The 10 most-cited articles in The English Historical Review, 2023

Abstract This article reviews recent work on trans and intersex history in the European Middle Ages, locating it within the established historiography on medieval gender and sexuality. It begins by surveying the three overarching themes in prior historical research on medieval gender and sexuality: identity, community and repression. Then, it introduces the context of the transgender turn in medieval studies, beginning in the late 2010s, by charting the origin of this sub-field and its rapid growth since 2020. It then outlines three key theoretical concepts underpinning its methodology: 1) gender is socially constructed and historically contingent; 2) likewise, biological sex is socially constructed and historically contingent; 3) all societies include people who transition away from their assigned gender, and, while these identities are no less contingent, they nevertheless constitute a valid subject for long histories of transness. Lastly, it argues that medieval trans and intersex studies contributes new perspectives and methodological approaches to each of the overarching…

Abstract This article argues that the 1970s saw an important change in the attitude of the British state to civil technological projects. It focuses on supersonic aviation and nuclear power policy as its case-studies, which were the key areas of techno-nationalist investment in the post-war period. It shows that Whitehall became radically more sceptical about state-led Research and Development, scrapped many core long-term projects, and cut back others. The politics and timing of this shift matter for our wider understanding of post-war British history, the history of technology, and histories of ‘neo-liberalism’. Thatcherism is supposed to have brought with it the decisive move away from industrial intervention by the state. Such a characterisation, while containing important truths, makes it difficult to see that the retreat from the most spectacular industrial investments of the British state in fact occurred during the 1970s in what was an economic liberalism from within, rather than a ‘neo-liberalism’ from without. This paper also challenges the narrative that the…

Abstract This is a work of historical criticism, not a research article or a book review. It re-examines what we mean by ‘Islamic’ when we speak about the discipline of ‘Islamic history’, the standard term for the history of the lands where Muslims were politically and, in some senses, culturally dominant, especially during the Middle Ages. It investigates the consequences of this implicitly religious label for who is included in the grand narrative (Muslims, chiefly Sunnīs) and who is not (non-Muslims and Muslim minorities). It then proposes an alternative approach that favours geography and political periodisation as ways of organising how we think about the past in a more neutral fashion.

Abstract In recent years, historians of modern Britain have focused on reconstructing its ‘political culture’, drawing extensively upon print sources. This work routinely highlights the commercial pressures that shape some types of print media—especially popular newspapers—but is less attentive to others. This article argues for closer attention to the business and financial contexts of a broader spectrum of Britain’s political culture in the late twentieth century. Drawing on histories of publishing, it illustrates the importance of business through a case-study of party-political intellectual journals for the 1980s British left. No history of the 1980s is complete without reference to the Communist Party’s glamorous Marxism Today. However, scholars have overlooked one of its significant market competitors. In 1981, the Labour Party founded its own intellectual magazine, the New Socialist. Initially, it was highly successful, recording healthy circulation figures and attracting iconoclastic pieces by leading socialists. Its early commercial success shows that it has been unjustly…

Abstract A close study of how the status of trading companies changed after 1688 demonstrates that mercantilist decision-making was a more widespread, more national process than is commonly assumed. English manufacturers and merchants looked to the state to support them in an increasingly global economy. Parliament’s position as the key decision-making institution helped turn London into an ‘open archive’ of pamphlets, petitions and correspondence that became the basis for mercantilist policy. In this chaotic debate between private interests, domestic employment was considered the primary objective of wider English participation in the global economy, and those English producers who could claim to be employing others were valued particularly highly. The role of the wider English nation in shaping the global impact of the state suggests the need for a fuller exploration of the role of mercantilism in early modern global history.

