The cultural shift that France experienced after the First World War has commonly been analysed through the prism of attitudes towards Germany, and the continuation of wartime prejudices in the immediate post-war period. Yet, an exploration of imaginings of future relations with a wartime ally reveals a broad spectrum of assumptions and expectations that span the transition from war to peace. Taking as its focus the prospect of a tunnel under the English Channel, this article situates thinking about France’s future within cultures of nationalism and ideas about international connection. It uses a collection of answers to a 1919 exam question which asked what might be the likely consequences of a Channel tunnel, and analyses the themes that emerged as the candidates picked and chose from a variety of different national symbols and images. In so doing, they offered a vision of a tunnel that was rooted in the past and in wartime experiences, but that equally represented a means to strengthen and sustain the Franco-British partnership that would be key to France’s future. Read alongside government and lobby group records, their essays afford a glimpse into grassroots imaginings of both the French nation and the new international order after 1919.

The article examines the relationship between quarantine practices and Western European medical notions of the Ottoman Empire in the eighteenth-century Mediterranean, as well as the crucial role of quarantine centres in facilitating trade and mobility between the East and the West. I argue that quarantine should be analysed to understand the complexity of the early modern Mediterranean as a shared context that saw both connections and clashes. The first part of the article focuses on Western European ideas concerning the geography of the Mediterranean, medical theories, and related quarantine practices. These theories often presented the ‘healthy’ ‘Christian West’ as opposed to the ‘infidel’ and ‘plagued’ Ottoman Empire. However, the article argues for a more nuanced understanding of the early modern Mediterranean, where both unity and diversity co-existed. Quarantine, despite its association with isolation and the reinforcement of borders, also enabled connections and circulation despite the fear of plague. This article explores quarantine centres as key components of the infrastructure of mobility, with a particular focus on religious diversity, tolerance, and multilingualism. The article also explores the perception of the institution through the eyes of Ottoman passengers, shedding light on their perspectives and attitudes toward quarantine.

Karl Marx consistently contrasts the alienation and egoism of bourgeois, capitalist society with the holism and intimacy of medieval feudalism. In his critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of right, he cryptically terms medievalism the ‘democracy of unfreedom’, arguing that feudalism embodied an integration of political and economic life that the fragmented modern constitutional state abandons. Focusing on writings from the early 1840s, this article examines Marx’s account of feudalism to better understand his early democratic theory and its relationship to his account of human emancipation. While Marx rejects feudal nostalgia and insists on the revolutionary progress brought by capitalism and liberal constitutionalism, he nonetheless believes that medievalism models a partial unity of political and economic life that ‘true democracy’ will restore and radicalize.

This article takes the example of the Tana-Beles project – a scheme sponsored by Italy to respond to the 1980s famine in Ethiopia – to demonstrate that postimperial international relief policies and practices were woven into the very fabric of the colonial past. Postcolonial humanitarianism emerges as the transformation of colonial practices and relationships into new policies, which did not depend on the interests only of former metropoles, but also of the new independent states and on the agenda of international organizations. Furthermore, this article contends that private companies had a prominent role in shaping postcolonial humanitarianism because they could benefit from both the favourable policies of donor countries and the relationships they established in the long run with the authorities of recipient countries. Finally, the history of the Tana-Beles project enables us to re-read the international response to the Ethiopian famine within a larger timeframe. On the one hand, this appears to be rooted in the previous colonial period, on the other it embraces the years thereafter when the schemes, relationships, and strategies set in motion during the famine were developed further.

At the turn of the seventeenth century, jurists such as Alberico Gentili (1552–1608) and Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), began to advance a novel account of the law of nations (ius gentium) as a law that binds a world of sovereign states. That they would produce such a theory is surprising, however, considering that sovereign states were neither the dominant form of political organization at the time, nor did conventional medieval jurisprudence treat them as the normative standard. This article traces this evolution to a broader transformation in legal interpretation. In an effort to put Roman law on a more rational foundation, jurists such as François Connan (1508–51) and Hugues Doneau (1527–91) connected the origin of law to the unfolding of a certain account of human sociability, with the result that a conception of the state as an autonomous body acquired a normative status within their version of the global legal order. It then argues that we should see Gentili’s work on the ius gentium as part of this tradition. In so doing, the article demonstrates how the innovations of a particular school of legal interpretation, by combining Roman law with a distinctive social theory, contributed to making the sovereign state the legal norm.

