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.

Konstantina Zanou's Transnational patriotism in the Mediterranean starts with the raucous last carnival in Serenissima Venice in 1797 and ends with a café brawl in British Corfu in 1853. Let's just admit it: Zanou is not really drawn to settling subjects. Most of the people encapsulated in the pages of her book remembered the Venetian empire as it partied its way to demise, and almost all of them watched the Napoleonic wars throw their Ionian islands back and forth between Russian, French, British, Ottoman, and Habsburg imperial guardianship. This dizzying experience set her characters loose, leading most of them to disperse around the Mediterranean and much of Europe, looking for a way to make a Greek home out of these imperial fractures.

The ocean is a central site of escape, danger, and rescue for refugees. It is also a place where oceanic humanitarianism is enacted. In histories of refugee migration, the combination of the ocean, weather, and climate in determining the fate of refugees has not been adequately examined. This article provides a critical analysis of a Vietnamese refugee boat journey in 1982, to demonstrate the paradoxical nature of the ocean as both a site of danger and saviour. Conventional historical methodologies alone cannot capture the complex role of the ocean and the weather in determining boat refugee journeys and rescues. Interdisciplinary research between historians and ocean engineers provides new evidence and understanding of how the ocean and weather influences the outcomes of refugees seeking asylum by boat. Numerical model predictions of sea state and ship motion – which enables the vessel's journey in past environmental conditions to be understood – integrated within historical analysis contributes to a fuller and more complex understanding of the nexus between environmental conditions and forced migration journeys. Ocean engineering produces a scientific narrative that historians can use, alongside oral histories and other sources, to theorize the ocean as an active agent.

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.

Transnational patriotism widens our understanding of the Mediterranean and the interactions and entanglements that constituted its social and political landscapes at a conjuncture of great transformation. Zanou's anti-teleological reading of early nineteenth-century intellectual mobility challenges hegemonic frameworks of the nation-state that obscure her book's protagonists in national historiographies. The perspective of the Ionian and Dalmatian characters (to simplify the complex array of languages of expression and locations of origin) retells in compelling fashion the history of modernity's possibilities and contributes to a growing body of scholarship on these Adriatic worlds. Zanou takes the reader on a journey beyond the sea's shores and into various hinterlands, but we also travel beyond ideas about exchange and interaction that insist upon port cities as primary nodes in regional connectivity. That geographical framework has come to dominate much of the recent historiography in and of the Mediterranean and, in Zanou's book, we learn how invariably intertwined are patterns of social and political relocation. She illustrates how ‘patria’ and belonging are at the centre of these mercurial intellectual circles, but that their definitions do not conform to ex post facto renderings imposed by the social and political containers of the nation-state. In focusing on this transformative conjuncture of meaning which defines the transition from early modern to modern worlds, Transnational patriotism is a welcome addition to the historiography of the Mediterranean.

‘No one's going to be interested in a story about prisoners of war!’ This is the withering comment that the director Julien Duvivier supposedly made to Charles Spaak, the scriptwriter of one of the greatest films of all times, La grande illusion (1937), which was ultimately directed by Jean Renoir. Fortunately for his readers, Renaud Morieux is well aware that stories about prisoners of war can be of interest to everyone.

In this historiographical review, I analyse recent works on the history of economic growth and provide a starting point for thinking about how this literature fits together as a discrete field of research. The questions being asked in these texts are relatively new, and as of yet no attempt has been made to identify the major themes that are driving this research. In putting these works into dialogue with each other, across the disciplinary boundaries of history, ecology, anthropology, economics, and political science, we can see that a new subfield of academic inquiry is emerging. Driven by concerns over climate change and rising economic inequality, this new research aims to understand the obsession with economic growth that has shaped so much of our contemporary world.

Britain and France were at war with each other for over half of the long eighteenth century. This period of sustained conflict produced immense changes, in both countries, in the character of the state and the course of economic development. Yet one of the most obvious ways in which contemporaries would have encountered the war was in the presence of large numbers of prisoners of war held by their country. Early in the century there were thousands of such captives, and by its end they numbered in the tens of thousands. Renaud Morieux takes this neglected topic for the focus of his multifaceted study. These prisoners created challenges that were legal and diplomatic, as well as administrative and financial. The citizens of each country found themselves having to learn to live with captives of a nation with which they were at war. In a work that is both theoretically informed and exhaustively researched, Morieux offers fresh insight into the consequences of war for European society.

Konstantina Zanou's Transnational patriotism is a thought-provoking book, which offers a multi-faceted perspective on its subject that brings together scholarship on nationalism and diasporas with modern Greek and Italian intellectual history. Written in lively and accessible language and based on thorough research, it makes the reader rethink some of the major dilemmas of our own time while still remaining true to the perspectives of its protagonists. To take but the most salient example, the word ‘patriotism’, which features prominently in the book's title, has dominated public debate in Britain in recent years, as so-called ‘Brexit patriotism’ has become a fashion statement.

Enemy combatants captured in wartime are both a potential resource for their captors and a logistical and security nightmare. This has long been reflected in their treatment. Over the centuries, captured enemy combatants have been sold as slaves (or simply used as slave labour), forced to switch sides, ransomed for money, swapped for other prisoners, physically maimed to ensure they could no longer fight, starved to death, imprisoned under abysmal conditions, or outright massacred. And yet, surprisingly, at other times (including in the period covered by this book), most prisoners of war – though not, as Morieux shows, all – have not only had a protected status but, especially in the case of officers, been allowed a degree of freedom of movement that seems extraordinary by modern-day standards.

I want to thank the reviewers for engaging so thoughtfully with my book and for raising such a variety of important points. I cannot hope to address more than a selection of them here.

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.

In 1756, the young John Howard set out for Portugal. His ship was taken by a privateer, and Howard became a prisoner of war in France. Twenty years later, he launched the movement for prison reform in Britain. Renaud Morieux challenges historians to more fully connect war imprisonment and the debates it engendered about prisoners’ rights to the emergence of prison reform in the 1770s and 1780s (p. 92). In this article, I take up that challenge. I suggest, however, that the connections are complex and twisted. Concerns about prisoners of war may have inspired prison reform, but they also made the project more confusing.