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When Switzerland was created in 1848, one of its founding fathers went by the name of 'Borneo Louis'. Before becoming a Swiss state builder, he had served as a mercenary in the Dutch East Indies. There he had founded a family with his native 'housekeeper', Silla. In Switzerland, he continued to benefit from Silla's exploited labour. Stories such as these seem unusual today, not for historical but for historiographical reasons. Borneo Louis was only one of c. 70,000 mercenaries from all over Europe in Dutch imperial services. Silla was one of the countless 'native concubines' who were forced to support these men and thereby help the Dutch build their nineteenth-century empire in South East Asia. Other empires, too, depended on auxiliary services from Europeans hailing from regions with intra-European or short-lived empires, or none at all. Recent new imperial histories, however, have remained conceptually limited to the study of interconnections within national empires (mostly the British Empire). Pan-European dimensions of colonial histories have continued to lie outside their focus. Explaining how Switzerland became part of the Dutch imperial project, this article therefore calls for a renewed new imperial history: a history that explains how Europe emerged out of continuous connections across the boundaries of national empires. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the concept of generations throughout world history and the historiography of generations, including generations throughout European history. An overview of the generations in African history, including the African diaspora's generational self-awareness and social identity in Africa, is provided.

This article contends that the Western European figure of the fanatic - the ideational basis of today's surveillance order - has since its birth in the Reformation possessed a particular political form: that of the rebel against Christian sovereignty. Western European political thought has not, however, considered this revolutionary state to be the inevitable result of an inherent ontology. Rather, suspect populations have been understood as being in a state of imminent fanaticism, which is only realized through a contingent process of becoming. The article argues that this template for understanding the fanatic was articulated through a Christian episteme of political theology that grouped Christianity, Judaism, and Islam together within a single referential frame. Finally, it asserts that the Christian subject disappeared from this frame as a consequence of the Enlightenment project of revolutionary secularism, leaving the colonized Muslim and the minority Jew as the West's potential fanatics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the relationship between the Enlightenment as a cultural and intellectual phenomenon and actual illumination in the long 18th century. Focused on street lighting in Paris, it nonetheless seeks to situate the French case in the broader context of developments in public lighting in the French provinces, Europe, and the Atlantic World. In the concerted effort to illuminate dark streets, the Enlightenment was operationalized in ways that bore fundamentally on commerce, sociability, and perceptions of progress, enlightened government, and enlightened space. At the same time, the attempt to illuminate formerly dark spaces generated reactions. A ‘dialectic of illumination’ was the counterpart to the dialectic of Enlightenment, fostering resistance to the new regime of light and its efforts to impose, through human ingenuity and instrumental reason, greater security and social control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For decades, the study of early modern women has been predicated on the assumption that patriarchy was a powerful force in early modern society, subsuming women’s interests to those of men and repressing women’s opportunities and thoughts to such a degree that most if not all women had to struggle to find personal satisfaction and be recognised for individual achievement. However, for more than forty years, the research by scholars of early modern women has vividly demonstrated that large numbers of women, both as individuals and in groups, successfully resisted patriarchal expectations and institutions. In this article, I argue that although patriarchy existed in early modern society, an examination of the scholarship in the aggregate indicates that we can no longer assume that it was the dominant or sole set of gender expectations. Early modern patriarchy was weak and easily challenged by everyone from peasant women to queens, suggesting that many people (both women and men) expressed an agentic set of gender norms that valued and expected women’s political, economic and intellectual activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay mainly focuses on what is problematic about the notion of ‘patriarchy’. It argues that ‘patriarchy’ is inadequate for talking about the lives and life-cycles of most people in human society, and endorses instead a version of intersectionality theory that emphasises intersecting and mutually constitutive relations of domination. To illustrate some of the ways this worked it examines three key relations of domination that structured some or most European and Middle Eastern societies, first, marriage (and especially the relationship of married women to unmarried women); second, slavery (here the focus is on slave concubinage in the Ottoman lands); and thirdly, the domination of humans over other species. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The critiques of modernity advanced since at least the 1980s have seldom focused on North Africa/the Maghrib, where Europe and non-Europe impinge so closely on each other. Nor have they often allowed us to recover an historical account of the making of modernity as a global condition, beyond the largely dichotomous or bifurcating categories introduced by modern relations of power and unequal exchange themselves. As an introduction to this collection of articles, this essay sketches what I call a "tectonic" approach to modernity as an historical process, with the aim of recapturing the dynamics by which, between the late eighteenth century and the mid-nineteenth, differently located people and places came to occupy divergent positions both in socioeconomic and political structures and in narratives of "modern" history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evidence from eighteenth-century library auction catalogues suggests that among the most widely-circulated books in the eighteenth century was a category of religious-pedagogical works constituting an eighteenth-century "middlebrow literature". This paper argues, firstly, that these texts meet the criteria often proposed to define middlebrow: female overrepresentation, mediating function between "high" and "low" culture, supposedly "middling" literary quality, and pedagogical intent. Secondly, their commercial success drew on their synthesis of elite ideals of reason and local, traditional practices of faith, foregrounding a supra-confessional natural theology, toleration, and civic notions of social utility. Thirdly, these texts were part of a transnational literary system of center-periphery relations between higher- and lower-prestige texts, nations, and authors. Interrogating the secularization paradigm of the Enlightenment, this paper therefore proposes a bottom-up approach to debate on the nature of "the" Enlightenment, and draws on an innovative DH-supported book history project, MEDIATE, to do so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses how local middle class Europeans in certain areas were responsible for writing and maintaining local, personal chronicles from the late middle ages until the nineteenth century in locales including Bristol, England, Augsburg, Germany, and Barcelona, Spain. It presents a comparative study of such accounts of both local and persoanl news written between 1500 and 1800 in Western and Central Europe. It reports how accounts were copied and shared in various urban centers, generally among men, which encouraged others to write their own accounts.