This article examines the idea of anti-slavery sociability as part of a wider analysis of the informal elements of the transatlantic anti-slavery movement. It considers how American abolitionist Maria Weston Chapman drew support for the American anti-slavery cause from French salons during her time spent living in Paris from 1848 to 1855. This case-study highlights how a focus on the informal dimensions of anti-slavery activism illuminates the often underappreciated work of female abolitionists in the transatlantic reform sphere. Through the connections she established with the likes of French writer Victor Hugo and Russian exile Nicholas Tourgueneff at salons in Paris, most notably that of Mary Clarke Mohl on the Rue de Bac, Chapman was able to cultivate European support for abolitionism in myriad ways. This included financial donations, goods to be sold at anti-slavery bazaars, and, perhaps most importantly, testimonies against American slavery from renowned Europeans like Hugo that could be republished in the United States.

Uncertainty about what constitutes work in the past has led to the labour of care occupying a shadowy place in the histories of both medicine and the economy. This article takes a microhistorical approach to shed new light on care in early modern England. Using depositions and other surviving records of a testamentary dispute heard in the Hereford diocesan church court in 1674–5, the article reconstructs the care received by a single, labouring man named Richard Howell. Focusing on forms of care that lay outside institutions, it unpicks the varieties of informal labour that society understood as care work in early modern England, including maintenance (provision of economic support for the sick, including lodging, food, and drink); physical or practical care (watching or attending the sick); and the emotional labour of care. The article challenges the idea that care work was simply undertaken by the family or carried out within a system of social obligation. It demonstrates that all forms of care in this pre-industrial society implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) held economic value, which could be leveraged as grounds for economic recompense in the early modern courts.

This article draws on childcare advice to investigate the shift from breastfeeding by the clock to feeding on demand in twentieth-century Britain and Italy, to demonstrate that it was not just mothers’ bodies, nor what they fed their children, but their time that was subject to political, medical, and cultural attention. The comparative approach highlights the convergences and divergences in breastfeeding advice, illuminating the interactions with political and intellectual currents, as much as social and economic patterns. ‘Scientific motherhood’ and the promotion of feeding by the clock dominated in Britain and Italy at the beginning of the century, and persisted under fascist initiatives to regulate breastfeeding. Some existing differences, however, contained the seeds of greater divergence after 1945 in the two countries. Shaped by differing intersections of medical, psychoanalytic, and feminist thinking, the uneven shift to the concept of demand feeding slowly took root in Britain in the post-war period, but in Italy only in the context of 1968 counter-cultural ideas. The 1970s brought the conversation back to a point of convergence between Britain and Italy in the feminist recognition of the complexities of balancing the ‘rights and duties’ of mothers and children when it came to feeding babies.

This article argues that pre-nineteenth-century elections at a sub-national level have an important place in the history of ‘modern’ voting practices. It does this through a discussion of unusually well-documented election disputes in eighteenth-century London parishes. Previously neglected records of litigation in the ecclesiastical courts reveal that parish elections in this period generated arguments which did not take place at a parliamentary level until the following century: arguments over votes for women, votes for religious minorities, and the secret ballot. Customary electoral rules came under increasing pressure in the early eighteenth century as London’s population grew and changed in character. In some parishes, this produced a narrowing of the traditional ratepayer franchise, allowing only male Anglican ratepayers a vote in parish elections. Elsewhere, groups or individual residents successfully pushed for a more inclusive franchise which allowed ratepaying women, Dissenters, and Jews a voice in parochial politics. Similarly mixed practices emerged with regard to electoral procedure: residents who feared the overbearing influence of their neighbours pressed for a secret ballot, while others insisted on the merits of an open poll. These cases illustrate the importance of small-scale local institutions as key sites of innovation in the history of electoral reform.

This article argues that the late colonial government of Hong Kong shaped and reconstructed Chinese performances and festivities to secure public support, creating Chinese culture that was sui generis and historically produced. The disturbances of the 1960s prompted local officials to improve state–society communication and legitimize their rule. They utilized Hong Kong people's identification with Chinese culture to formulate their policies. Focusing on the Festival of Hong Kong, carnivals, Chinese opera shows, and the Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra, this article shows that colonial administrators adopted policies that targeted people across generations and communities. They sought to cultivate a sense of belonging to Hong Kong by engaging both the older and younger generations in these cultural activities. Late colonialism became intertwined with notions of Chineseness in Hong Kong. Unlike colonial officials in other former British territories, those in Hong Kong went beyond British culture and focused on cultural elements that the people preferred. This cultural perspective, which has been underexplored, shows that late colonialism in Hong Kong not only made the colony's decolonization differ from other cases but also created diversified Chinese culture that was independent of the mainland China's and Taiwan's political discourses.