Historiographical Debate Research Articles

Labour Women MPs and Housewifery in the House of Commons, 1945–1951

Abstract This article analyses how Labour women MPs championed the needs of ‘the housewife’ in parliament in order to improve the lives of women, especially working-class women, during the Attlee administration. Relying on personal experience to make their case, these women spoke as housewives, not just for housewives, using gendered experiences for political ends. This article examines how they applied the politics of housewifery to two specific contemporary economic challenges: the cost of living and the impact of taxation. In doing so, and in contrast to the established literature, it shows how far Labour women were prepared to challenge party and government policy on behalf of women. It thus contributes to historiographical debates about the Labour party’s relationship to consumerism and affluence as well as gender and austerity. Building on Brian Harrison’s influential study of interwar women MPs, it also responds to a recent call made by Miles Taylor in this journal for more attention to women as legislators in the post-war period. Methodologically, it emphasizes the benefits of qualitative analysis of ‘big data’ sources.

Financial Mobilisation for Economic Survival: The Rhodesian Insurance Industry During UDI, 1965–1979

ABSTRACT This paper examines the insurance industry during Rhodesia’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI, 1965–1979). It demonstrates how the sector was a vehicle for economic survival against sanctions imposed by the United Nations and Britain. It argues that the growth of the insurance industry was key to the financial mobilisation needed in other undercapitalised sectors. The paper builds on earlier scholarship to demonstrate how Rhodesia mobilised its domestic resources. It explains how the Insurance Fund was mobilised to facilitate the development of the Export Credit Insurance Scheme to facilitate international trade. It contend that the insurance industry constituted one of the most important arms of Rhodesia’s financial sector during the UDI period. The paper suggests that without the remodelling of the financial and insurance sector it would have been impossible for Rhodesia to survive economic sanctions. UDI precipitated a transition away from orthodox financial systems to insurance, because sanctions propelled the growth of the industry. This article joins an existing broader historiographical debate that argues sanctions are inefficient in changing states’ behaviour. It draws on primary sources from the National Archives of Zimbabwe and provides a qualitative study on how Rhodesia survived economic sanctions using the insurance industry.

‘Oh Dutchmen, Defer this Catastrophe’

‘Oh Dutchmen, defer this catastrophe’ wrote a former Dutch plantation owner commenting on the temporary abolition of slavery in the French empire in 1794. It seems that his advice was heeded, as it took close to 70 more years to abolish Dutch slavery. Strangely, however, the successful defence of slavery does not feature prominently in the historiographical debate over the late abolition of Dutch slavery. This article ventures to explore the ideological defence of slavery in the Dutch Republic around the turn of the eighteenth century, and how it was connected to Atlantic debates on race, slavery and civilisation in the wake of the Haitian revolution (1790-1804). By studying historical publications I show that the Dutch interpretation of the Haitian Revolution came about through translated works. These works almost exclusively supported a racial conservative interpretation of Haiti. The revolt even became an important point of reference in Dutch political circles. These findings offer a new perspective on the decline of principled abolitionism in the Netherlands from the late eighteenth century until the 1840s.

The So-Called Ansbert, his ‘Historia de expeditione’ and Related Sources as a Research Problem *

Abstract The article dealing with the so-called Ansbert, his ‘Historia de expeditione Friderici imperatoris’ and related sources offers a research overview and analysis of the topic as it has evolved over the past 200 years and presents a new and more productive way to approach the narrative – the most important source documenting Frederick Barbarossa’s crusade ( 1188–1190 ). Firstly, the circumstances of the source’s reappearance in 1826 are explained, showing the troubled fate of the Strahov manuscript, where the narrative is extant in its fullest form. Secondly, the course of the academic discussion is traced, the main protagonist being Anton Chroust, the author of an edition used to this day. The main characteristics of the source are explained and the historiographical debate on the ‘Tageno-Ansbert-Frage’ is analysed, demonstrating that in almost desperate attempts to solve the question of authorship, the interconnectedness of sources and the exact manner of composition, research has gone up a blind alley, hindering more result-yielding questions from even being asked, which has not been remedied even by crusading studies that have bloomed in the past 100 years. Finally, a fresh approach to the topic is introduced: the narrative may be researched more viably through the lens of the functions and aims the source may have followed and the role the crusading idea may have played in it. Rediscovery of the ‘Historia’, p. 362. – The ‘Tageno-Ansbert-Frage’, p. 363. – Anton Chroust Enters the Scene, p. 365. – Karl Zimmert Disagrees, p. 367. – Towards the Modern Edition, p. 368. – The Edition, p. 371. – Reactions and Aftermath, p. 375. – The So-Called Ansbert in Crusading Studies and Barbarossa’s Biographies?, p. 377. – ‘Historia de Expeditione’ and its Modern Translations, p. 380. – New Horizons?, p. 385.