This article examines the history and development of the material culture of writing in Europe from 1500–1900, looking at how writing equipment developed during this period and how the choice of object used was dictated by status and income, and considering whether the gender of the user was a further factor which must be taken into account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the reception to the early 16th century Italian political philosophy book "The Prince," by Niccolò Machiavelli in Europe from 1513 through 1700, including by the Christian Church. The role that Machiavelli played in transforming the meaning of prudence from an ethical connotation into a method of political effectiveness justified by civic needs, or the "reason of state," is discussed. Machiavelli's perspective on the relationship between virtue and prudence, including the role that former plays as an end and the latter as a means to this end, is discussed.

This article investigates the role of status considerations in the response of dominant powers to the rise of emergent states. Accordingly, the hypothesis explored is that dominant actors are prone to fear that they will lose their upper rank, and, due to this status anxiety, resist the efforts of emergent powers to match or surpass them. The article begins by explaining why political actors deem status important and puts forward a theory of status anxiety in world politics. The more pronounced is this anxiety across status dimensions (economic and military capabilities as well as prestige), the higher the likelihood of conflict. This argument is then tested against competing theories of dominant power behaviour in two cases: the relations between France and Britain from the 1740s to Napoleon and those between Britain and Germany from the 1880s to World War One. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recent debates on global history have challenged the understanding of history beyond the nation-state. Simultaneously, they search for non-Eurocentric approaches. This has re-percussions on the relation between historical space and time in both historical interpretation and in research design. This article reflects on the possibilities of a global conceptual history by expanding Reinhart Koselleck's theory of temporal layers (Zeitschichten) into global spaces. To this end, it introduces the notion of spatial layers (Raumschichten). First, historicisation and its relation to and interaction with spatialisation and temporalisation is pondered; then, the impact of global spatial and temporal complexities on comparative and conceptual history is considered, before, thirdly, a framework of three tensions of global history - normative, temporal and spatial - is introduced as a way to concretely unfold historical research questions through global conceptual history. Regarding time and space, the main lines of argument in global history have focused either on the question of whether or not European powers were ahead of non-European ones or on the supposedly Western linearity of time as opposed to a non-Western cosmology or circularity of time. Taking its point of departure in Zeitschichten, which break from the linear-vs.-circular logic, this article instead proposes to foreground an actor-based, multi-lingual, global conceptual history to better understand spatio-temporal practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on a conference on the history of the European nobility and the European nation-state, held in Paris, France, from May 22-24, 2013. Topics of discussion included identity conflicts among nobles in early modern Poland, the migration of Huguenot nobles from France to Prussia, Germany, and the attitudes of the Prussian nobility toward German nationalism in the 19th century.

