Few historical problems have attracted so much attention over so many years as the social consequences of the British industrial revolution. For the most part, historians presumed that working people produced very little historical evidence that could be used to contribute to our understanding. However, projects to catalogue and encourage the use of the nation's scattered, yet extensive, archive of working-class autobiography have revealed that such evidence does, in fact, exist. The insertion of working-class autobiography helps to offer a new perspective, one which suggests a more positive interpretation of industrial life than historians have usually been willing to admit. Yet there remains a problem with the archive. During the industrial revolution, life-writing was a male art form. Women only started writing autobiographies in any number around 100 years after the conventional periodisation of the industrial revolution. This article surveys the autobiographical writing during and after the industrial revolution – around 1,000 items in all – in order to rethink the relationship between economic growth and social change. It confirms that industrial growth improved the position of working men in society, but concludes that female perspectives on this change are far more ambivalent.

This paper applies the concept of ‘kinetic empire’ to the eastern Mediterranean world in the tenth and eleventh centuries. The term ‘kinetic empire’ is borrowed from Hämäläinen's analysis of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century north American Comanche Empire. It refers to the way in which trans- and supra-regional power could be created, expressed and enforced through mobile means. The article focuses primarily on the role of mobility in the expansion of the Byzantine Empire between c. 900 and 1050, but also makes comparison with the contemporaneous Fatimid caliphate and other regional polities which we might usually regard as sedentary states. Recovering the role of the kinetic not only extends our understanding of the modalities of power in this crucial region of the medieval world, it also allows us to question the nature and degree of transformation wrought by mobile newcomers, such as Normans, crusaders and Turks in the later decades of the eleventh century. In this sense of developing and exploring concepts useful for the study of the transregional in premodernity and questioning standard periodisations, this article is also a practical exercise in medieval global history.

This article offers a new approach to early modern global history, dubbed (dis)entangled history as a way to combine the conventional focus on the history of connections with a necessary appreciation of the elements of disconnection and disintegration. To exemplify this approach, it offers a case study related to the history of cannibalism as both a disputed anthropophagic practice and a cultural reference point across the early modern world. Through a rich multilingual and multimedia source base, we trace how the idea of Indigenous Tapuya endo-cannibalism in Brazil travelled across the Atlantic through Europe and Africa to East Asia. The idea of Tapuya cannibalism crossed some linguistic borders, stopped at others and interacted unevenly with long-standing Ottoman, Polish, West African, Islamic and Chinese ideas about ‘cannibal countries’, of which it was just one more example. This trajectory challenges the historiographical consensus that early modern ideas about cannibalism were centred on the Atlantic world. By tracing how one particular discourse did and did not travel around the globe, this article offers not just a theoretical statement, but a ‘fleshed out’ and concrete approach to writing about intermittent connectedness during the period 1500–1800.

The text of John Heywood's wedding ballad for Mary I and Philip of Spain, A Balade specifienge partly the maner, has been underestimated for many years. It is criticised for the poor quality of its poetry and lambasted for its tortured imagery. Instead, this article re-evaluates the ballad as a highly effective popular song intended to spread propaganda defending the queen's Spanish match. It argues that the song performed an excellent job of addressing complex constitutional issues through a quintessentially popular genre, while at the same time successfully overcoming the problem of fitting new words to a pre-existing tune. Furthermore, it is proposed that the song was deliberately set to the melody from Henry VIII's ballad ‘Pastyme with good companye’ and, by drawing on the latest research into cultures of creativity and examining what resonances the tune would have had for its listeners, it suggests that the potential multivalency of the melody was crucially important for understanding the song and its reception.

In the mid-sixteenth century, there were many parallels between the political cultures of Poland-Lithuania and the kingdoms of the British Isles, as thinkers inspired by the ideals of Renaissance civic humanism challenged traditional currents of thought. Across the British Isles and Poland-Lithuania there were strong native traditions asserting the liberties of communities of the realm and the need to check unbridled royal authority through parliamentary assemblies. As the Reformation swept across the British Isles and Poland-Lithuania, traditional claims concerning the right to resist tyrannical authority were bolstered. Finally, in 1603, Scotland and England formed a loose political union as Poland and Lithuania had formed a loose political union in 1386, although it was not until 1707 that England and Scotland followed the example of the 1569 Lublin Union, when Poland and Lithuania established the first parliamentary union in European history. Despite these parallels, the fates of these composite polities were very different, and their political cultures diverged substantially. This article considers the idea of the Renaissance republic in Poland-Lithuania and the British Isles. It suggests why their roads diverged, and asks what made all the difference.

