Royal Counsel in Tudor England, 1485–1603

Royal counsel in Tudor England has been a central historiographical theme for over twenty years. This review offers a critical assessment of the state of the field. It appraises historical and literary scholarship on both the theory and practice of royal counsel. Among other themes, it discusses the concepts of evil counsel and arcana imperii. The review concludes by suggesting priorities for future enquiry, including the need to think more carefully about which areas of English government still required royal decision-making, and therefore counsel, in this period. The article also charts the rise of conciliar ‘government under the king but not by the king’ and shows that Tudor counsel often happened the wrong way around: the monarch advised the privy council on the direction of state policy. It calls for a new administrative history in early modern studies, with a renewed focus on institutions and their procedures, to complement existing strengths in the fields of political culture and political thought.

Slavery and Abolition in Chartist Thought and Culture, 1838–1850

In Britain between 1838 and 1858, the Chartist movement demanded the implementation of the ‘Six Points’, a parcel of parliamentary reforms centred on universal male suffrage. Despite the movement's recognized importance, little study has been made into Chartism's attitude towards slavery and abolitionism. This article will provide the first comprehensive study of this topic, from Chartism's origins in the 1830s until its decline in the decade after 1848. It will illustrate that Chartism was influenced by the radical labour component of the ‘Democratic’ coalition that supported President Andrew Jackson. This helped reinforce amongst early Chartists theories that wage labour was more exploitative than chattel slavery, alongside a racist reaction to West Indian emancipation more extreme than has previously been acknowledged. By 1842, however, various changes within the movement helped bring to the fore more consistently anti-slavery and even anti-racist sentiment with Chartist culture, as did growing exposure to American abolitionism, especially that of William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass. The development of the anti-slavery ‘Free Soil’ ideology amongst American labour radicals profoundly influenced the late Chartist position on slavery by inserting abolition into Chartist aspirations for land reform. Consequently, a core component of late Chartism was its own anti-slavery ‘Free Soil’ ideology, which greatly informed pro-Union working-class agitation during the American Civil War.

Disseminating and Containing Communist Propaganda to Overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia through Hong Kong, the Cold War Pivot, 1949–1960

This article explores an understudied aspect in Asia's Cold War history: how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) used Hong Kong as a Cold War pivot to produce and disseminate left-wing literature for overseas Chinese living in Southeast Asia. It argues that the CCP's expanding cultural influence can be attributed to the Party's commercial acumen. Operating within a permissive colonial regulatory regime, the CCP expanded its control of local and regional markets for left-wing printed materials. The content of CCP literature was inevitably propagandistic – that is, shaped by the changing demands of the Chinese government's foreign policy and by a need to attract foreign remittances and accommodate socialist transformation at home. Hong Kong's emergence as a pivot in propaganda wars that were global in scope created tensions between the United States and Britain, and led governments in Southeast Asia to strengthen state controls on imported communist media. As such, this article makes an original contribution to Hong Kong colonial history and deepens our understanding of transnational dynamics within Southeast Asia.

Reimagining the Family of King Charles I in Nineteenth-Century British Painting

The nineteenth century represents a formative period for the development of historical consciousness in Britain, with texts and, increasingly, images shaping perceptions of the past. This article examines how Stuart history was interpreted and experienced, through a series of historical genre paintings of King Charles I and his family. It explores how Anthony van Dyck's depiction of politicized domesticity in royal portraiture was revised and reworked in these later images. Reimagining Stuart family life, they extended processes of remembering, enlisting audiences in an active, participatory engagement with the past. Probing temporal, visual, and verbal alignments and connections, the article contributes further dimensions to the understanding of historical representation. It argues that these paintings stirred the viewer's intellectual, emotional, and associative responses to encourage a sense of proximity. Establishing an episodic narrative, they initiated processes of recollection and recognition, they reflected sympathetic historiographies, and they encouraged a shared community with their pictorial protagonists. By so doing, nineteenth-century artists diminished historical distance and fashioned a familiarized past.

Globalizing the History of the First World War: Economic Approaches

This historiographical review offers an overview of new approaches to the global history of the First World War. It first considers how, over the last decade, there has been a move to emphasize the war's imperial dimensions: in reconsiderations of the war in Africa, the experience of soldiers and workers from across Europe's colonial empires, and the German ‘global strategy’ of fomenting unrest within the Allied empires. It then suggests that new global histories of the First World War give further attention to its economic aspects, particularly in two ways: first, by recovering understudied global financial aspects of the war, including the effects of the 1914 financial crisis and wartime inflation on economies and societies far outside of Europe; and second, by investigating wartime histories of primary production, both in colonial territories and sovereign states in Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia. It argues that these approaches can offer an important corrective to common assumptions that the First World War led to a dramatic break with pre-war globalizing trends.

