Abstract Biography has long been ostracized from the academy while remaining a popular genre among the general public. Recent heightened interest in biography among academics has some speaking of a biographical turn, but in Canada historical biography continues to be undervalued. Having not found a home in any one discipline, Biography Studies is emerging as an independent discipline, especially in the Netherlands. This Dutch School of biography is moving biography studies away from the less scholarly life writing tradition and towards history by encouraging its practitioners to utilize an approach adapted from microhistory. In response to these developments, this article contends that the discipline of history should take concrete steps to strengthen the subfield of Historical Biography. It further argues that works written in this tradition ought to chart a middle path between those studies that place undue focus on either the individual life or on broader historical questions. By employing a critical narrative approach, works of Historical Biography will prove valuable to both academic and non‐academic readers alike.

Abstract Before 1900, Western medicine struggled to attract patients in Africa. As part 2 of the history of European medical practice in Africa before 1900, this article describes how practitioners from Europe tried to win over patients in Ethiopia and East and Southern Africa, regions that already had pluralistic healing networks of herbal and spiritual therapies. Western medicine began at a disadvantage because it could offer little to combat the diseases of the tropics or fight epidemics sweeping the continent from Asia. However, over the course of several centuries, emissaries, missionaries, and explorers from Europe were able to bring a unique set of European healing ideas, practices, and medicines to the continent with them. African patients showed skepticism towards practices that they regarded as overly invasive, such as surgery at hospitals, but they were open to experimenting with pharmaceuticals as treatments for illnesses for which they had no cure. Western medicine did not “save” the people of Africa nor did it achieve hegemony, but by 1900, it was able to gain a footing on the Horn of Africa, on the coast of East Africa, and throughout Southern Africa.

Abstract As Part I of the history of Western Medicine in Africa before 1900, this article covers North, West, and Central Africa regions where European medical practitioners struggled to gain recognition within established pluralistic networks of herbal and spiritual therapies. Western medicine started at a disadvantage, with no treatments to combat tropical illness or epidemic disease. Nonetheless, practitioners from Europe gradually defined their role as healers along the coast of Africa, first as slave‐ship surgeons, missionaries, and explorers and later as physicians and sanitary officials. African patients showed ongoing skepticism toward Western medicine, in particular surgery at hospitals, but they did recognize that European pharmaceuticals could be useful in curing some illnesses. Western medicine did not “save” the people of Africa, nor did it achieve hegemony on the continent, but by 1900, it was able to gain a footing in each of these regions.

Abstract Reading historians' views on the March of Wales from the 19th century onwards reveals a range of interpretations of the region, but these have been predominantly secular in nature. Historical constructions of Marcher lordship have varied depending on the way historiographical trends have developed, and how this subject could be placed and understood within frameworks for understanding the medieval history of England and Wales as a whole. Not since the mid‐20th century have scholars dealt with the relationship between the Church in Wales and the impact this had on the constructions and development of Marcher lordships. This article explores this gap, focusing on the interplay between Church and lordship and the scope for further exploration of earlier, influential ideas, such as R. R. Davies' view that the church in the Wales played a ‘subjugation’ role in support of the military conquest, and the more nuanced observations of Glanmor Williams, who allowed for a more complicated picture to emerge based on brief analysis of certain events before 1282. In following the threads of these scholars and highlighting more recent studies, particularly in the field of family studies, where individual case studies of Marcher families has revealed more of this complex picture, this article argues for a microcosmic approach to tackle the gap and opens up avenues for future studies.

