The greatest period of Celtic expansion occurred between the fourth and third centuries BC, with the conquest of new territories on the margins of the Hellenistic and Roman worlds. Historians often underemphasize this period: while the barbarian raids and the rise of mercenary service in the fourth century BC are stressed, colonization is neglected. In addition, Celtic society at that time was radically different from those found in coeval Mediterranean cultures. Imports from the south were much less common than in previous centuries, and attempts at urbanization were abandoned. Celtic society became distinctly rural, with its craft industries, settlement, and sanctuaries dispersed throughout the countryside. Although there were local variations, art and religion assumed original and consistent characteristics. Celtic society was composed of peasants and warriors and dominated by large aristocratic families.

In the 1780s, the dispute about the New World entered a new phase. Creole voices redesigned the spatial, political, and economic matrix of modern thought about race within an Atlantic framework. By focusing on the changing eighteenth-century entry on “America,” this article considers the successful commercial enterprise of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which was conceived in Scotland. It examines the intellectual shift in reference from the Scottish Enlightenment of William Robertson to the antiquarian history advocated by Francisco Xavier Clavijero, a Mexican Jesuit, exiled in the Papal States. The new cartography of knowledge endorsed by the Encyclopaedia led to a racial classification associating Scriptures and providential history.

The newspapers of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world copied, translated, and corrected each other. Part of the technology facilitating the transmission of international news was the paragraph, a textual unit that was easily removed from one source and inserted into another. In eighteenth-century London the paragraph became the basic unit of printed news, relaying political messages and also providing the means by which these messages could be analyzed. Subject to a whole range of editorial interventions, the form and content of news reports evolved as they circulated from one place to the other. Integrating scholarship on journalism in Europe, Great Britain, and the United States, this article compares reports in French, English, and Spanish-language newspapers in order to understand the process of newsmaking. Two detailed examples from the American Revolutionary war demonstrate how political news in the Revolutionary age was a collaborative process linking printers, translators, readers, and ship captains on both sides of the Atlantic. In doing so it highlights the importance of the paragraph as an object of historical study.

This article deals with the field of Atlantic history, which first rose to prominence in North America in the early 1990s. Based on a critical review of two recently published books that reflect this “new” historiographical current, it presents the various debates dividing the Atlanticist community, including the different ways of conceptualizing the Atlantic world, practicing Atlantic history, and envisioning the future of Atlantic studies. It argues that the Atlantic world should remain a simple historical framework instead of becoming the main object of investigation. The goal is thus to write a situated history that, while taking into account all historical actors, focuses on the redefinition and renegotiation of power relationships among individuals, groups, and socio-political formations in this interconnected world born out of European colonialism and imperialism.

Between 1190 and 1234, from the first compilations of pontifical decretal letters up to the Liber Extra, the pontificate acquired power over the management of debts. This article provides a detailed analysis of the Liber Extra section on vows, which offered a means of exchanging spiritual and temporal matters: vows, especially those concerning crusades, were offered, bartered, and redeemed. Innocent III played a significant role: for him, pontifical power was neither directly absolute nor contractual, but arbitrational. However, he had to compromise with more strictly centralizing forces in the Curia, which triumphed in the Liber Extra. This work, ordered by Gregory IX, served as the unstable but long-lasting basis for monarchical laws.

Throughout pre-industrial Europe, the manorial estate was an important institution in the rural economy. Related literature communicates the widespread view that the estates insured their tenants against uncertainties, for example, in times of economic hardship. By distributing grain or accepting deferment of rents, the manors helped to alleviate hunger in times of scarcity. If this insurance was indeed effective, then manorial tenants should have experienced less fluctuation in income or food availability than other peasants. However, there has not been much empirical confirmation that the pre-industrial estates were effective in providing this kind of insurance. This study uses the impact of grain prices on demographic outcomes as a measure of the efficiency of the manorial system in protecting its inhabitants against economic stress. Looking at four hundred parishes in Sweden (1749-1859), the manorial estate seems to have been able to insure its inhabitants against risks of economic stress, but the protective effect was imperfect and only visible in the short term.

In the Touat, a group of oases in southern Algeria, local economies depend on outside sources of investment and thus participate in larger economic and socio-political projects. Land and water property are scattered, and ownership rights are complex and overlapping. Local economies are pervaded by monetary expressions that help to create debts, forcing the majority of producers into a situation of chronic dependence. Islamic law is freely adopted in order to redefine local transactions in universalizing terms and thereby to inscribe the local into a wider intellectual and spiritual world. Hence, oases appear to be the result of a movement of internal colonization, in political, commercial, and spiritual terms.