Non-Marathi Hindutva Pop Culture and the Imagery of Shivaji: A Digital Ethnographic Exploration of YouTube Contents and Communities

The presence of cultural materials across Internet platforms should not be solely seen as diffused and disconnected propaganda materials directed towards a passive target audience. Instead, they should be seen as elements representing a community and as having the potential to form a dynamic and active community of their own through their presence in certain digital spaces through certain channels. Hence, a study of such online communities and their constituent cultural materials, together with their interrelation with the physical community, can help us to understand the actual social phenomenon marking such cultural production. In this background, the aim of this article is to understand the ways through which the image of Shivaji is employed in Hindutva cultural discourses, along with the reasons which account for the large-scale emotional appeal of the figure of Shivaji, particularly in the non-Marathi cultural landscape. This is done through an analysis of certain popular YouTube channels, their contents and the communities they appear to form. For this purpose, the article is divided into two parts: While part one surveys a few selected YouTube channels, their communities and contents, the second part analyses and contextualises the data thus gathered within the larger historiographical debates concerning Shivaji, to argue that the reason behind the popular emotional appeal and acceptability of the figure of Shivaji in Hindutva cultural discourse emanates from the sociocultural and historical ambivalence associated with his character, where he represents a fresh new revolutionary force against external onslaught as well as against internal orthodoxy. It is argued that it is this ambivalence which has made the figure of Shivaji emotionally appealing and hence acceptable to a wide section of the Hindu populace, allowing each of them to interpret, appropriate and relate with the figure of Shivaji in its own way.

Revisiting the Concepts of Centre and Peripheries in Islamic Art with Geographic Information Systems (GIS): the Creations of Western Islamic Societies

Abstract The aim of this paper is to review the concepts of centre and peripheries in Mediterranean Islamic art during the late Middle Ages. Traditionally, the idea of a unique Eastern production centre was widespread in historiographical debates; however, in the framework of current research projects, the need to review the well-established concepts of centre and peripheries has been identified. In this context, this paper considers the geographical distribution of muqarnaṣ in the Mediterranean basin between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries from the Almoravid period. In this framework, a double aspect has been analysed to examine: 1) how muqarnaṣ spread from the Almoravid Empire to other Mediterranean areas, and 2) if those Western muqarnaṣ can be related to the Eastern ones or if, on the contrary, they can be considered an independent manifestation of a new production centre located in an area traditionally considered peripheral. To achieve this aim, a geodatabase including the Mediterranean muqarnaṣ ensembles has been created. Different categorised analyses have been developed with a Geographic Information System (GIS), as well as an element concentration analysis, with the Heatmap plugin in the QGIS software, to determine where the centres with the highest concentrations of muqarnaṣ are located. On the basis of the different analyses, innovative cartographic materials have been developed and are included in the study. From the obtained results, it can be concluded that the traditional view of a unique production centre in the case of muqarnaṣ should be discarded.

