Controverted Elections,Electoral Controversy and the Scottish Privy Council, 1689–1708*

Both the privy council and elections in early modern Scotland are understudied. The council itself has largely been described as a tool for crown management of elections. But it was fundamentally a court and standing committee charged with government administration, which was often supplicated to deal with cases of electoral impropriety and controversy. As elections became increasingly contested throughout the later 17th century, so the council's role developed into a form of elections committee which adjudicated over controverted elections. This, in some ways, reflected the business conducted by parliament's own elections committee, although the council was largely concerned with elections in the royal burghs while it also dealt with other electoral issues. This article explores the privy council's engagement in a complex range of electoral business between the Revolution of 1689 and its abolition in 1708.     

De Bow’s Revolution: The Memory of the American Revolution in the Politics of the Sectional Crisis, 1850–1861

In January 1861 editor James D.B. De Bow advocated the secession of southern states from the union as he proclaimed to his readers that white Southerners “are mainly the descendants of those who fought the battles of the Revolution, and who understand and appreciate the nature and inestimable value of the liberty which it brought.” While editors on both sides of the Sectional Crisis over slavery in the 1850s and 60s claimed to be “custodians of the legacy of 1776” as they used the American Revolution symbolically in their rhetoric. By focusing on De Bow’s Review, a widely read and influential journal during this fight, we can gain a better understanding of the specific terms by which Southerners were encouraged to think of themselves not as rebels but as guardians of “the true American character.”     

Freedom,Religion and the Making of the Modern State in Japan, 1868–89

This paper rethinks the article of religious freedom of the Meiji Constitution of 1889 and calls into question the liberalist paradigm employed to understand the Constitution and modern Japanese history. In this liberalist framework, the Constitution manifests the peculiar and authoritarian nature of the pre-war Japanese state. In particular, the 28^th article, which provides for the conditional freedom of religious belief, is seen as no more than a cover for social control by the state. This paper examines the histories of the ideas of religion and freedom, and the religious freedom article, and argues that the most appropriate task is not to measure how much religious freedom the Meiji Constitution failed to guarantee against a de-historicised liberalism, but rather to consider the function of the very inclusion of religious freedom in the Constitution. I argue that the inclusion of religious freedom as a generic type of liberty in the Meiji Constitution was instrumental in the creation of the private modern individual as a subject-citizen. It is through this private individual citizen that the modern state as a public, secular authority was created.     

Pillars and perspective: demarcation of the Belgian Congo–Northern Rhodesia boundary

From 1911 to 1914 an Anglo-Belgian boundary commission demarcated the 885 km boundary between the Belgian Congo and Northern Rhodesia along the watershed of the Congo and Zambezi rivers with a total of just 46 markers. Such low-density boundary demarcation with widely spaced pillars was typical of early British boundary-making in southern Africa. Less than fifteen years later, a second Anglo-Belgian boundary commission was created to re-demarcate the boundary. Not only was it unique for a colonial boundary in southern Africa to be re-demarcated, this second Anglo-Belgian boundary commission worked for six years with a budget that exceeded any previous British boundary commission in colonial Africa. This commission marked the Belgian Congo–Northern Rhodesia boundary on the ground with nearly five times the number of pillars as the first commission, literally etching the boundary in the African landscape. Its techniques of survey and boundary demarcation set a new standard, serving as a model for later British colonial boundary commissions and influencing boundary-making theory through the present day.     

Beyond the crabgrass frontier: industry and the spread of North American cities, 1850–1950

The conventional story of suburbanization in Canada and the United States portrays an outward movement of residences from the cities that only since World War II has been fuelled by the dispersal of employment to the urban fringe. This prevailing wisdom needs considerable revision. In this essay we present a theoretical interpretation of industrial suburbanization. We argue that the outward spread of factories and manuÍfacturing districts has been a distinctive and important feature of North American urbanization since the middle of the nineteenth century. The paper begins with a discussion of how industrial decentralization has been repeatedly misinterpreted as new and unprecedented, rather than an extension of past trends. In contrast to the prevailing interpretation, we claim that industrial suburbanization is the product of a combination of the economic logic of geographical industrialization, investment in real estate, and political guidance by business and government leaders. The result has been extensive, multinodal metropolitan regions.     

The making of the Gibraltar-Spain border: cholera,contraband, and spatial reordering, 1850–1873

The Anglo-Spanish controversy over Gibraltar has generated a good deal of research in international law and diplomatic history, but little insight into the historical dynamic that forged the British territory's permanent de facto sovereign border with Spain during the third quarter of the nineteenth century. The transformation of a loosely defined neutral zone into a clearly marked line had little to do with statecraft or expansionism, as typically assumed, but rather was a local response to a series of external challenges that increasingly militated for some agreement among local authorities on a precise demarcation. These included broad administrative and fiscal reforms on the part of the British Empire and Spain's liberal governing coalition, the rise of revolutionary Republicanism in Spain, a dramatic uptick in human mobility and migration in the Mediterranean, and the third cholera pandemic.