The article analyses the processes that preceded the construction of sanctuaries in the Holy Land through the prism of the Church of Gethsemane in Jerusalem, deconstructing and uncovering layers of political power struggles which led to its formation and present shape. This study, based on extensive archival research and a field survey, demonstrates how the reconstruction of the basilica of Gethsemane, and hence the concretization in stone of some of the most depicted evangelical traditions, was not merely the result of an ecumenical consideration. In fact, it reflects the narrow, and sometimes very down-to-earth, interests of various denominations and political forces. The study also demonstrates how the unique setting of the Holy Land encouraged simultaneous multi-layered political processes, comparing the case-study of the Church of Gethsemane to those of other symbolic and national religious monuments: the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the basilica of Sacré-Coeur in Paris, and the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow.

In 1964, the editor of Sydney University Press, Michael Turnbull, approached G. R. Elton to write the book that became The practice of history (1967). Remarkably, a famous University of Cambridge historian was persuaded to embark on what Turnbull correctly sensed would be an influential and profitable text, and this for an obscure and recently established publishing house located at the other end of the earth. Were it not for Turnbull, The practice of history would probably never have been written. But for Turnbull's editorial advice, a somewhat different book would have resulted. This article traces the close and fruitful working relationship between publisher and author, as well as the adversarial relationship between The practice of history and E. H. Carr's What is history? (1961). It also suggests that Turnbull intended The practice of history as part of a wider publishing purpose where big ideas could be expressed, given a mass audience, and thus contribute to debate and social change. Elton would have found such a socially engaged agenda abhorrent, had he known about it.

This article examines Spanish and Portuguese liberal political thought in the period after the independence of Latin America (c. 1825–50). It argues that while Iberian liberalism undoubtedly reflected broader European and transatlantic debates and intellectual trends, it was distinguished by its robust engagement with literary romanticism. The article proceeds to describe and make a case for ‘romantic liberalism’ through the examination of texts by six politically engaged writers: Spanish statesman, poet and dramatist Francisco Martínez de la Rosa (1787–1862); Portuguese statesman, poet, novelist, and dramatist João Baptista da Silva Leitão de Almeida Garrett (1799–1854); Spanish poet and statesman Ángel de Saavedra (1791–1865), Duque de Rivas; Spanish parliamentarian and literary critic Antonio Alcalá Galiano; Spanish poet, journalist, and parliamentarian José de Espronceda (1808–42); and Portuguese historian, novelist, and journalist Alexandre Herculano (1810–77).

During the second half of the nineteenth century, British social purity campaigners framed the pornography trade as a major source of cultural and moral pollution. As in their anti-prostitution efforts, purity campaigners presented the abolition of pornography as an attempt to protect women, children, and impressionable members of the lower classes from sexual immorality. Their rhetoric and policy efforts, however, reveal deeply entrenched fears of middle-class vulnerability to the negative effects of pornographic literature and images. Building on existing obscenity studies scholarship, this article explores the role of class and gender tension in nineteenth-century pornography regulation. In contrast to the majority of work on Victorian pornography, this article focuses on the British lower classes as producers and distributors rather than consumers of pornography. In addition, this article argues for a higher level of female participation in the pornography trade than has been previously recognized. By focusing on the contradictions and biases at the heart of campaigns against pornography, this article explores the ways in which regulation efforts and discourses of obscenity were shaped by the class and gender dynamics of the pornography trade.

Scotland was unique in Western Europe in continuing to accord legal validity to irregular marriage until 1939 with one form of irregular marriage remaining legal until 2006. This article examines official attitudes to irregular marriage in Scotland in the period 1855–1939 as well as its incidence and popularity amongst the populace. The article argues that irregular marriage was narrowly defined by the authorities as meaning those irregular marriages that had been registered. Other forms of irregular marriage were often deemed to be cohabitation or concubinage which was regarded as morally reprehensible. However, authorities, including Poor Law officers, could also be flexible and sympathetic in their treatment of couples who lived together where the law was perceived to be rigid. Although it is impossible to quantify the numbers of couples who lived in non-registered informal unions, the evidence suggests that there were significant numbers but that in the majority of cases couples cohabited because they were unable to marry for legal, religious, or financial reasons.

