and petitioning for better treatment. In doing so, they took advantage of their special status as Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek’s ‘righteous compatriots’.

In 1976, the Committee of Safety of Medicines (CSM) in Britain authorized the contraceptive injectable Depo-Provera (DP) for short-term use and for two main reasons only: if a woman had received a rubella vaccine or if her partner had just undergone a vasectomy. Although officially authorized on restricted grounds only, the drug appears to have been widely prescribed by doctors of the Domiciliary Family Planning Services (DFPS). This article takes the prescription of DP in the DFPS of Haringey, a multiracial neighbourhood in London, and Glasgow as a comparative case-study to explore the intersections of medical authority, race, and class. Drawing on the archives of the Wellcome Collection, London, and the NHS Archives of the Mitchell Library in Glasgow, we show that the DFPS offered the ideal setting to test and prescribe Depo-Provera widely. In the hands of the medical profession, the drug at times became a tool of violence towards women from disadvantaged backgrounds. In doing so, we contribute to the wider, global history of DP, and illustrate how racist, classist, and ableist prejudices could shape family planning services in the British context.

The recovery of soldiers’ remains has been a major concern of the US military since the mid-nineteenth century. However, military defeats during the Cold War left the remains of US soldiers unattended for decades, which diminished the odds of their identification and created ambiguities about their fates. After the Vietnam War, some statespersons and soldiers’ families alleged that many missing soldiers had not been killed, but rather detained by the enemy and abandoned by US authorities. The US military strove to recover and identify as many missing soldiers as possible to debunk these allegations. Existing forensic methods failed to provide definitive conclusions, straining the relationship between the military and the American public. Consequently, the military turned to DNA profiling to identify missing personnel. Technical limitations and US society’s lingering distrust of authorities turned DNA profiling into a new battleground between the US military and prisoners of war/missing in action (POW/MIA) families. Despite the promise DNA technology seemed to offer for remains’ identification, this article argues that its success was reliant on POW/MIA families’ attitudes towards the military and politics, who demanded much more than identified remains as a means of achieving closure.

This article studies two refugee political communities, the Indian National Army (INA) and Faridabad, during the 1940s. It follows two Indian women who supported the refugees: the captain of the INA’s women’s regiment, Lakshmi Sahgal (née Swaminadhan, 1914–2012), and the socialist freedom fighter Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay (1903–88). Indian and Chinese anti-colonialism and working-class protests in Malaya inspired the INA’s war against British rule in India and Southeast Asia. This article conceptualizes the INA as a refugee polis, comprising Indians displaced by Japanese and British imperialism. Uprooted by the Partition of India, the refugees in Faridabad brought practices of state evasion from the Indo/Pak-Afghan borderlands. Kamaladevi and the Indian Cooperative Union helped organize them into a refugee polis. Thus, the INA and Faridabad, shaped by imperial crises and decolonization, emerged as two refugee poleis. They embodied political alternatives to the nation-state as an outcome of decolonization. The refugees advocated direct democracy, egalitarian redistribution of land, and co-operative economic management. The postcolonial Indian state saw this as a challenge. It transformed refugees into workers, whose labour would generate profits for the state. Although the refugees protested through unionization, strikes, and civil disobedience, ultimately, the Nehruvian state brutally suppressed these refugee poleis.

While Stephen Greenblatt’s 1980 book, Renaissance self-fashioning: from More to Shakespeare, was methodologically innovative within the field of literary criticism, his work also grew from the roots of Jacob Burckhardt’s old cultural history, and his method of new historicism developed alongside the new cultural history. Although certain parts of Burckhardt’s arguments have been discarded, the work of Greenblatt and others has continued to build upon his foundation. Courtiership, anxiety, and the relationship between outward and interior identities, text and context, hybridity, and individuation are all useful concepts for constructing less monolithic understandings of early modern identities. With a European scale, this article traces early modern historiography and literary criticism from the nineteenth century to 2024 and introduces historical examples of identity formation from early modern England, France, Iberia, the Italian peninsula, and the Holy Roman Empire. The article reflects upon early modern examples of self-fashioning in the light of Burckhardt, the Annales, Greenblatt, and others who have contributed to our understanding of agency and identity up to the present day, arguing that these historians and literary scholars have worked together to answer questions that are fundamentally psychological in nature.

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

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

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

The following communication sets a previously unrecorded manuscript by John Locke in context. The manuscript comprises his remarks on a bill to create a ‘Flax and Hemp Company of Ireland’, laid before the Irish House of Commons in November 1695, which circulated in London in late 1697. Locke likely made his remarks for the lord chancellor, Sir John Somers, among whose papers they survive. The manuscript sheds new light on Locke’s practical involvement in post-revolutionary political economy, on his engagement with Ireland, and on his thought regarding corporations and corporate corruption.

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