This article offers a framework for historical analysis of the goals of Protestant missionary projects. ‘Conversion’ in Protestantism is not clearly defined, is liable to be falsified and may (in some missionary views) require preparatory work of various kinds before it can be attempted. For these reasons, Protestant missionaries have adopted a variety of intermediate and proxy goals for their work, goals which it is argued can be organised onto four axes: orthodoxy, zeal, civilisation and morality. Together these form a matrix which missionaries, their would-be converts and their sponsors have tried to negotiate. In different historical contexts, missionaries have chosen different combinations of priorities, and have adapted these in the face of experience. The article suggests how various historical missionary projects can be analysed using this matrix and concludes by suggesting some problems and issues in the history of Protestant missions which such analysis can illuminate.

This study examines the practice of ‘alternate attendance’ (sankin kōtai), in which the daimyo lords of Tokugawa Japan (1600–1868) marched with their retainers between their home territories and the shogunal capital of Edo, roughly once a year. Research on alternate attendance has focused on the meaning of daimyo processions outside their domains (han), along Japan's highways and in the city of Edo. Here I argue that, even as daimyo embarked upon a journey to pay obeisance to the shogun, the ambiguous nature of sovereignty in early modern Japan meant that alternate attendance could also be used for a local agenda, ritually stamping the daimyo's territory with signs of his dominance, much like what has been highlighted in the study of royal processions in world history. I focus on the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries, providing a case study of visits made by the Shimazu family, lords of Satsuma domain, to a village of Korean potters within their territory, whose antecedents had been brought as captives during the Imjin War of 1592–8. During daimyo visits, a relationship of mutual benefit and fealty between the Shimazu and the villagers was articulated through gift-giving, banqueting, dance and displays of local wares. This in turn was used to consolidate Shimazu power in their region.

Portraits and biographies play a central role in engaging non-specialists with the past, and hence invite careful scrutiny. Major enterprises, such as the National Portrait Gallery in London and the Dictionary of National Biography, in both its original and Oxford versions, provide rich examples for reflecting on public history and on the relationships between types of writing about past times. These issues relate to literature as well as to history, given the prominence of biographies of literary figures, and the role of literary scholars as authors of biographies. Using materials concerning the artist John Collier (1850–1934), the publisher George Smith (1824–1901) and the surgeon James Paget (1814–1899), this article examines the relationships between portraits and biographies and the types of insight they afford. Colin Matthew's innovation of including portraits in the Oxford Dictionary, together with his own scholarship on William Gladstone (1809–1898), including his portraits, provide the basis for suggestions about the role of work when representing lives, including those of historians. Public history can only benefit from research practices being discussed in an accessible manner, as attempted here.

What effect did British imperialism in Myanmar have on frogs? And, given that the lives of these small amphibian creatures were rarely ever recorded or preserved in archival collections, how might we find out? Sceptical readers may also wish to take a step back and ask, why should historians even care about their lives? These are unusual questions for a historian to confront, but they are occasioned by the deepening conversation between ecology and history. This paper delves into the ecological impact of colonial rule in Myanmar through the lives of Burmese elephants and the creatures that they lived alongside. In it I argue that the concepts of ‘accumulation’ and ‘cascade’ are useful for enabling historians to apprehend the full extent of the impact of imperialism on the lives of animals.

The ‘right of public meeting’ has historically been a key demand of extra-parliamentary political movements in England. This paper examines how public assembly came to be perceived as a legally protected right, and how national and local authorities debated and policed political meetings. Whereas previous histories have suggested that a ‘liberal governance’ dominated urban government during the nineteenth century, this paper offers an alternative framework for understanding the relationship between people and the state. It points to rights paradoxes, whereby the right of free passage and to ‘air and recreation’ often conflicted with the demand for the right of political meeting in challenges to use of public spaces. Local authorities sought to defend the rights of property against political movements by using the common law offences of obstruction and ‘nuisance’. By the first half of the twentieth century, new threats of militant tactics and racial harassment by political groups necessitated specific public order legislation. Though twentieth-century legislation sought to protect certain types of assembly and protest marches, the implementation and policing of public order was spatially discriminatory, and the right of public meeting was left unresolved.

This article explores how popular historical knowledge and understanding can be deepened by collaboration between historians, creative artists, and editors, publishers and those who support and develop the creative arts. Historical research into enslaved people who escaped in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century London reveals much about their enslavers but very little about the enslaved people themselves. However, archival gaps and silences can be imaginatively filled, and those who engage with the historically inspired creative work can explore the nexus of historical research and artistic creativity. In this article the authors (a historian and two members of the creative industry) detail how their ‘Runaways London’ collaboration developed, and how the work of poets and artists, premised on extensive historical research, deepens our understanding of race and slavery in British history, achieving something that is beyond the reach of historical research and writing alone.