From the 1820s to the 1850s, the British Indian state undertook its final major phase of expansion to assume the approximate geographical extent it retained until its demise in 1947. It confronted at its north-eastern and north-western outskirts seemingly intractable mountains, deserts, and jungles inhabited by apparently stateless ‘tribal’ peoples. In its various attempts to comprehend and deal with these human and material complexities, the colonial state undertook projects of spatial engagement that were often confused and ineffective. Efforts to produce borders and frontier areas to mark the limits of administered British India were rarely authoritative and were reworked by colonial officials and local inhabitants alike. Bringing together diverse examples of bordering and territory-making from peripheral regions of South Asia that are usually treated separately lays bare the limits of the colonial state's power and its ambivalent attitude towards spatial forms and technologies that are conventionally taken to be key foundations of modern states. These cases also intervene in the burgeoning political geography literature on boundary-making, suggesting that borders and the territories they delimit are not stable objects but complex and fragmented entities, performed and contested by dispersed agencies and therefore prone to endless fluctuation.

This article examines the enrollment of a brigade of armed volunteers which took place in Great Britain in summer 1860 to help the Italian patriot Giuseppe Garibaldi in southern Italy. Through the narrative strategies used to promote the enlistment and the images of the brigade that circulated in both Great Britain and Italy, it reveals features of a cosmopolitanism of nations and of a commitment based on transnational values spread in the nineteenth century. This article argues that the narratives used to mobilize men for a foreign cause not only shared values of freedom, justice, fraternity among nations, and a romantic appeal, but they had a strong national connotation. It was British pride in its freedom and constitution that gave the power and legitimacy to interfere in foreign affairs. Moreover, joining foreign causes strengthened a sentiment of British national pride and identity. The Legion's organizational and disciplinary problems also shed light on the biases and difficulties that troubled these kinds of expeditions and on the latent contradictions between a sense of patriotic duty, the transnational ideals that dominated the rhetoric, and the underlying disillusionment and frustration of the daily routine.

This article analyses the historical conditions for, and implications of, the attitudes and conduct of a number of prominent or influential public intellectuals in the United States during the Great War. It argues that many intellectuals, particularly those who supported American entry to the war, shared a general lack of concern with the realities of full-scale warfare. Their response to the war had little to do with the war itself – its political and economic causes, brutal and industrial character, and human and material costs. Rather, their positions were often based on their views of culture and philosophy, or on their visions of the post-war world. As a result, relatively few of these intellectuals fully considered the political, social, and economic context in which the catastrophe occurred. The war, to many of them, was primarily a clash of civilizations, a battle of good versus evil, civilized democracy versus barbaric savagery, progress versus backwardness, culture versus kultur. The article describes several manifestations of American intellectual approaches to the war, discusses the correlation between intellectual and general public attitudes, and concludes with some implications for thinking about the relationship between intellectuals and war in more recent American history.

The Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 provided monetary independence to the newly established Irish Free State. The existing historiography views Irish monetary and banking policy post-independence as following British precedent in terms of the structure and design of state monetary institutions. However, this article considers how Professor Henry Parker-Willis's experience of establishing the United States (US) Federal Reserve system in 1913 had a direct impact on his work as chair of the Irish banking commission in 1926. This research highlights that Parker-Willis played a significantly more important role in formulating the Irish Currency Act 1927 than is currently recognized. It further identifies that Parker-Willis's design for a wholly independent, non-political Irish currency commission was primarily based on his disillusionment with the political interference then evident in the management of the Federal Reserve system. This article, therefore, challenges the dominant view that Irish monetary institution building in the 1920s automatically followed British precedent, but rather identifies the direct influence of US monetary structures on the development of Irish institutions. This is an internationalist dimension not recognized in the existing historiography.

In 1883 and early 1884 the controversial commemoration of the four-hundredth birthday of Martin Luther, celebrated in Germany and worldwide, captured much British public attention. The examination of this celebration offered here will improve current understanding of late Victorian religious controversies and indicate their continuing centrality to a range of cultural and historical debates in the period. The commemoration invigorated historic antagonisms in the British religious landscape, yet it also did far more than this. The commemoration provided a platform for those who wanted to foster Protestant unity in the face of what was widely perceived to be a revived threat from ‘popery’ and religious indifference at home and abroad. Whereas some religious and not-very-religious commentators, often belonging to a younger generation, wanted closely to associate Luther's world-historical role with liberalizing intellectual and social progress, others – sceptics, Catholics, high Anglicans, older Protestants – resisted this. Arguments about Luther's life and teaching often became more broadly Victorian discussions of the family, Anglo-German affinities or antagonisms, and the nature of modernity. By relating themes in the study of modern religious history to current concerns in the history of historical writing, this article will point to wider lacunae in scholarly approaches to nineteenth-century culture.

