The ability to control international flows of information constitutes one of the core elements of the soft power of any modern state aspiring to exercise some level of regional or global hegemony. This phenomenon has been previously examined by those who study long-distance communications mainly in the context of the nineteenth-century telegraph or the twentieth-century broadcast. However, inquiries focusing on the analogous historical role performed by the postal service during the early modern era are much more scarce. Building upon this premise, this study examines the strategic advantages gained by the Republic of Venice through its control of the mail exchange between Europe and the Middle East – a de facto postal monopoly established during the sixteenth century. Venice deliberately subsidized this service in order to prevent the rise of potential competition. Despite the substantial cost, this was seen as an effective investment through which the republic gained a set of tangible strategic advantages. In particular, it helped to extend Venice’s relevance on the European political scene long past the point when its traditional political, economic, and naval–military power was already fading away.

This article explores how Protestants defended the co-existence of multiple translations of the Bible into English in Elizabethan England. The matter of biblical plurality is considered through the prism of the debates surrounding bible translation which occurred throughout the 1580s between the Catholic translator of the Bible into English, Gregory Martin (c. 1542–1582), and the English Protestant polemicist William Fulke (1537/8–1589). It is contended that this debate, which has tended to be cast as a storm in a teacup, reveals how Protestants responded, innovatively, to the publication of the Catholic English New Testament. Attention is paid to how Martin attacked the existence of the many different Protestant English bible translations in circulation and, reciprocally, how Fulke defended them. This study of the Martin and Fulke debate thereby unsettles some long-standing assumptions about the combative relationship between different versions of the English Bible and it points, instead, to ways in which contemporaries might have seen the plurality of translations as spiritually and polemically advantageous. Fulke's arguments help us to comprehend how, prior to early seventeenth-century attempts to restrict the existence of multiple English bibles, some Elizabethans responded to, and even defended, the plurality of English bible translations which had come to exist.

This article contributes to a recent shift in the study of early modern political thought, moving away from a state-centric view of the period towards an interest in the political significance of a range of other communities. More specifically, I argue that debates about the scope of one key concept, that of societas, resulted in different visions of the relationships between a variety of human associations. To demonstrate this, I reconstruct Johannes Althusius’s theory of societas and compare it to those of several contemporaries, ranging from Renaissance Ciceronianism to Jean Bodin and Hugo Grotius. I show that Althusius provided an innovative juridical interpretation of societas, which he used to ground a conception of politics according to which all human associations, from the family to the corporation to the state, are political. This complements traditional theological interpretations of his thought, which alone cannot fully account for its distinctiveness. Althusius’s conception of politics enabled him to chart an original middle way between two options available at the time: on the one hand, the isolation of politics from social and religious life; on the other, its subordination to or full identification with other kinds of community.

Historians have increasingly stressed the impact of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars on Britain and Ireland. Less attention, however, has been paid to the legacies of martial mobilization after 1815. Drawing on hitherto unused press and archival sources, this article assesses the implications of wartime military expansion for the music profession, and musical culture more generally, in the decades after Waterloo. It demonstrates that men and boys who honed their instrumental skills in uniform embarked on a variety of civilian musical careers, becoming instructors, wind performers, composers, and even opera singers. The article traces the post-war circulation of regimental instruments and reveals that a multitude of militia and volunteer bands remained active long after demobilization. The wartime proliferation of military bands, moreover, encouraged the subsequent spread of quasi-martial wind ensembles in wider society. Finally, the article proves that brass bands were first introduced to Britain and Ireland in a regimental guise. The influence of the military on musical culture after 1815, in short, was palpable and often profound, and manifested itself in numerous ways and settings.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.