ARTICLES

The Long Parliament and the Law of Necessity in Seventeenth-Century England

John M Collins

Pages 3–35

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtz053

The ability to claim an eminent right over property was central to the parliamentary war effort. Relying on a narrative of necessity that jurists in both England and in western Europe had increasingly used since the end of the sixteenth century, MPs gave the English political public a narrative parallel to that of a beggar in extreme duress: in order for it to survive, the property rights of English subjects needed to give way. Scholars have noted the Long parliament's use of necessity in the past in order to disassociate the causes of the Civil War from a ‘rule of law’ ideology or to make a claim that Parliament made a novel political theory of emergency. Yet the Long parliament was not abandoning English law nor was it generating a novel theory of emergency. Instead, it was relying on legal concepts that jurists and Crown officials commonly used to advance the power of the state. This law of necessity was controversial, however, and the Long parliament's continued use of it generated conflict even as it also enabled MPs to seize control over England's armed forces.

Inns And Elite Mobility In Late Georgian Britain

Daniel Maudlin

Pages 37–76

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtz050

This paper considers the significance of the spaces and material culture of the ‘principal inn’ as the centre of a distinct world of elite mobility in eighteenth-century Britain. Inns were central to the expansion and improvement of the travel network that brought the British Isles closer together through the long eighteenth century. The turnpike system introduced improved surfaces to old and new roads while new coach-building technology allowed faster movement on those roads. However, it was the national network of inns, regularly and reliably punctuating Britain's roads, that made fast and efficient travel a practical, everyday reality from London to York, Bristol to Holyhead, Edinburgh to Inverness. On arrival the inn provided food and accommodation for travellers, hay and stables for horses and grease for carriage axles. From cross-country travel to crossing the inn-yard, finding a table in the parlour or climbing the stairs to bed, the inn served the traveller across different scales of space and mobility. Moreover, for the elite traveller, inns were not simply blank containers for travel-related activities; they were material constructs that gave those activities form and meaning. Within the principal inn refined interior spaces and well-made, fashionable things placed the elite traveller in a reassuringly familiar cultural space, a bubble of comfort, luxury and good taste which they did not leave from one inn to the next.

Following the Money: Fenian Bonds, Diasporic Nationalism, and Distant Revolutions in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century United States

David Sim

Pages 77–112

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtz036

This article tracks and analyses the history of bonds issued by the Fenian Brotherhood in the 1860s to argue that US Americans could take part in a marketplace in distant revolutions in the mid-nineteenth century. In this period, various, disparate nationalist groups issued bonds, suggesting a commonly understood method of generating funds, sustaining sentimental attachment, and projecting the authority of authentic nation-states. The Civil War-era United States was a particularly fertile environment for the issuance of such bonds because of its traditions of free banking, the ease with which bonds might be floated to a public increasingly au fait with their operation, and a broad rhetorical sympathy with the distant revolutions for which these bonds stood. The debt these bonds represented acted as a sentimental form of ‘special money’ and, for Irish-Americans, as for other immigrant communities in the United States, they allowed participation in a transnational movement without ever leaving their immediate neighbourhood. Tracing their issuance and circulation, then, allows us to write a material, sentimental and social history of everyday transnationalism and anti-imperialism in the mid-nineteenth century. For later generations, this sentimental quality could and did devolve into a more immediately financial form, and the article concludes by identifying the redemption of these bonds as a significant step in legitimating the new Irish republic to a US audience.

Irish Cursing and the Art of Magic, 1750–2018

Thomas Waters

Pages 113–149

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtz051

Fairies, leprechauns, banshees, witches, holy wells and rural remedies. Historic Ireland is famous for its superstitions, magic and ‘alternative beliefs’. Yet we should not ignore what was once the most widespread Irish magic of all: cursing. A righteous occult attack, a dark prayer for terrible pains to blight evildoers, cursing was unnervingly common from ancient times until the mid-twentieth century. This article explores its neglected modern history, since the late 1700s, by carefully scrutinizing the Irish style of cursing, relating it to wider social and economic conditions, and making comparisons with maledictions elsewhere. Irish imprecations can be analysed using familiar academic categories such as belief, ritual, symbolism, tradition and discourse. However, by repurposing an older way of thinking about magic, I argue that historic Irish cursing is best understood as an art, because it required knowledge, practice, wit, skill and composure. Intimidating, cathartic and virtuoso: cursing mingled gruesome yet poetic phrases with ostentatious rites, in the name of supernatural justice. It had many applications but was particularly valuable to Ireland’s marginalized people, fighting over food, religion, politics, land and family loyalties. Cursing rapidly faded from the mid-twentieth century and, unlike other forms of occultism, was not revived by the post 1970s ‘New Age’ movement. Its unusual history underlines three wider points: (i) magic can usefully thrive in modern societies, figuring in the most vital areas of life; (ii) different types of magic have distinct chronologies; (iii) the most psychologically powerful forms of magic are subtle arts that deserve our (begrudging) respect.