Abstract This article explores the political career and writings of Richard Champion (1743–1791), a Bristolian Quaker and merchant who acted as a local supporter and agent of the Rockingham Whigs. It aims to recover a forgotten aspect of Lewis Namier’s original ambition to understand eighteenth-century politics through the perspective of relatively ordinary people such as merchants and civil servants. However, against old Namierite assumptions, as well as much of the recent historiography on the post-1760 period in British politics which focuses on a dichotomous conflict between ‘radical Whigs’ and ‘new Tories’, this article restores the importance of the Rockingham Whigs. Importantly, it shows that a commercial Dissenter such as Champion could be fully attuned to the aristocratic and party-centred interpretation of British politics associated with the Rockinghamites and Edmund Burke, and thus encourages us to consider the idea of ‘aristocratic government’ in inclusive and eclectic ways. The case-study of Champion demonstrates that a close reading of political correspondence from…

Abstract This article analyses the conditions and ideas motivating cross-border connectivity among young Roman Catholic intellectuals during the trans-war era of the 1930s and 1940s. It examines Pax Romana, the Swiss-based international association of Catholic students and graduates, as it navigated between fascism and resistance in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War and during the global conflict of 1939–45. The organisation was headed successively by two young activists from Spain, Joaquín Ruiz-Giménez, a legal scholar from Madrid who fought for Franco, and Ramon Sugranyes de Franch, a Catalan literary specialist who went into exile in 1936. Comparison of their parallel careers forms the central narrative cord of the article, illuminating the complex relationship of national to global Catholic fractures between conservative nation-statists and political and social pluralists. The Pax Romana congress held in Spain in 1946 was pivotal in accounting for the transnational legacy of that country’s civil war. The wartime ‘humanist’ critique of Franco’s ‘crusade’ made by key Catholic…

Abstract At the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914, many French commentators doubted that France had the strength to withstand the trials of war. Yet the national mobilisation for war was an indisputable success that surprised military planners and political leaders alike. Despite inauspicious beginnings and the unprecedented material and human costs of war, France held out, and the Republican nation-state emerged victorious and to a large extent reinforced by the war. However, the subsequent failure to mobilise successfully in 1939–40 begs the question of the nature and transformation of French patriotism in the First World War. Interestingly, in a field characterised by its vibrant, sophisticated and highly contentious debates, French historians appear to have skirted around the problem of patriotic mobilisation. This article reconsiders this question by investigating social mobilisation in the country’s southern periphery, focusing on the town of Béziers. It underlines the need to locate patriotism by considering its valence in the particular social and geographic…

Abstract Recent historiography has placed particular emphasis on the social origins and influence of individuals who took opposing sides in debates on the abolition of the slave trade between 1787 and 1807. There is no doubt that family networks and connections influenced patterns of pro-slavery and abolitionist support. Despite this familial focus, comparatively little attention has been paid to the attitudes and interventions in the debate of King George III and his family. As early as 1808, Thomas Clarkson’s History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade by the British Parliament recorded how Prince William Henry, duke of Clarence, and his younger cousin, Prince William Frederick, second duke of Gloucester and Edinburgh, held diametrically opposed views on the issue. Evidence that has recently come to light in the Royal Archives makes it possible to assess whether the divide between George III’s son and nephew points to a royal family riven by disagreement on the rights and wrongs of slavery. By broadening the canvas of study to…

Abstract This article is a study of the life of Gunhild (d. 1087), sister of King Harold, who, together with her mother Gytha, sought exile in Flanders after the Norman Conquest; it is set in the wider context of the fate of high-status elite or royal women in post-Conquest England. Gunhild’s lead burial plaque with inscription (found in her tomb in the church of St Donatian in Bruges) constitutes a unique testimony to the fate of a royal sister in the aftermath of the Norman Conquest. Her Latin obituary, the longest known on a lead plaque for an eleventh-century woman, consists of a biographical sketch of her and her family, including her brother’s death, and her itinerary in exile, while the second half is a near-hagiographical account of her as a woman religious; a new edition and English translation are included in an appendix. The article analyses the historical, literary and material aspects of Gunhild’s life, including evidence from the archive of St Donatian as to the considerable wealth she bequeathed to the canons in return for her burial in the church’s wall. It is…