Only rarely have the non-secular roots of modern political individualism been subject to study. In this article I forward the hypothesis that modern political individualism, as expressed by 19th-century liberalism, was a result of individualistic, low Church and nonconformist revivals to the same extent that it was a product of secular rationalism. The hypothesis is probed in a comparative case study of rural liberalism in two north European regions, Schleswig-Holstein (Germany) and Värmland (Sweden). I address three key requirements of the hypothesis: that the nonconformist revival movements in 18th and 19th-century northern Europe promoted an individualistic outlook among their followers; that individuality rooted in religious awakenings was congenial to liberal ideology; and that traits of non-secular individualism were incorporated with everyday liberal political discourse and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Innovation has become a very popular concept over the twentieth century. However, few have stopped to study the origins of the category and to critically examine the studies produced on innovation. This paper conducts such an analysis on one type of innovation, namely technological innovation. The study of technological innovation is over one hundred years old. From the early 1900s onward, anthropologists, sociologists, historians, and economists began theorizing about technological innovation, each from his own respective disciplinary framework. However, in the last forty years an economic and 'dominant' understanding of technological innovation has developed: technological innovation defined as commercialized invention. This paper documents the origins of this representation and the tradition of research to which it gave rise: 'innovation studies.' More specifically, it analyzes what distinguishes this tradition from that concerned with technological change as the use of inventions in industrial production, and looks at why such a tradition originated in Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the changes relating to the images of the Magi, or Three Kings, that occurred as a result of European expansion in America and Africa between 1492 and 1788, with a focus on the Iberian Empires. The author discusses research conducted by American historian Richard Trexler, who traced the voyage of the Magi on their journey to pay homage to the newborn Christ in Bethlehem. The author emphasizes that Trexler's research revealed that the image of the Three Kings both challenged and legitimized authority in clear historical contexts.

The article discusses relations between Italy and Russia, presenting both contemporary and historical perspectives from the fifteenth century onward. It examines cultural ties, including literary, theatrical, musical, and artistic exchange. Economic and trade relations are also considered. The author comments on the interest of Russia's Peter the Great in Italy and reflects on cultural collaboration in 2011, noting that it marks the Year of Russian Culture and Russian Language in Italy and the Year of Italian Culture and Italian Language in Russia.

An introduction to the journal is presented which explores the issue's theme of disorder and disciplinarity from 1750 to 1830 and discusses articles in the issue, including one on ballooning and disciplinary fields, one on chemist Humphry Davy, and one on Anglo-Irish writer Maria Edgeworth.

In the early postwar period, improvements in life expectancy in many Western countries made health authorities, health scientists and politicians believe that social differences in mortality converged. The assumption was that inequality, when measured as death rates, was on steady decline, possibly even on the brink of disappearing. The question is then, how far back in time can social differences in mortality be traced? Can they be traced back to the agricultural society or are they a result of industrialization? Whether or not these differences are the result of the industrial revolution became a lively debated issue at the time and has continued to be discussed to date. While many scholars have taken a Malthusian view, that mortality in the past was largely determined by economic factors, others argue that mortality was determined by non-economic factors, leaving little room for a social gradient in mortality. Due to lack of coherent data covering long time periods, our knowledge has been based on bits and pieces of evidence from various locations and time periods. The evidence used is not only fragmentary but furthermore only partly comparable as different definitions of social class and mortality have been used. Here we present results from seven new studies of locations in Western and Southern Europe, the US and Canada for which individual-level longitudinal data exists during the industrialization period. Most of these studies cover also the first part of the twentieth century, a period for which such microdata hitherto has largely been lacking. Taken together, they have a wide geographic coverage and a very long time horizon. Based on these studies, we argue that social differences appeared both long before and long after the industrial breakthrough, in both cases implying that these differences are not directly related to industrialization. We also argue that the association between income and mortality observed today most likely is a recent phenomenon. Overall, a causal link between income and mortality is put into question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A bibliography is presented on topics of European history and social sciences which includes the books "Principes et formules du calcul des probabilités pour assigner les limites des variations des événements naturels (1813)," by Emmanuel-Étienne Duvillard de Durand, edited by L. Dell'Aglio and G. Israël, "Mélanges historiques," new edition, by Marc Bloch, and "La philosophie de Beccaria. Savoir punir, savoir écrire, savoir produire," by Philippe Audegean.

Abstracts are presented on a variety of history topics related to migration, diaspora, and refugees including the post-World War II treatment of children refugees in Czechoslovakia, the development of border control systems in Europe in the late nineteenth century, and transatlantic migrations of Italians in the early twentieth century.

Abstracts are presented on a variety of history topics related to migration, diaspora, and refugees including the post-World War II treatment of children refugees in Czechoslovakia, the development of border control systems in Europe in the late nineteenth century, and transatlantic migrations of Italians in the early twentieth century.

This article aims to integrate discourse analysis of politically instrumental imagined identity geographies with the relational and territorial geography of the communities of praxis and interpretation that produce them. My case study is the international community of nationalist scientists who classified Europe’s biological races in the 1820s—1940s. I draw on network analysis, relational geography, historical sociology and the historical turn to problematize empirically how spatial patterns of this community’s shifting disciplinary and political coalitions, communication networks and power relations emerged, were structured, persisted, changed, interacted and disappeared. I focus especially on core— periphery relations. I argue that if local historical spatial patterns affect those of later phenomena, geographies like that of European integration should be understood in the context of Europe’s complex historical cultural geography. Unlike discourse deconstruction alone, this complementary relational de-essentialization of geography can identify large-scale, enduring associations of cultural patterns as well as cultural flux and ambiguity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article deals with the question weather, and if so how, security could be produced by technical innovations and communication about these innovations in the Early Modern period. The linkage between fire security, by fire engines, technical knowledge and communication about this knowledge will be pointed out. With the discourse of the improvement of fire engines in journals of the Enlightenment a trigger for the change in the communication about fire engines can be found. Further it is discussed how inventions for fire-safety can be evaluated in the transforming scientific society in the Early Modern period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article demonstrates that the development of "security" as a leading category and main field of state activity in the Early Modern Era was closely interconnected with the concept of "gute Policey" and the increasing body of police ordinances. Within Early Modern administrative law as well as in the theoretical discourses of the administrative sciences, "security" became a crucial objective of the well-ordered police state and thus succeeded "peace" and "unity" as a leading category. In this respect, the growing importance of security indicates the "secularization" of authoritarian regulatory policy. In parallel to this, administrative law was characterized by the differentiation between "internal" and "social" security. Whereas the former focused on exterior security threats, for example mobile marginal groups, the latter manifested itself in scopes such as "poor relief", the "health sector" and measures dealing with risks and hazards including bad harvests, epidemic plagues, fire hazards and natural disasters. The resulting regulatory policy gave rise to the gradual establishment of administrative measures in the area of internal and social security, ranging from surveillance to insurances. However, the addressees of ordinances and the subjects also participated in the production of security via "guter Policey", and in this respect security policy partially adopted popular demands for security and security discourses. Altogether, the Early Modern "gute Policey" could well be interpreted as a prototype of "human security". But on the other hand, "gute Policey" also implied the juridification of security and the implementation of a state-based security policy, which ultimately led to the fundamental separation between internal security and police on the one hand and welfare policy/administration on the other hand, by the beginning of the 19th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information about a conference held in Mainz, Germany on September 3-5, 2010. Topics under discussion at the conference focused on Early Modern political and social relations in Europe. Presentations were given by international scholars including Peter Claus Hartmann, Wolfgang Wüst, and Helmut Neuhaus.

There have been many attempts to define ‘European History’. The concept did not exist until the emergence of the idea of ‘Europe’ itself, which can be dated to the Early Modern period, when ‘Christendom’ no longer seemed a viable geographical concept in view of the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the expansion of Christian missions overseas. By the late eighteenth century, the reforms of Peter the Great had led to the expansion of the idea of ‘Europe’ beyond the area imagined by Ancient geographers to include a large part of Russia. More recently, attempts to equate European history with the history of the member states of the European Union have met with little favour. In the UK, European history conventionally means the history of the European Continent, not including the British Isles. Argument about the cultural parameters of European history continues, and forms an essential part of any study of the subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the history of nationalism in Europe and Russia during the modern period. Some of the subjects considered include the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, and early modern British foreign policy. The impact of the Vienna Congress of 1815 on Europe's political geography in the nineteenth century is considered including the division of Poland; the claims of Czech nationalists towards Bohemia; political instability in Austria-Hungary; and the role of the Pan-German League in World War I. The author considers how historic nationalism compares with contemporary European nationalism and politics.

This article provides an intellectual history of the status of wage earners as conceptualized within the natural law paradigm by European writers both on the Continent and in Britain. Historians of political discourse have mostly investigated the consequences of such a status for the political rights of labourers. This article shows that the crucial moves were made by different authors analysing the relation of servant to master either in the domestic sphere or in private contracts. The article further contends that that resulting deeply ambiguous analyses implied a far from complete personal freedom for wage earners. This had a decisive impact on different visions of commercial society in early modern times, and left a significant legacy for moderns. ☆ Apart from a few changes and some abridgment, this essay is the first chapter of my forthcoming book Vite da servi. Figure del lavoro salariato dalla giurisprudenza naturale all'economia politica (Servants' Lives: Figures of Paid Labour from Natural Law to Political Economy). I am much indebted to Matthew Armistead for translating it, and to Marco Geuna and Gabriella Silvestrini for commenting on an earlier draft. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapid changes that syphilis underwent after the first major outbreak that occurred in Naples in the mid-1490s are believed to constitute the first well-documented example of a human disease. The new plague was of exceptional virulence, highly contagious and causing severe ulceration at the site of infection. According to medical and other historical sources, the ‘genius epidemics’ changed some years after this onset, and a slower-progressing form of syphilis seems to have replaced the initial severe form, as do many virulent epidemic infectious diseases that appear in devastating forms in a previously uninfected population. But what exactly were the features of the disease at the moment of its appearance in Europe at the end of the fifteenth century? How many years did it take for the early, virulent form to be replaced and become endemic? What was the pace of these changes through the decades following the onset of the epidemic? In this essay, I review these issues through an analysis of a large number of chronologically-ordered primary historical sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study of port cities, focusing on those on the Atlantic facade of France, argues that their economic significance cannot be understood within the canons of an insular French, or even European history. They were often case studies of the more general phenomenon of the early globalisation of Europe. In particular, navigation, fishing, trade, and colonisation, depended not only on the seas and the port but also on the agrarian hinterlands. They were often determinative of national imperial expansion. Thus, the success of exports and imports were not necessarily judged on Atlantic crossings but rather on the supply and demand of national or European economies. Commerce did not end on the seashore, in a port, or even in a contraband network, but often deep within a nation’s hinterlands. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The relation of science to secularisation is discussed in relation to the sociological frameworks of rationalisation and social differentiation in the context of crossnational and cross-cultural comparison. It is argued that there is no consistent relation between the degree of scientific advance and a reduced profile of religious influence, belief and practice. The crucial factors are sociological and historical, in particular the relation of religion to power and to the role of the intelligentsia in promoting radical social change. It is also argued that mental space constitutes a manifold so that there is in principle no zero-sum relation between science and religion. That there is such a relation derives from the Enlightenment master narrative and it acquires much of its emotional power not from the logical consequences for religion of science as from a putative relation between religion and moral evil and the legitimation of oppressive regimes. However there are indirect consequences of science for religion through the social consequences of technological change. In practice the consequences of historical studies, for example biblical criticism, are probably greater than the consequences of science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers brief profiles of historians Patrick Bernhard, Sebastian Conrad, and Emma Hunter, who contributed to the writing of the journal.

A bibliography is presented on topics of European political and intellectual history which includes the books "The Contested Nation: Ethnicity, Class, Religion, and Gender in National Histories," edited by Stefan Berger and Chris Lorenz, part of the "Writing the Nation" series, "Remembering the German Democratic Republic: Divided Memory in a United Germany," edited by David Clarke and Ute Wölfer, and "Oliver Cromwell: God’s Warrior and the English Revolution," by Ian Gentles, part of the book series entitled "British History in Perspective."