Between Art and Commerce: Women, Business Ownership, and the Arts and Crafts Movement

Zoë Thomas

Pages 151–196

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtz071

In art-historical works and social and cultural histories the Arts and Crafts movement is portrayed as an anti-commercial design reform movement that revolved around the workshops of a cadre of elite male ‘craftsmen’. But a confluence of elements during this era — developments in print culture; urbanization; mass consumerism; the women’s movement; reactions against industrialization; widespread interest in medievalism and domestic crafts — created an environment in which many more people became involved in the movement than is traditionally recognized. This research offers the first history of the emergence of women’s ‘artistic’ businesses across England, c.1870–1939. The article argues that the persistent focus on institutional hierarchies in histories of skilled work has led to a failure to consider the importance of rhetorical self-fashioning and the built environment in the construction of new cultural roles. Engrained disciplinary divides have also led to discrete bodies of scholarship on the history of artistic culture, ‘professional society’ and business ownership, which belie the interwoven nature of these categories in lived experience. Tracing the gendered strategies implemented by women business owners ultimately reveals their democratization of the movement to incorporate greater reception of domestic consumerism, ‘popular’ culture, and a wider range of incomes and interests.

The Desert at the End of Empire: An Environmental History of the Armenian Genocide

Samuel Dolbee

Pages 197–233

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtz055

In the contentious historiography of the Armenian genocide, the desert has been acknowledged by almost everyone as the endpoint of the deportations of hundreds of thousands of Ottoman Armenian citizens in 1915 and the years that followed. Those who use the term ‘genocide’ suggest that this action was tantamount to a death sentence, while those who oppose the term claim that the desert exculpates the Ottoman state. This article unpacks the meaning of the Jazira region — one of the arid regions to which Armenians were sent — and suggests how Ottoman officials used the desert to kill and Armenians used it to survive, mostly as part of nomadic groups among whom they were somewhere between slaves and family members. The desert even came to shape the humanitarian rescue campaign in the wake of the genocide and World War I, as organizations worked to remove Armenian children from the desert and, subsequently, to transform the desert itself by establishing Armenian agricultural colonies. Yet some Armenians stayed, and remain to this day in the Jazira calling themselves Armenian Muslims in honor of their heritage. The desert not only shaped Armenian suffering and survival. The marginal environment also incubated a population of imperial survivors, whose existence did not fit comfortably with post-Ottoman national divisions, or the historiographies influenced by them.

On the Transnational Destruction of Cities: What Japan and the United States Learned from the Bombing of Britain and Germany in the Second World War

Sheldon Garon

Pages 235–271

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtz054

How did it become ‘normal’ to bomb civilians? Focusing on the aerial bombardment of China, Germany, Britain, and Japan in 1937-45, this essay spotlights the role of transnational learning in the construction and destruction of ‘home fronts’. Belligerents vigorously studied each other's strategies to destroy the enemy's cities and ‘morale’, while investigating efforts to defend one's own home front by means of ‘civilian defence’. The inclusion of Japan, as bomber and bombed, contributes to a more global, connected history of the Second World War. Japan's sustained bombardment of Chinese cities not only reflected emerging transnational ideas of strategic bombing and total war, but also imparted new ‘lessons’ to Western air forces. Moreover, the devastating US firebombing of Japanese cities in 1945 challenges widely accepted judgments that bombing was generally ineffective, serving only to stiffen civilian morale. Why Japanese cities were bombed, and how they were bombed, was not an exceptional story, but was intimately connected to what the Allies had learned from bombing European urban areas.

The Battle of Muhammad Mahmoud Street in Cairo: The Politics and Poetics of Urban Violence in Revolutionary Time

Lucie Ryzova

Pages 273–317

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtz029

The battle of Muhammad Mahmoud Street in November 2011, pitching protestors against security forces in a five-day long stand-off, represented a crucial episode of Egypt's 25 January Revolution. Part riot and part carnival, this event opens up a number of questions for historians. This article examines the battle on three distinct scales, paying particular attention to time and temporality. The first scale is the battle's position within the temporality of the Egyptian revolution. The article argues that revolutionary situations are best understood through concepts of liminal time, and that the winter of 2011, rather than the initial stage of the Tahrir Square sit-in in January–February, represented the crucial phase of the revolutionary process in Egypt. A second scale zooms in on street action, focusing on the nexus of class, masculinity and urban violence. Here, raw experiences on the ground inform subjective meanings of ‘violence', ‘politics' and ‘revolution' from the perspective of those who were most directly involved in their making. These experiences also reveal different temporal horizons experienced by diverse participants, which, however, did not remain unchanged as events unfolded. The third scale is historically comparative, delving into spontaneously enacted riotous and carnivalesque urban violence as reflected in classic literature on riots and carnivals in different contexts. The battle of November 2011 allow us to see the generic affinity between these liminal events and the persistence of the riotous and carnivalesque within modern revolutionary situations, as it may help us understand the resurgence of riots within the contemporary world.

CORRIGENDUM

Corrigendum to: The Battle of Muhammad Mahmoud Street in Cairo: The Politics and Poetics of Urban Violence in Revolutionary Time

Page 319

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtaa006