Geoffrey Parker has remarked that the Spanish Armada, though a disastrous defeat, was a considerable psychological success. Deep into the seventeenth century the specter of a returning armada haunted England. Twice in the middle of James I’s reign alarms occurred. One grew out of the king’s plan, opposed by Spain, to marry his daughter Elizabeth to the Calvinist elector of the Palatinate. The other derived from a rekindling of the disputed succession in the Cleves-Jülich duchies in the lower Rhineland, into which Spanish forces intervened militarily, while England suspected the formation of a large Spanish-led Catholic league, seemingly bent on invasion, which caused a few days of panic in London. Both scares were based on misinformation and rumor, worsened by longstanding English anxiety over Spanish designs and doubts about the loyalty of English Catholics, the persecution of whom intensified. The latter scare occasioned the appearance in London of a satirical print, long thought in England to be lost, of James holding the pope’s nose to the grindstone, but a copy sent to Madrid by the Spanish ambassador has survived, and, reproduced here, preserves what appears to be the oldest known example of English political satire in the print medium.

This book traces and analyses the relationship between Britain and Spain in its various forms since 1489. So often viewed as antagonistic rivals in history, the two countries are here compared and contrasted in order to shed light on their international connection and how this has evolved over time. Mark Lawrence reflects on the similarities of their composite monarchies, their roles as successive projectors of European global power, and the common fondness for peculiarly patriotic expressions of Christianity through the ages. At the same time, Lawrence is alert to recognising other ways in which Britain and Spain have seemed worlds apart in their respective corners of the European continent. He examines how British Protestants excoriated Spain in a 'Black Legend', while Catholic propagandists dismissed rising English power as the work of pirates and heretics during the early modern period. In a series of chronological chapters rich with a diverse range of sources, Anglo-Hispania beyond the Black Legend considers the cultural exchanges which flourished amidst the growth of travel and new ideas in the 18th century, the surprising alliances of the 19th century and the shared international causes of the 20th. Whereas Spaniards feared or admired Britain for its successful political and fiscal system, the book convincingly argues, Britons romanticised Iberia for its supposed failures. It ultimately concludes that British campaigns in the 1700s and 1800s established a Romantic Spain in memoir culture which the 20th century gradually dissolved in the ideological cauldron of the 1930s and the advent of mass tourism.

This is a coordinated presentation of the economic basis of revolutionary change in 16th- and early-17th century England, addressing a crucial but neglected phase of historical development. It traces a transformation in the agrarian economy and substantiates the decisive scale on which this took place, showing how the new forms of occupation and practice on the land related to seminal changes in the general dynamics of commercial activity. An integrated, self-regulating national market generated new imperatives, particularly a demand for a right of freedom of trade from arbitrary exactions and restraints. This took political force through the special status that rights of consent had acquired in England, based on the rise of sovereign representative law following the Break with Rome. These associations were reflected in a distinctive merchant-gentry alliance, seeking to establish freedom of trade and representative control of public finance, through parliament. This produced a persistent challenge to royal prerogatives such as impositions from 1610 onwards. Parliamentary provision, especially legislation, came to be seen as essential to good government. These ambitions led to the first revolutionary measures of the Long Parliament in early 1641, establishing automatic parliaments and the normative force of freedom of trade.

The role of migration for Christianity as a world religion during the last two centuries has drawn considerable attention from scholars in different fields. The main issue this book seeks to address is the question whether and to what extent migration and diaspora formation should be considered as elements of a new historiography of global Christianity, including the reflection upon earlier epochs. By focusing on migration and diaspora, the emerging map of Christianity will include the dimension of movement and interaction between actors in different regions, providing a more comprehensive ‘map of agency’ of individuals and groups previously regarded as passive. Furthermore, local histories will become parts of a broader picture and historiography might correlate both local and transregional perspectives in a balanced manner. Behind this approach lies the desire to broaden the perspective of Ecclesiastical History – and religious history in general – in a more systematic manner by questioning the traditional criteria of selection. This might help us to recover previously lost actors and forgotten dynamics.

For centuries, historians have narrated the arrival of Europeans using terminology (discovery, invasion, conquest, and colonization) that emphasizes their agency and disempowers that of Native Americans. This book explores firsting, a discourse that privileges European and settler-colonial presence, movements, knowledges, and experiences as a technology of colonization in the early modern Atlantic world, 1492-1900. It exposes how textual culture has ensured that Euro-settlers dominate Native Americans, while detailing misrepresentations of Indigenous peoples as unmodern and proposing how the western world can be un-firsted in scholarship on this time and place.

This book shows how the Dutch accumulation of great wealth was closely linked to their involvement in warfare. By charting Dutch activity across the globe, it explores Dutch participation in the international arms trade, and in wars both at home and abroad. In doing so, it ponders the issue of how capitalism has often historically thrived best when its practitioners are ruthless and ignore the human cost of their search for riches. This complicates the traditional Marxist understanding of capitalists as middle-class exploiters in arguing for a much greater agency among lower-class Dutch soldiers and sailors in their efforts to benefit from skills that were in high demand.

In 1718, a young woman named Moricette Nayl fought with her brother’s mother-in-law and accidentally killed her. Ruled a homicide, the incident set in motion an investigation, a trial, Moricette's flight from justice, an execution in effigy and, ultimately, the pardon of the killer and her reintegration into the community. Based on the detailed records of the court dossier, this microhistory reveals the social networks of a small town, the history of interpersonal violence, the complex criminal justice system at work, and the power of restoring harmony after a tragedy of this magnitude. An enduring mystery is the reluctance of those closest to the crime to participate in the legal process. An explanation for their silence sheds light on the turmoil of the criminal justice system in France in the decades leading up to the French Revolution. Neither independent feudal lords nor an elite tamed by an Absolutist king, the gentlemen overseeing justice in this place maintained a delicate balance between their personal power and the rule of law. The incident and its aftermath also reveal the bonds that make community possible, even in the face of senseless violence.