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Reproductive Unfreedom and Structural Violence in Early Modern Catholic Europe
This article argues that reproductive unfreedom was a form of structural violence that significantly constrained poor women’s and children’s lives across early modern Catholic Europe. Reproductive freedom entails parents’ ability to raise their own children safely and sustainably. This was impossible for the thousands of poor women who were forced to delegate their mothering by abandoning children to foundling hospitals, where mortality rates were extraordinarily high through much of the period. How did these hundreds of thousands of infant lives become “ungrievable”? This article takes apart the social logic of reproductive unfreedom, and it investigates how structural violence implicated not only institutions but also the intimate dynamics between women and the children in their care. It pays particular attention to the multiple ways that care work was coerced, and how women refused to undertake this care, which often meant that infants became collateral damage of labor disputes. The article thus contributes to scholarship on early modern social and gender history by reframing the history of delegated mothering as a history of structural violence perpetrated on poor women and children, and perpetrated in turn by poor women themselves.

I Queue, Therefore I Am: Splendeurs et Misères of Waiting in Line in Nineteenth-Century Paris
In late-19th-century Paris, standing in line for entertainment became a leisure activity in its own right. The queue—its length, social mix, and shared anticipation—turned into a spectacle. Waiting itself became something to consume, signaling status, curiosity, and the pleasure of being part of a temporary urban crowd.

Ausgabe 003/2025

Fixing Early Modern Identity in the Mobile Mediterranean
This article examines a seventeenth-century Venetian trial of brokers working for Ottoman and Persian merchants. Their linguistic and religious mobility made them valuable for commerce yet legally vulnerable. Venetian institutions alternately prized and punished such mobility, forcing brokers to develop strategies to navigate between professional asset and liability.

“When all the liquid World was one extended Thames”: Early Modern British Prospects in West African Estuaries*
This essay explores how the Royal African Company sought to exploit West African estuaries for imperial gain through prospecting and settling strategies. Environmental barriers and African-European competition hindered control, producing hybrid waterscapes and fostering coastal trade that reinforced the Atlantic slave trade. The shift toward Cape Coast Castle highlights adaptive yet contested British imperial expansion.

Ausgabe 002/2025

Father Pepe’s House of Cards: Jesuits, Cheap Print, and Material Devotion in Eighteenth-Century Catholicism
In 18th-century Naples, Jesuit Francesco Pepe used cheap printed materials to spread religious devotion among the poor. He created mass-produced devotional objects and booklets telling miraculous stories. This mix of books and objects helped people, especially women and the uneducated, keep faith alive in a crowded city. Pepe’s work shaped new ways of practicing religion.

Integral Outside: The Financial Curb Market, the Electric Telegraph, and the Politics of Pricing in Second Empire France
In 1800s France, most financial trading happened outside the official stock exchange on a hidden but active "curb market." Using new telegraph lines, unofficial traders spread fast price info and challenged state power. This article shows how modern tech and finance clashed with politics—leading to a crackdown in Paris and Marseille.

Porträt von The Journal of Modern History

The Journal of Modern History ist ein Fachjournal, das sich auf europäische intellektuelle, politische und kulturelle Geschichte vom 16. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart spezialisiert. Es gilt als führendes internationales Journal für moderne europäische Geschichte; veröffentlicht Forschungsartikel, Buchrezensionen und gelegentlich Sonderhefte; herausgegeben von renommierten Historikern der University of Chicago

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In der aktuellen Ausgabe von The Journal of Modern History

Reproductive Unfreedom and Structural Violence in Early Modern Catholic Europe

This article argues that reproductive unfreedom was a form of structural violence that significantly constrained poor women’s and children’s lives across early modern Catholic Europe. Reproductive freedom entails parents’ ability to raise their own children safely and sustainably. This was impossible for the thousands of poor women who were forced to delegate their mothering by abandoning children to foundling hospitals, where mortality rates were extraordinarily high through much of the period. How did these hundreds of thousands of infant lives become “ungrievable”? This article takes apart the social logic of reproductive unfreedom, and it investigates how structural violence implicated not only institutions but also the intimate dynamics between women and the children in their care. It pays particular attention to the multiple ways that care work was coerced, and how women refused to undertake this care, which often meant that infants became collateral damage of labor disputes. The article thus contributes to scholarship on early modern social and gender history by reframing the history of delegated mothering as a history of structural violence perpetrated on poor women and children, and perpetrated in turn by poor women themselves.
I Queue, Therefore I Am: Splendeurs et Misères of Waiting in Line in Nineteenth-Century Paris

In late-19th-century Paris, standing in line for entertainment became a leisure activity in its own right. The queue—its length, social mix, and shared anticipation—turned into a spectacle. Waiting itself became something to consume, signaling status, curiosity, and the pleasure of being part of a temporary urban crowd.
The Multiple Levels of Cultural Diplomacy: Weimar Germany’s Exhibition Moment, 1927–1928

The article explores two major Weimar-era exhibitions as tools of cultural diplomacy. These events, shaped by the cooperative spirit after Locarno, hosted multiple overlapping agendas—from municipal ambitions to internationalist visions—showing how exhibitions became platforms for negotiating Germany’s place in interwar global culture.