‘Raising Sand,Soil and Gravel’ Pardon Refusers On-Board Prison Hulks (1776–1815)

For a short period of time at the end of the eighteenth-century and the beginning of the nineteenth-century a small number of convicted felons refused the offer of a royal pardon. Drawing heavily on evidence from The National Archives this article considers the possible and actual fate of fifty convicted felons on-board prison hulks at the turn of the nineteenth-century who declined the offer of pardons on condition of serving in the army abroad. Who were these convicts and why did they refuse the offer of a pardon? What were the choices they faced and how successful a strategy was refusal in terms of survival, freedom and a return to friends and family? This article bridges the gap in literature that exists between work on discretion (King, Gatrell, Hay et al.); prison hulks (Branch-Johnson and Campbell) and transportation (Bateson, Hughes, Morgan and Rushton) while challenging and developing the understanding of the motivations of the pardon refuser, set out by Devereaux and MacKay, but within the context of the forgotten prison hulks.     

‘Reckless youth’. Cardinal Maffi and Fascism (1919–31)

The article focuses on Cardinal Pietro Maffi's attitude towards Fascism. As one of the mightiest princes of the Church and a well-known patriot, the Archbishop of Pisa enthusiastically supported the war effort in 1915–18. Concerned by the spread of strikes and social disorders after the victory, he saw Fascism as a bulwark against socialism and tried to make an alliance through celebrations of the ‘heroic’ memory of the Great War together with the Black Shirts. Maffi's strategy seemed to work: with a few exceptions the alliance remained effective and became official with signing of the Lateran Pacts of 1929. Consequently, Cardinal Maffi made a significant contribution to the success of the secular religion of the Fatherland preached by Fascism which shortly after his death in March 1931 would become a major source of tension between the regime and the Church.     

‘Peasantist nationalism’ in inter-war Greece (1927–41)

Abstract

‘Peasantist nationalism’ was a new radical nationalist discourse in the twentieth century. The crisis in agriculture in the 1920s, urbanism and the perceived overpopulation of the cities were important social factors that instigated the intellectual construction of the ‘peasantist nation’. Peasantist nationalism was by and large constructed by agronomists, a new stratum of technocrats who used nationalism as a vehicle for social mobility and their entry into the strata of the organic intellectuals of the bourgeoisie. Peasantist nationalist ideas, set forth earlier by the agronomists, were adopted by Metaxas' quasi-fascist regime and upgraded to the level of the state's hegemonic ideology.