Zeroing in on private garden plots, the article discusses the manner in which Germans portrayed themselves in relation to displaced persons (DPs) – former foreign workers, Allied prisoners-of-war (POWs), and concentration camp inmates – in immediate post-Second World War Hanover. Challenging the notion that a coherent narrative of German victimization truly emerged only in the 1950s, the article reveals how German gardeners already articulated loudly a discourse through which they sought to depict themselves as decent, hard-working sufferers, while portraying displaced persons as immoral and dangerous perpetrators. The plots of garden owners, as foci of German yearnings for Heimat, came particularly under threat. Germans cherished such sites, not only because they provided the opportunity for procuring additional sustenance amidst a post-war world of scarcity, but because they symbolized longings to inhabit a peaceful, productive, and beautiful space into which the most turbulent history could not enter, and upon which a stable future could be constructed. Only with the removal of DPs could Germans claim for themselves the status of victims, while branding DPs perpetrators, and reaffirm past patterns of superiority and inferiority in both ethical and racial terms. In so doing, Germans could realize the innocence integral for achieving Heimat and establish democratic stability after 1945.

This article compares the rhetorical justifications surrounding two landmark instances of Western imperialism. In 1882, the British occupied Egypt, ousting indigenous proto-nationalist forces that supposedly threatened British and other foreign interests. The consequences of this intervention were still being worked out in 1956 when, in the wake of the Cairo regime's nationalization of the Suez Canal, the British again invaded. France participated on this occasion, with serious but differing political consequences for both. We suggest that comparing how the British and French argued about these issues, and also examining how the rhetoric of the later crisis contrasted with the earlier one, offers useful insights into the two nations' respective imperial cultures. Specifically, we suggest that the latter-day imperialists Anthony Eden and Guy Mollet couched their actions in internationalist rhetoric reminiscent both of the Gladstone government's justifications for intervention in 1882 and of French official explanations for their takeover in Tunisia a year earlier. Each claimed their actions were taken both to uphold better standards of governance and to restore regional order, itself a highly loaded concept. The language of imperial domination was eschewed; but the ends of empire were served by the use of this rhetoric of ‘liberal order’.

This article explores early twentieth-century British political and humanitarian engagement with the Balkans. It focuses on the Balkan Committee, a liberal pressure group that served as the main hub for British interest in the region in the decade before the First World War. Whilst drawing attention to the specific challenges presented by the Balkans to the British liberal mind, it is argued that the Balkan Committee was part of a wider movement of humanitarianism and political activism that encompassed both continental and colonial questions. The issues around which the committee campaigned are related to humanitarian protests against the use of forced labour in Africa, in particular the Congo Reform Association, as well as to the Persia Committee, formed in protest against the 1907 Anglo-Russian agreement. This approach highlights how ‘Europe’ and empire were interconnected agendas within an overarching liberal-internationalist worldview and reformist conscience, despite the different cultural lenses through which humanitarian questions in different parts of the globe were viewed. It is suggested that research into British interaction with the Balkans offers a fruitful means by which to integrate historical analysis of the continental and imperial aspects of Britain's external relations in the ‘age of empire’.

This article looks at central government's role, focusing on the parliamentary terms 1959–64 and 1964–6, in directing the way in which local authorities enacted the central area redevelopment schemes of the 1960s. The first two sections review the substantial but little-studied literature produced across the political spectrum about central area urban renewal in the period 1959–64. Section III uses the Joint Urban Planning Group, a group set up within the Ministry of Housing and Local Government, as a case-study to show how modernist approaches to redevelopment became operative within a government department. The Joint Urban Planning Group has received no attention from historians. Section IV discusses the fate of these ideas during Labour's first term after the 1964 election.

