Between 1530 and 1798, Malta, the southernmost tip of Catholic Europe, was home to the military-religious Order of St John (of Malta). This organization traced its origins to the years just before the beginning of the crusades in late eleventh-century Palestine. From Malta, the Order sought to keep up its dual mission of hospitality (hence the appellative of hospitallers) and fighting the infidel Muslim at sea. From 1592 to 1768 the Society of Jesus was present in this Catholic outpost from where it supported the mission of the Order and sought to remould hospitaller piety. The relationship between these two organizations had ramifications that spread beyond tiny Malta, both because of the issues that arose between them, as well as because of the international composition of the Order and the Society. The Carnival of 1639 proved to be a defining moment in this relationship; though generally passed over as a ‘temporary disturbance’ this article emphasizes that it was more than this by looking at the dynamics of the links between hospitallers, Jesuits, the Inquisition, and Carnival. This article is based on a wider range of sources than previous studies, which will help to bring out the nuances of the subject under investigation.

Eighteenth-century architect-builders were a small group, but important for understanding the market strategies of knowledge-based experts in an age of rapid growth in technical information before the creation of modern professions. This article confronts a teleological historiography of emerging professionalization. It is focused on Robert Mylne and several of his contemporaries in Edinburgh and London, including a number of successful London-based Scots who were active as architects, builders, engineers, and surveyors, and self-styled in all these areas when it suited them. It supplies an account of what it took for building experts to establish themselves and flourish in big cities and the ways in which such experts navigated, controlled, and accommodated an environment of unregulated expertise that largely suited contemporary practitioners. Individual, family, and collective market strategies are examined in detail and the final section is a close analysis of the activities of the Architects Club in the 1790s.

This article presents four manuscript essays from the mid-1750s, three of which are attributed to Edmund Burke for the first time. In doing so, the article aims to reconstruct Burke's earliest political thought during a period often described as the ‘missing years’ of his biography. These essays cover themes that would later occupy places of central importance in Burke's thinking, and so form a bridge between his early intellectual development and his subsequent political career. After presenting the grounds for ascribing these writings to Burke, the article then sketches their main lines of argument and situates them in their political context. It also briefly establishes their significance with reference to their enlightenment intellectual milieu. Covering such themes as the nature of party, the functioning of the mixed constitution, and the terms on which Ireland was subjected to the English crown, these early essays address a set of political and constitutional issues that were major areas of controversy in British politics in the second half of the eighteenth century.

The second earl of Shelburne is well known for his association with reform initiatives in the second half of the eighteenth century. However, he also put conspicuous effort into strengthening his aristocratic credentials and status. One noteworthy feature of this was his politeness: he aimed at personal cultivation, a goal in itself and a foundation for leadership in society; he also had a reputation for politeness in everyday social situations. One context for Shelburne's conspicuous politeness was his personal need to overcome a number of impediments to asserting aristocratic status. However, another context was his effort to articulate a vocation for the modern aristocrat. For Shelburne, polite sociability was a way for the aristocrat to gather, organize, and deploy creative energies in society for the sake of improvement and reform. Though a particular example, Shelburne illustrates the energy that asserting aristocratic status could demand and the sort of modernity that could be claimed on behalf of aristocracy. Finally, Shelburne demonstrates the role of politeness in aristocratic formation: in particular, he shows how aristocratic engagement in contemporary society entailed a range of social relations which polite competence helped to manage.

The dominant memory of the Paris Commune has been of disproportionate violence wreaked on the Communards by a brutal government. However, accounts of the extent of the bloodshed rest on flimsy foundations. A range of archival evidence suggests that the death toll has been greatly exaggerated, and a revised estimate is here proposed. How and why the number of deaths became crucial to the history of the Commune from an early date is explored. If the killing was in reality on a far less apocalyptic scale, how does this affect the narrative of nineteenth-century French politics and its ‘memory’?

At the 1918 general election, Sinn Féin overtook the Irish Parliamentary Party as the dominant political force within nationalist Ireland, a process that has its origins in the aftermath of the Easter Rising of 1916. This article argues that to understand better this shift in public opinion, from an initially hostile reaction to the Dublin rebellion to a more advanced nationalist position,1 it is important to recognize the decisive role played by a political welfare organization, the Irish National Aid Association and Volunteer Dependents' Fund. The activities of the INAAVDF significantly shaped the popular memory of the Rising, but also provided a focus around which the republican movement could re-organize itself. In foregrounding the contribution of the INAAVDF to the radicalization of political life in Ireland between 1916 and 1918, the article argues that this understudied but important organization offers a useful way of charting popular responses to the Rising and its aftermath, as well as laying the foundations for a reinvigorated political and military campaign after 1917.

Historians have tended to characterize the ‘white ethnic’ identity politics of the 1970s in the United States as a significant feature of the conservative counterrevolution, especially the rise of populist racial conservatism and its splintering of the Democratic New Deal coalition. Seeking to provide a broader, more representative portrait of white ethnic mobilization, activism, and institutionalization in government, with particular focus on the work of Rev. Geno Baroni, the National Center for Urban Ethnic Affairs, and the Carter administration's Office of Ethnic Affairs, this article challenges that assumption. It posits that the politics of white ethnicity was a far more complex, diverse phenomenon, of appeal to liberals and conservatives in an era of considerable political flux. This reconsideration also reveals that the 1970s were not conservative in the United States, but a watershed decade of uncertainty, volatility, and experimentation, in which ethnic identities and affiliations were reshaped, political norms upended, and new forms of organization and mobilization trialled out, with great significance for today's ‘post-ethnic’ United States. White ethnic politics was of considerable importance to American political development in the late twentieth century, but not in the way usually thought.