Feminism, reproductive labour and the gendered welfare state in Britain’s National Insurance Act of 1911

Abstract In 1911, numerous women’s organizations, of varying political interests, mounted a campaign against the National Insurance Bill. Such opposition emerged despite feminist support for increased welfare provision in general and especially for the maternity benefit that the Bill proposed to introduce. Feminists criticized National Insurance for discriminating against women, especially its failure to recognize the economic contribution of women’s unwaged reproductive labour. They lobbied and campaigned for a series of amendments, some of which were successful. Feminist opposition to National Insurance sheds new light on an ongoing historiographical debate over the degree to which women were able to influence early welfare states prior to enfranchisement. Their activities cannot be easily contained within a framework of ‘maternalist feminism’, and call into question distinctions between ‘maternalist’/‘social’ feminism and ‘equality’ feminism, and middle-class and working-class women’s agendas. Instead, feminist campaigns around National Insurance reveal an early analysis of ‘social reproduction’ (the origins of which are usually traced back only to ‘second wave’ feminism) whereby British feminists participated in international conversations contesting the gendered definitions of work that went on to inform insurance-based welfare states across Europe.

Late pre-industrial production and consumption in poor rural households (north-eastern Catalonia, 1750-1807)

This paper examines domestic production and consumption in poor rural households from north-eastern Catalonia during the second half of the eighteenth century. Using a database of probate inventories, a criterion was established to determine which of them corresponded to humble households and conduct a comprehensive analysis. The results suggest that at the end of the pre-industrial period, these domestic units had only limited access to land ownership and little involvement in domestic production activities, but their consumption patterns were improving. They incorporated new items related to eating habits, such as spoons, forks, and napkins. This apparent contradiction between production and consumption is discussed in relation to historiographical debates about the Industrious Revolution and the Consumer Revolution.

Entre o fascismo e o autoritarismo conservador. O regime do Estado Novo nos manuais escolares portugueses de história (1975-2023)

In Portugal, the dictatorial Estado Novo regime (1933-1974) ended with the Carnation Revolution of 25 April, which put an end to thirteen years of colonial war on several fronts. Since then, the regime has been the subject of an intense historiographical debate that has ultimately covered its multiple dimensions and realities. Part of this debate has focused on its possible “fascist” nature. The aim of this text is to use a comparative methodology (qualitative and quantitative) to analyse post-25 April history textbooks to see how the approach to the dictatorship might have evolved.

“Enlightened Man Incarnate”: Mediating Enlightenment in Eighteenth‐Century Literary Reviews

Abstract‘Crucial to the Enlightenment’, Roy Porter argued, was the work of ‘critics, knowledge‐mongers, and opinion‐makers’; the critic was ‘enlightened man incarnate’. In order to enhance our understanding of the ways in which exponents of print culture sought to orient public opinion and promote recognizably liberal principles and values, this article will examine both the polemical discourses of prolific literary journalists and the intellectual context of key issues, highlighting the work of the lawyer Owen Ruffhead. In often substantive commentaries, Ruffhead and his fellow critics referenced a distinctive set of natural law principles: they celebrated the norms of right reason, of equity and liberty. Amongst the values expounded in the Reviews were Lockean political precepts congruent with core features of liberal theory. From the mid‐eighteenth century, an early and unfamiliar ‘liberal’ vocabulary and agenda can be traced as civil liberties and rights were advocated, including the rights of the colonists, the underprivileged and the exploited. Decades before the term liberalism was devised, critics contributed to the shaping and diffusion of recognizably liberal patterns of thinking. Such an inquiry into a vibrant domain of ideas engages in ongoing historiographical debates, providing a new perspective on the formation and diffusion of influential ethical and socio‐political modes of thought.

A Turbid River of History and Law: The Procurement of Women in Imperial Japan and Colonial Korea

Abstract Japanese military brothels during the Pacific War, known as comfort stations, and the predicaments of women confined there still reverberate in public memory. Of late a growing number of scholars have called for approaching the comfort women issue from a broader historical context, linking it to Japan’s prewar state-regulated prostitution, later transplanted into its colonies, and human trafficking. This article discusses the legal frameworks of indentured contracts and criminal prosecution surrounding the procurement of women in imperial Japan and colonial Korea. Most women entered prostitution impressed by poverty when the law fully recognized their agency as independent contractors. The age-old machinery of advanced loan agreements, signed or guaranteed in many cases by destitute parents, revealed how the ill-guided idea of filial piety muddled the boundaries between the exercise of legal rights and their abuses. The judicial process dealing with prostitution contracts and also the crimes of abduction and kidnapping helps understand how law and state institutions operated in the Japanese colonial empire. The recent historiographical debate on the comfort women raises critical questions about the conditions under which the past is assessed.