This article analyses the emergence of politically motivated acts of left-wing terrorism in Britain between 1967 and 1972. Through the case of the ‘Angry Brigade’, an ill-defined grouping which claimed responsibility for a number of attacks against property between 1970 and 1971, it analyses how protest and political violence emerged from discourses and events in the British New Left, the anti-war protest movements, the counterculture, and the underground press. Against common interpretations of ’68 as a watershed of naïve hopes that waned into inaction, this article identifies a consistency of political activity that developed beyond traditional party and class politics towards a more internationally aware and diverse network of struggles for civil equality. Among the shared political and cultural commitments of the counterculture, campaigns around squatting, women's liberation, or the necessity of ‘armed propaganda’ each became possible and at times overlapped. It analyses the group's development, actions, communications, as well as surrounding media discourses, subsequent police investigation, and the criminal trials of ten individuals for their involvement in the Angry Brigade. The article reappraises their overlooked historical significance among the wider countercultural militancy and discourses of political violence of the late 1960s to early 1970s.

This article addresses the reputation of Edmund Burke and his transformation into the ‘founder of modern conservatism’. It argues that this process occurred primarily between 1885 and 1914 in Britain. In doing so, this article challenges the existing orthodoxy which attributes this development to the work of Peter Stanlis, Russell Kirk, and other conservative American scholars. Moreover, this article historicizes one aspect of the construction of C/conservatism as both an intellectual (small-c) and political (capital-C) tradition. Indeed, though the late Victorian and Edwardian period saw the construction of political traditions of an entirely novel kind, the search for ‘New Conservatism’ has been neglected by comparison with New Liberalism. Thus, this study explores three main themes: the impact of British debates about Irish Home Rule on Burke's reputation and status; the academic systematization of Burke's work into a ‘political philosophy of conservatism’; and, finally, the appropriation of Burke by Conservative Unionists during the late Edwardian constitutional crisis. The result is to show that by 1914 Burke had been firmly established as a ‘conservative’ political thinker whose work was directly associated with British Conservatism.

The Indian Rebellion leader Nana Sahib became Victorian Britain's most hated foreign enemy for his part in the 1857 Cawnpore massacres, in which British men, women, and children were killed after having been promised safe passage away from their besieged garrison. Facts were mixed with lurid fiction in reports which drew on villainous oriental stereotypes to depict Nana. The public appetite for vengeance was thwarted, however, by his escape to Nepal and subsequent reports of his death. These reports were widely disbelieved, and fears persisted for decades that Nana was plotting a new rebellion in the mountains. He came to be seen as both a literal and symbolic threat; the arrest of suspects across the years periodically revived the memories and the atavistic fury of the Mutiny, while his example as the Victorians' archetypal barbaric native ruler shaped broader colonial attitudes. At the same time, he influenced metropolitan perceptions of empire through the popular Mutiny fictions in which he was a larger-than-life villain. Tracing Nana's changing presence in the British collective memory over generations illustrates the tensions between metropolitan and colonial ideas of empire, and suggests the degree to which an iconic enemy figure could shape perceptions of other races.

This article examines the final years of French rule in India. It questions the established narrative of the merger of the French settlements, which implied that they were always a ‘natural’ part of the Indian Union. It argues, on the contrary, that a full merger was only one of several possibilities for the various actors involved in the negotiations that took place between the independence of India in 1947 and the French withdrawal in 1954. Even those who supported a merger did so for different reasons, while a significant proportion opposed the merger on economic, social, and historical grounds. By examining more closely the opposing positions in the merger debate, we can locate them within the larger tensions of early post-colonial India – a new state that was struggling to define its geographical and ideological boundaries. This suggests that the decolonization of French India was not simply another chapter in French imperial decline; it was also an important example of Indian nation-building.

This article uses new archival evidence and the growing literature on religion and the foreign relations of the United States to reinterpret the Peace Corps. The religious revival of the 1950s continued into the 1960s, and the Kennedy administration saw ‘spiritual values’ as part of the national interest. Church–state politics and Kennedy's public conception of the role of religion in foreign relations dictated that this aspect of the cold war would change in form. The Peace Corps should, in part, be seen as a continuation of the religious cold war, one that drew on the precedents of missionary and church-service organizations. The Corps was a counterpart to church groups working abroad, and hoped to subcontract much of its work to them. Kennedy hoped to work with religious groups in ecumenical fashion. As Catholic organizations were most visibly interested in receiving Corps funds, funding church groups proved politically unworkable, leading to church–state arguments that Kennedy wanted to avoid. The Kennedy administration struggled to separate the secular and the sacred, as confused definitions of ‘religion’ and a tough constitutional stance narrowed policy options. The Peace Corps fight shaped, and was shaped by, contemporary debates over church and state.