Abstract This article examines the newspaper obituary as a source for historians of the late 19th and early 20th century Egypt. Long utilized by genealogists, these sources have been neglected by historians, for a number of reasons. Rather than read them as an uncritical reflection of social relations, as genealogists have, historians ought to engage with them critically as a way of understanding how individuals imagined themselves and their social worlds.The article argues that reading and writing obituaries was one of the ways in which a previously differentiated and divided Egyptian elite began to imagine itself as belonging to a single, horizontal class. It further demonstrates how obituaries can be used to chart social mobility in a context where surnames were neither heritable nor standardised. Obituaries provide unique insights into social transformations independent of the political ruptures around which state archives are organised and official histories written. The article shows how sociocultural developments (such as the rise of Islamic modernism) are reflected in and were transformed through, the reading and writing of obituaries. Discourses around the ‘good Muslim death’ were inscribed and indeed prescribed through this form, even as it came under increasing attack at the turn of the 20th century for being un‐Islamic. Aside from opening up new methodological avenues for writing the history of class, and the history of gender beyond the state, the article emphasises the importance of death as a historical subject of enquiry in its own right.

Abstract By exploring the themes of settler colonialism and modernity in Australian commentary about Italy's invasion of Abyssinia in 1935, this paper sets out to consider Italy's war in north Africa as an international crisis with significance for Australian progressive narratives about Aboriginal conditions, status and rights important to Australia's international reputation. Thus, Australia's role as a member of the League and a mandatory power will be read in the context of international debate about Italy, modernity, race and violence.My case study draws from the experiences of Bessie Rischbieth, alternate delegate for Australia to the League of Nations in 1935, who observed the Abyssinian protest being made before the Assembly. Rischbieth was seemingly persuaded by Italy's claims to the right to land and territory in the context of immigration restrictions into the United States (and we might add, in relation to Australia) and was provided evidence of slavery in Abyssinia mobilised by Italy and earlier by the Anti‐Slavery Society in London in defence of the civilising influence of Europe upon a fellow (non‐European) member of the League. However, Rischbieth was also an activist within liberal humanitarian networks critical of Aboriginal policy in Australia in this same era. Her responses to the crisis in African and League affairs offer some insight into the proximities between settler colonialism in Australia and the ‘race’ issues raised by the annexation of Abyssinia by Italy, and its implications for collective security and global governance.

No abstract is available for this article.

Abstract This introduction sets out several of the key themes for this special issue, including new ways of thinking about histories of humanitarianism and empire, and humanitarian campaigns concerned with Aboriginal conditions in settler colonial Australia from the mid‐19th to the present day. This special issue brings new work together investigating two high points in imperial and international humanitarianism – the Abolition and League of Nations eras – and poses the question of how and why these pasts still echo in relation to the representation of ‘new slaveries’ in the present.

Abstract The origins of International Relations (IR) as an academic discipline are often associated with research at British and US universities inspired by Wilsonian idealism in the aftermath of the First World War. However, this paper argues, there are more nuanced intellectual traditions that transcend the chronological, geographical and thematic boundaries of what has conventionally been understood as early IR scholarship. In particular, it shows how nationalism and internationalism were used as rhetorical devices to underpin debates beyond the Anglo‐American sphere and before 1919. The paper first reviews how the conventional narrative of inter‐war ‘idealism’ evolved and how recent revisionist historiography has challenged it. The second part shows how neglected strands of literature contribute to the revised picture and highlights the role of nationalism and internationalism in channelling the study of IR from around 1900 to the Second World War.

Abstract This exploratory article reviews recent scholarship about late Qing multilingualism and discusses its influence on studies of national linguistic practice in modern Chinese history, particularly in the borderlands. The Qing Empire (1644–1911) was a multilingual empire with the Manchu, Mongolian, Chinese, Tibetan, and Uighur languages being used in its large territory. Qing multilingualism maintained distinctive group identities and the integrity of the empire. The real difficulty for Chinese national linguistic practice in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was how to transform the social ideology and structure which supported Qing multilingualism. Linking empire and nation by the legacies of Qing multilingualism helps us reconsider the result and future of national linguistic practice and its aspiration to build the Chinese nation within its multilingual background. Qing borderlands largely inherited and maintained the empire's multilingual legacies. The infiltration of the Russian and Japanese languages further highlighted the complexity of the challenges faced by modern Chinese national linguistic practice in borderland areas. All of these make the Qing borderlands a good setting to examine the complicated and sometimes contradictory relationship between late Qing multilingualism and national linguistic practice.