The Rise and Fall of Hicky's Bengal Gazette (1780–2): A Study in Transoceanic Political Culture

The rise and fall of Hicky's Bengal Gazette (1780–82), India's first printed newspaper, is a narrative of prime importance to the history of Indian newspapers, and such is the context within which it has invariably been written. Previous works have approached Hicky's Gazette in a somewhat teleological and insular manner. These accounts have ignored the significance of foreign news among its content and fail to acknowledge Hicky's appropriation of political rhetoric from other parts of the British Empire. Through the contents of Hicky's Gazette we find Calcutta residents engaged in a transoceanic political discourse, criticising ‘nabobs’ with all the ferocity of the metropolitan British press; claiming the freedoms of Englishmen in common cause with the discontented, not only in Britain, but also in Ireland and America; and participating in discussions to regulate the governance of the East India Company through petitions of grievances. In the circulation of Hicky's paper throughout the presidencies and in the contributions of pseudonymous writers we find a platform for the politically discontented among the European community of Bengal whose voice is otherwise muted amidst the Francis-Hastings disputes and the steady stream of ‘official’ information between Calcutta and London.     

Stone projectiles from the siege of Alcalá la Vieja (Spain) and likely trebuchet placement

Investigations of the siege of Islamic Alcalá la Vieja (Madrid, Spain) by Christian forces in the 12th century ce have depended on secondary sources proven to be unreliable and error-laden. In a search for possible locations of trebuchets used by the Christian attackers, the option was for an interdisciplinary approach combining elements from archaeology, physics and spatial analysis. The discovery of stone projectiles near the Islamic fortress allowed for the application of projectile physics to the calculation of several effective firing ranges for each stone. Those outcomes, in combination with geographical information system (GIS) data, have revealed a possible location where Christian forces could have effectively deployed hybrid trebuchets as siege engines.     

Islamic Caliphate or nation state? Investigating the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant's imagined community

Through the lens of Benedict Anderson's Imagined Community concept, this paper examines how the selected community‐building theories are useful in understanding the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and its imagined community. Using four factors—language, education, power and history—derived from Anderson's Imagined Community concept, this paper applies theories of Modernism, Primordialism and Insurgency Governance to explain ISIL's imagined community. Specifically, our argument is threefold: (a) Anderson's Imagined Community concept and alternate theories of community building, although insightful, does an imperfect job at describing ISIL's Caliphate; (b) ISIL's group structure appears to transcend traditional and accepted notions of nations, nationalism and nation states; and (c) based on this reasoning, ISIL's Caliphate can be considered an outlier in community‐building literature analysed.     

Decline or Transformation? Archaeology and the Late Medieval ‘Urban Decline’ in Southern England

Archaeological evidence is used to examine how urban life changed in the later medieval towns of Sussex, Surrey, and Hampshire in southern England, in light of ongoing debates about the existence of a fifteenth-century urban ‘decline’. The article proposes that rather than seeking evidence of decline, we should consider how and why experiences of urban life vary. The role of towns in commercial and political networks is highlighted as a key cause of variability in late medieval urban experience.     

Consumption and the ‘Social Self’ in Medieval Southern England

Over the last 30 years we have become increasingly aware of the commercialising nature of the medieval English economy. However, these insights have had little impact on narratives of consumption, which persist in seeing it as a characteristic of modernity. Here it is argued that we must move away from seeing an early modern consumer revolution and instead think about consumption in medieval society, particularly to examine the implications of commercialisation for identity and selfhood. A framework is developed, building upon David G. Shaw’s use of the ‘social self’ and the writing of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, to explore how the increasing variability, and wider range, of objects impacted upon the negotiation of selfhood in the 13th–15th centuries.     

Nairn's England and the progressive dilemma: reappraising Tom Nairn on English nationalism

In British political and intellectual circles, there is a longstanding disagreement between those envisaging an opportunity for the development of a radical English patriotism and those resistant to the idea of a progressive English imaginary. Despite their antithetical quality, both divergent frameworks were explored in the work of Scottish nationalist and New Left intellectual Tom Nairn, long before mainstream social science preoccupied itself with the ‘English Question’. Notwithstanding his later espousal of Englishness as a contribution to democratic renewal, Nairn's earlier notion of an inherently regressive nationalism remains the dominant frame for many intellectuals and politicians confronted by the challenges of increasingly politicised English identities. Whilst he has been only one of a number of thinkers and writers who have informed and contested political thinking on this question in the UK, the influence of his early work upon liberal and left circles has been underestimated, an oversight that this article addresses.