Law and Order, the Rule of Law, and the Legitimation of the Colonial Presence in Late British Burma

In Britain's empire across Asia and Africa from the mid-nineteenth century, two political-legal principles were central to colonial modernity, law and order, and the rule of law. These two principles secured the legitimation of colonial rule, in the eyes of those who ruled. It is striking then to see that in late colonial Burma, in the 1920s and 1930s, the colonial government struggled to maintain law and order and to embed the rule of law. Violent crime soared while the criminal justice system failed hopelessly for serious offences. This article seeks to explore the ways in which senior British officials in Burma navigated the disjuncture between the imperial principles that were central to colonial justification and Burma's reality. Perhaps most notably, they did so by putting blame for the soaring crime rates and the failures of the criminal justice system firmly on the Burmese. In the early 1940s, however, with the end of colonial rule clearly imminent, the legitimation of the colonial presence became of less pressing importance, and the failure of colonial practice to live up to its ideological rhetoric could now be more openly faced.

The Münster Rising, Memories of Violence, and Perceptions of Dissent in Restoration England

This article examines the ways in which the violent Anabaptist rising at Münster in 1533–5 was reinterpreted in Restoration England. Historians have often recognized that the incident was used to attack English Baptists in the seventeenth century, but there has been little systematic exploration of the processes behind this. This article suggests that recollections of Münster in later seventeenth-century England were a species of ‘cosmopolitan memory’ – an internationally shared memory of trauma put to distinctive local uses. References to Münster served as ways for English writers to tie nonconformists to specific acts of religious violence in England, including the Civil Wars and Thomas Venner's 1661 rising in London, without directly recalling these events. Historical discussions of the Münster rising therefore often directly transformed German Anabaptists into Quakers or Fifth Monarchists. Condemnations of the violence in the German city were also used by Congregationalists and Presbyterians to differentiate themselves from Baptists and Quakers and to emphasize their orthodoxy. Some Baptist writers responded by disclaiming their links to continental Anabaptists, while others moved to question the established historiography around the Münster rising. This article demonstrates these points through a range of sources, including sermons, letters, commentaries, controversial literature, and almanacs.

Imperial Thinking and Colonial Combat in the Early Twentieth-Century Italian Army

Although designed primarily as a national institution, between the 1880s and the First World War the Italian army's military operations were all in the colonial sphere. By 1914, Italy claimed an extensive empire in East and North Africa. How far did imperialism shape Italian military culture and institutions? I identify ‘imperial thinking’ across nine areas of army activity. Italian colonialism relied on a pervasive narrative of Italian benevolence – italiani brava gente – with Italian conduct in war or as imperial rulers portrayed as inherently mild. This was accompanied by a set of anxieties we might term Adwa syndrome: after Italy's defeat by Ethiopia at Adwa in 1896, the Italian army was acutely afraid of possible violent uprisings by the local people. Many army officers expected betrayal and brutality from their colonial enemies or subjects, and acted accordingly. This outlook shaped the army's conduct both in the colonies and when dealing with European adversaries in the First World War. While the army of late Liberal Italy was structurally and doctrinally a national army, it was increasingly imperialist in mindset and outlook, which directly affected its conduct on and off the battlefield.

Parliamentary Representation in Modern Britain: Past, Present, and Future

A series of recent books all attest to a revival of interest in the theory and practice of parliamentary representation in the modern era as a scholarly discipline. This review surveys eight different aspects of that history since the early nineteenth century: the spatial dimension of the Palace of Westminster; the comparative framework offered by the history of parliaments in Europe; ideas of parliamentary representation; the history of parliamentary procedure; women in parliament; the House of Lords; the history of corruption; and the Brexit crisis. Insights and perspectives are drawn from recent historical research as well as from political science and intellectual history. The review concludes by observing that the history of parliamentary representation in the modern era is in good shape. Some older interpretive paradigms still lurk, especially an obsession with ‘democratization’. However, more is now known about individual MPs and constituencies than ever before. The digitization of the records of parliament is expediting the kind of longitudinal analysis which was impossible back in the 1960s and 1970s. And the intellectual history and public policy literature around the idea of representation is enjoying a renaissance.