Italia tra storia e storiografia. In cerca dell'identità nazionale

Starting from the fundamental studies of the historian Giuseppe Galasso and in the context of a close confrontation with the most experienced European historiography on these topics, the essay reconstructs some issues of the italian national identity through the different guidelines of the historiographical debate from the nineteenth century to today in a comparative and historical setting of european modernity. The centuries-old duration of the events related to the process of formation of the Italian identity, from the tradition of the Roman Empire to the Risorgimento and national independence, passing through the long domination of foreign powers, finally ended with the unification of the peninsula and the state-building in 1861. The most significant terms of the identity discourse are thus affirmed: territory and nation, whose underlying grounds, however, still struggle to find shared reasons for a unitary understanding of the national historical framework. In this respect the category of national identity starts its construction at the time of the Romantic ferments and remains intimately linked to those anthropological traits that would have provided to found in the mid-nineteenth century the community of Italians, finally rejoined under the frame of a new State. Not a single identity, therefore, but a multiplicity of references to the rich, centuries-old Italian cultural heritage, rethought in the light of a decisive season for national destinies.

Churchgoing in Glasgow, 1836–2016: The Statistical Record

Historiographical debate about religious change and secularisation in Scotland often fails to take a sufficiently long-term perspective and to subject the sources used to critical scrutiny. In this article, one possible metric of secularisation (churchgoing rates) is investigated for Scotland’s largest city (Glasgow), by a statistical examination of fourteen church censuses between 1836 and 2016. Emphasis is placed on the varying methodologies of the censuses and the limitations to their comparability. Churchgoing in the city has declined, relative to population, since the later nineteenth century, initially among Protestants. The net scale of decrease was mitigated after the Second World War by the Catholic majority in the pews, but even Catholic attendance has shrunk absolutely in recent decades.

TRANSLATION IN HISTORY AND METAHISTORY1

ABSTRACTTheo Hermans's Translation and History: A Textbook offers an insightful, clear, and sophisticated account of debates in translation history as a transdisciplinary field that remained, until recently, at the margins of historiographical debates. It discusses essential theoretical and methodological tools through which historians of translation may wrestle with the problem of defining their object; with modalities of historicizing associated with specific fields and perspectives (including, for instance, memory studies, microhistory, and the history of concepts); and with questions of context, temporality, space, and agency by accounting for translation's transformative movement, migration, and metamorphosis. This review essay follows the book's journey in and out of disciplinary and conceptual borders in order to discuss some of the stakes at play in it, especially problems pertaining to the delimitation of translation as a differential, but distinct, object of historical research, one that lays bare the power of translations to mobilize cultural works and frontiers. By the same token, it attempts to inscribe a translation paradigm into historical theory and, crucially, into debates that shift our focus from rigid historiographical borders toward mobilizing and transformative motifs, identities, and domains of history. This focus grants a new orientation to (translation) history, setting malleability, thresholds, mobility, and resistance to movement at the center of ongoing attempts to configure alternative spatialities, temporalities, subjects, and worlds of the past beyond conventional accounts of contextualizing, periodizing, and only human history.

F. J. E. Woodbridge in the Context of American Historiography

Abstract: This paper offers a contextual and philosophical analysis of Woodbridge's 1916 The Purpose of History . It is maintained that Woodbridge's treatise can be fruitfully situated in a series of early twentieth century American historiographical debates. More specifically, Woodbridge's take on the writing of history is allied with the views of prominent 'New Historians', namely Frederick Jackson Turner, Carl Becker, Charles Beard, and James Harvey Robinson. Like his historian peers, Woodbridge emphasised the selectivity (or relativity) of historical practice, whilst simultaneously affirming history's 'scientific' status and social utility. If Woodbridge innovated, then it was due to his careful examination of the truth-aptness of historical claims and his detailed articulation and systematic defence of a properly pluralistic historiography.