Between 1907 and 1984 unearned income in Britain was taxed at higher rates than wages and salaries, a bias that was supported intermittently by limiting shareholders’ dividends and attempting to tax capital wealth. Although apparently accepted as part of the fiscal order until 1979, Margaret Thatcher's government was able to complete the dismantling of the bias in favour of earned income by 1984. This article examines the events and politics of the 1970s to explain the volte-face. The article initially charts the role of political prejudice against rentiers in maintaining higher taxes on unearned income in the context of 1970s economic turmoil and inflation. The article then considers the 1970s fiscal shift from the perspective of equity shareholdings, juxtaposing the use of tax and dividend restraint as a mechanism for control of investment capital with pressure for wider share ownership, particularly for employees. Finally, Avner Offer's theories on prudent financial behaviour are imported as a backdrop for the trend away from tax relief for long-term, illiquid savings towards market-driven incentives. Ultimately, the article detects a change of approach in both main political parties which in turn creates a more stable environment for future policy formation.

In reply to the comment by Andrew Farrant and Edward McPhail on Ben Jackson's article ‘At the origins of neo-liberalism’, this communication briefly examines the development of the political thought of Friedrich Hayek in the 1940s. It argues that the chronology of Hayek's critical analysis of the ‘Keynesian welfare state’ is more complex than Farrant and McPhail suggest. Farrant and McPhail underestimate the extent to which neo-liberalism in the 1940s was a body of ideas in flux, trying to come to terms with a changing political context, but not yet achieving a mature and stable ideological statement.

According to the textbook version of history, the Enlightenment played a crucial role in the creation of the modern, liberal democracies of the West. Ever since this view – which we might describe as the modernization thesis – was first formulated by Peter Gay, it has been repeatedly criticized as misguided: a myth. Yet, as this paper shows, it continues to survive in postwar historiography, in particular in the Anglophone world. Indeed, Gay's most important and influential successors – historians such as Robert Darnton and Roy Porter – all ended up defending the idea that the Enlightenment was a major force in the creation of modern democratic values and institutions. More recently, Jonathan Israel's trilogy on the Enlightenment has revived the modernization thesis, albeit in a dramatic new form. Yet, even Israel's work, as its critical reception highlights, does not convincingly demonstrate that the Enlightenment, as an intellectual movement, contributed in any meaningful way to the creation of modern political culture. This conclusion raises a new question: if the Enlightenment did not create our modern democracies, then what did it do? In answer to that question, this paper suggests that we should take more seriously the writings of enlightened monarchists like Nicolas-Antoine Boulanger. Studying the Enlightenment might not allow us to understand why democratic political culture came into being. But, as Boulanger's work underscores, it might throw light on an equally important problem: why democracy came so late in the day.

Historians of the British empire recast their understanding of relations between the metropole and its peripheries in the late twentieth century, notably through the work of the ‘British world’ network and the ‘new imperial historians’. The former emphasized the material, emotional, and financial links between British colonizers across the imperial diaspora; the latter focused on the empire's impact on Britain, particularly in terms of ‘everyday’ experience. This article critically reviews recent interventions, which extend and challenge these approaches by seeking new ways to juxtapose the macro with the micro, and balance the exceptional with the quotidian; by adopting a more transnational (or global) approach to colonialism; and by rethinking the categories of ‘settler’ and ‘colonizer’. Collectively, these works question the traditional frameworks within which both colonialism and the British empire have been understood. In conclusion, the article considers their impact on the vibrant field of Britain's colonial legal history.

This essay surveys literature on the engagement of different European empires, including the French, British, Dutch, Russian, and German, with Islam. While the history of Islam and empire has attracted the attention of scholars for decades, most of their studies have been written primarily as contributions to the historiography of a specific empire or a distinct geographic region and rarely refer to research on other imperial powers, even though the questions and themes raised are remarkably similar. The article brings together these studies, exploring the following topics: Islam and imperial rule and, in particular, the ways in which religious institutions were accommodated and controlled in the colonial state; Islam and anti-imperial resistance; and the relationship between Islam, information, and colonial knowledge. It assesses the dominant themes in the field and points to a number of questions that remain to be studied.

Writing the history of historiography is a tricky business. There is no unbiased way of doing it, and it can serve different goals that at best complement and at worst contradict each other. The genre can seem both suitable to promote one's own academic agenda and to reflect upon one's own ideological constraints, epistemological presumptions, and social aspirations. This article analyses the motivations and methods of recent authors in the field, and it does so principally by focusing on the roles they attribute to historians past and present. To enable comparisons, the article includes works with a national, European and global framework, on early modern and late modern historiography, by intellectual, cultural and post-colonialist historians. A general conclusion will be that while most publications use the genre to pursue academic interests with epistemic arguments, only few try to exploit its potential for critical self-reflexion. As a consequence, they tend to be of limited credibility and originality when it comes to describing historiography's functions and historians' roles. This article does not treat their lack of critical commitment as an isolated phenomenon in a historiographical sub-field, but as a symptom of a larger problem within academic scholarship today. There are, however, exceptions to the rule, and this article will also try to work out their particular strengths.