The Historical Journal

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 cal…

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 …

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 vocifer…

Migration history is a growing field – yet the legal status of migrants in early modern England has not yet been investigated in detail. Reconstructing the legal system that governed migrants in early modern England does not just add significant depth and nuance to histories of migration and migrants, but also provides fresh insight into the status of English subjects. Furthermore, it enables his…

Up to 1616, when the Copernican theory of heliocentrism was prohibited, Galileo had never asserted its truth. But the pope and cardinals of the Roman Inquisition assumed that he had, and he was required to repudiate it. In contrast, Copernicus’s book was only lightly corrected and allowed to be read. Galileo continued his practice of not asserting the reality of heliocentrism in his Dialogue on t…

Depictions of numeracy among non-Europeans were a prominent feature of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Anglo-European travel writing, but remain largely overlooked in the extensive scholarship on travel, knowledge, and empire. This article shifts attention from traditionally ‘scientific’ forms of numeracy such as mathematics and astronomy towards more fundamental counting, calculation, and co…

Despite a growing body of scholarship reflecting renewed interest in the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), there remains little agreement on how to interpret its origins, ideological coherence, political agency, and historical significance. This review article examines a selection of key English-language publications from 2011 to 2022, analysing them across three main dimensions: the NAM’s ideological …

The debate between Hythlodaeus and an English lawyer before Cardinal Morton in Book One of Utopia (1516) contains many proposals for socio-economic reforms. These have typically been interpreted as innovative proposals to counteract the corruption of Christendom which surrounds them. However, when placed into their legislative context, it is apparent not only that these reforms echo closely many …

In February 1744 in Paris, the Swedish physician Abraham Bäck (1713–95), better known as Carl Linnaeus’s best friend, dissected the cadaver of an unidentified sub-Saharan man. In contrast to the widespread exploitation of the enslaved dead in North America, cadavers of dark-skinned Africans remained rare in the anatomical theatres of eighteenth-century Europe. Scarcity not only increased their ma…

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 p…

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 f…

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 r…

John Evelyn (1620–1706), in Tyrannus, or, the mode in a discourse of sumptuary lawes (1661), decried the foreign fashions that threatened the English economy and symbolized Restoration extravagance. He supposedly instilled these beliefs in his daughter Mall (1665–85), with whom he co-authored the Mundus muliebris: or, the ladies dressing-room unlock’d (1690), a remarkable satire that expressed co…

Studies of petitioning activity in the early years of the Long Parliament (1640–2) have often focused on the large-scale petitions which engaged with issues of high politics and religion in the charged atmosphere prior to the outbreak of Civil War. However, many subjects were drawn to petition the Commons and the Lords for relief in much more particular economic disputes. Utilizing overlooked man…

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, …