Archaeological Insights into Asymmetrical Warfare on the Queensland Frontier

Historiographic debate in Australia over whether or not the asymmetrical conflicts between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in the colonial period can be characterized as “war” remains unresolved, largely because most such events did not involve the traditional military. In this regard the situation in Queensland merits special attention, since much of the conflict in that colony from 1848 onward was conducted by a particular government paramilitary organization: the Queensland Native Mounted Police (NMP). In trying to understand the operations of this force, we adopt KOCOA terrain analysis, coupled with the forensic analysis of firing pin impressions on discharged Snider cartridge primers, to visualize how features around NMP camps affected and contributed to the use of firearms within these spaces. Given the well-recognized nexus between tactics of hunting and warfare, we argue that it is through the lens of training (both as hunters and soldiers) that we can best understand the Indigenous troopers of the NMP, as well as the strategies and tactics applied by the Queensland NMP in the context of the asymmetrical violence that characterized the Australian frontier.

Between Humanism and Pre-Enlightenment: Dimitrie Cantemir and His Work: Historiographic Controversies

The multi-faceted personality of this Romanian prince, descended from a modest family, who achieved success by virtue of his own merits, became one of the foremost connoisseurs of the Islamic civilization and participated in the elaboration of Tsar Peter the Great’s reform policies, has inspired vivid historiographic debates, concerned especially with his inclusion among the representatives of late Romanian Humanism or among the exponents of Southeast European pre Enlightenment. His career, built at the crossroads between the Orthodox world, Islamic alterity, and the German historical-geographic school for the study of states, justifies the classification of his work as part of this latter cultural movement, illustrated to the fullest in terms of the Roma nian historical writing by the representatives of the Transylvanian School.

Between Innovation and Resistance: The Role of Guilds in Early Modern Italian Ribbon Manufacturing.

The historiographical debate about the influence of guilds on economic development and innovation lacks consensus. Scholars are divided: some argue that guilds fostered a positive environment for technological innovation through privileges that ensured profits for inventors, while others underline the guilds' role in stifling innovation to protect their interests. This article undertakes a comparative analysis of ribbon manufacturing in early modern Italy, a sector known for its technology transfer across Europe. It finds that the nature of the guild and its specific privileges crucially determined technology transfer and innovation acceptance. In addition, the redistribution of profits within guilds was vital to the innovative process. The article concludes that the key to technology transfer and innovation lay in preserving the guilds' profit monopolies and internal stability.

‘The most original and significant effort of political invention of Modern Times’. The reception of fascist corporatism in Britain in the 1930s

A contribution to recent historiographical debates concerning the transnational circulation of corporatist projects and ideas, the article aims to determine to what extent, and with what theoretical outlooks, the principles of the fascist corporatist State circulated in Great Britain during the 1930s. The reception of fascist corporatism will be analysed by examining the influences that the model of the corporatist State, developed in Italy in the interwar period by the fascist regime, exerted on those British political groups that showed an interest in the Italian corporatist experiment. The article will focus on three British political groups: catholic, conservative, and fascist. Observing how advocates of these three political groups incorporated and re-interpreted the fascist corporatist model will help to highlight those key elements that led to the adoption of fascist corporatism as a reference model by different political figures such as the Catholic thinkers Gilbert K. Chesterton and Douglas F. Jerrold; the Conservatives Harold Macmillan, Eustace Percy and Leopold Amery; and finally, the most important representatives of the British Union of Fascists, Oswald Mosley and Alexander R. Thomson.

History teaching in Russia and Ukraine: the revision of school textbooks in a comparative perspective (1991-2014)

This article aims at presenting some relevant aspects of the heated historiographical debate on the evolution of the teaching of history and on the revision of textbooks performed in post-Soviet Russia and Ukraine. The introduction will describe the beginning of the renewal process of history teaching undertaken in the years preceding the fall of the communist regime (December 1991). The first part and the second one will analyse the main features of the textbooks revision process in the two countries, Russia and Ukraine, after 1991, focusing on the most popular textbooks and interpretation changes in the textbooks published after 2000. The Russian invasion of Ukraine was the culmination of a process of geopolitical instrumentalization of history that led to the separation of the history shared between the two countries.